What Body Hair Costs

Some corners of the internet are genuinely worse than others, but the section dedicated to policing women’s bodies is something else entirely. The checklist hasn’t changed in decades—smooth, thin, hairless—and neither has the violence of its enforcement.

Arvida Byström is a Swedish photographer and artist who appeared in an adidas Originals campaign for the Superstar and showed up in the photos with unshaved legs. That’s the entire provocation. For that, she received a flood of hateful comments, trolling, and actual rape threats in her inbox.

Her response was more measured than the situation deserved. The photo of my Superstar campaign for adidas Originals got a lot of disgusting comments, she wrote. Essentially because of the ’abnormal’ amount of hair on my very white legs, I got actual rape threats in my DMs. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to not have as many privileges as I do, and still try to exist in this world.

That last sentence is what sticks. Byström is white, conventionally attractive, professionally established, with a platform and a voice—and the response to her having body hair was violent. She knows she’s absorbing something that others absorb at higher intensity with fewer resources. The threats weren’t fringe behavior. They weren’t even surprising anymore. Just the routine cost of existing visibly as a woman on the internet, delivered like ordinary correspondence. The internet gets worse every single day.