It’s a prickly subject, sure to raise some eyebrows, or perhaps the hairs on the back of your neck.
Welcome to Hair and Loathing, a new four-part podcast series about women and body hair. Yep, we are talking bums, boobs, thighs, toes and tummies. You name it, it’s probably got some hair on it!
Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.
Charlotte Cook Photo: Robert Burrowes
I'm Charlotte Cook, a 26-year-old woman with thick dark body hair, and I wanted to understand why this small insignificant fact about me, has taken up a big part of my brain for so long.
Like many other women, for me, the emotions tagged around body hair are shame, disgust and masculinity. It comes with a sense of not fitting in, not being womanly and not being attractive.
So I wanted to investigate why that is, it's natural! So why is Western culture so dead set on removing it?
During the process of making this podcast, I grew out all of my own body hair, which as you can imagine was a minefield of its own - including the part where my screams (while having a Brazilian) will now be archived forever as a ‘public record’.
Charlotte Cook lies on a salon bed ready to get waxed Photo: Supplied
Featured throughout the series is body hair expert, Virginia Braun who has studied the topic for years, and there isn’t much about all the bits she hasn’t heard before.
A study of hers found 86 percent of their female sample had removed pubic hair in their lifetime – 69 percent reported ‘current’ removal.
She said this was a trend which had been increasing over the past 100-odd years.
Some excerpts featured in New Zealand newspaper advertisements in the early 1900s were actually more like instruction manuals on how to rid yourself of 'unsightly hair.'
Braun said “These were quite interesting because it was actually teaching people, ‘this is disgusting’, ‘that is unattractive... a feminine woman shouldn’t have leg hair.”
An old women's hair removal advertisement Photo: Supplied
Someone who flies in the face of those ‘instruction manuals’ is Musician and chippy, Priya Sami.
For years she’s let her leg hair get caught in the wind and unashamedly raises her arms with fully-formed and beautifully conditioned pits.
The Aucklander who is of Fijian-Indian heritage spent her childhood making jokes about her moustache and having ‘black forests’ (the name for the hair on her legs) before anyone else could make her feel bad.
Her confidence and absolutely infectious laugh inspired me early on to enjoy what me and my hair follicles have to offer.
Sami said “I’ve never understood why someone would say, ‘you have such nice eyelashes’, but no one ever says ‘you’ve got such nice armpit hairs”.
Priya Sami showing off her stunning hair Photo: Supplied
But she wasn’t always so confident and describes herself as a bit 'traumatized' from growing up with it.
Braun said this makes sense for lots of women.
Shame is the most commonly associated word with body hair, and psychologically that’s a hard thing to be resisting.
“It seems on one level like quite a trivial and superficial thing, but actually there is quite a lot of emotional labour that goes into thinking about it and worrying about it.”
“It’s not surprising the decision to just go along with that [removing body hair] is made.”
I’m caught in the middle. I want to throw a big middle finger to the patriarchy, but my own aesthetic preferences have been shaped in a hairless world.
To hear more about this, head to the next episode where you'll get a frightening insight into my own head when it comes to body hair and getting friskaaayy!
Priya Sami as a young girl Photo: Supplied
