Fur (or Body Hair)

One of my "friends" on Facebook (you know, the ones you used to know at school, have no contact with other than seeing the odd post and hitting the 'like' button) decided it was appropriate to take a picture of an unsuspecting woman on the tube and shame her for not shaving her arm pits.

The comments that followed, from both men and women, ranged from (and I'm paraphrasing here) "oh my god, is that a WOMAN?" to "that's disgusting"...

There are so many things wrong with this that I can't get my head around it:

1) After millions of years the human body has still not evolved to the point of being body-hair free, nature knows best; if you say armpit (or any other body hair) is unhealthy then please feel free to leave this blog and never return, preferably without leaving a comment!

2) If it's "disgusting", why aren't men encouraged to shave their armpits, when women are frowned upon and publicly shamed if they don't?

3) It's HAIR... it's just hair.  Hair; you know, like the stuff that grows on your head; the stuff some people spend over £50 getting cut, coloured and styled, panic over when it goes grey, CRY OVER when they start to lose it!

4) It's that woman's prerogative what she chooses to do - it's her body.

5) Snapping a photograph of someone when they're completely unaware of it and posting it on a social media platform in order to shame someone is a pretty low thing to do.

As a single person I have to say that this post really struck a chord with me; I have days when I put makeup on, I have days when I don't; I have days when I style my hair properly, I have days when I don't (this is beginning to sound like the lyrics to "Sunscreen"); I have days, weeks, months even, when I don't shave my legs (OMG, right?!) or my armpits (SHOCK HORROR).  A lot of people will think that the reason I don't do this is because I am single, some people among you will probably state that it's the REASON I am single!

I don't subscribe to the idea of daily personal grooming... because it's boring, and tedious, and it's ten minutes (or more!) of my day I can be doing something else like studying for my degree, having a coffee, chatting to friends, writing a blog post.

I do worry that the fact I don't shave from the neck downwards every 5 minutes (yes it's an over-exaggeration, but "I'm worth it...") might affect how someone might feel about me if they ever saw me in the buff... I have been in one serious relationship, and one fairly casual one where I didn't even entertain the idea that my body hair might have an impact on my love life - but now things feel a lot different; maybe it's because I'm getting older.

However, do I really want to be with someone who puts that much importance on something that they themselves may or may not do?

There will be more posts on this in future, this is a long-running internal debate for me; suffice it to say I will be honest here and admit that I have both unfriended this person on Facebook, and shaved my armpits...

Yours, hypocritically...