A Year Without Razors

Morgan Mikenas stopped shaving for a year and posted about it. The backlash came fast—vicious comments, vomit emojis, sexual threats dressed as criticism. What bothered me most was watching other women pile on, women so locked into the hairless standard they couldn’t tolerate someone refusing it. They’d swallowed the whole thing so completely they became the enforcers themselves.

It’s strange how much effort society puts into making body hair on women seem disgusting—not unattractive or a cultural preference, but genuinely, viscerally disgusting. The message starts young and it’s everywhere: your legs, your underarms, everything below your neck has to disappear. It’s an enormous infrastructure of shame built around something completely natural, something that grows on half the population without any of this baggage in most contexts.

You notice the power of the rule when someone breaks it. Morgan’s year of unshaven legs genuinely rattled people. The revulsion was real, not performed. I don’t know what she was trying to prove or if she proved anything. But it’s worth noticing that a woman choosing not to shave is still radical enough to trigger that kind of response. Still forbidden enough to matter. That tells you something about how completely this thing has been internalized, what everyone’s supposed to believe about her body.