Shaved or Not

There are basically two camps now—women who shave everything smooth, women who’ve decided that’s exactly what they won’t do. Both absolutely convinced they’ve found the right answer.

The natural-hair argument has some feminist weight behind it: smooth means hairless, hairless reads as childlike, childlike is basically some male fantasy. Real women, free women, have hair. Everywhere. Full stop. You’re not supposed to carve your body into somebody else’s idea of sexy.

But demanding women must have hair, insisting that shaving is complicity—that’s just swapping one set of rules for another. Your body should look like this because of what I believe. That’s control dressed up as freedom. Different politics, exact same energy.

The thing I’ve noticed is how little of this is actually about ideology and how much is just sex. People like what they like. Some guys like smooth, some like hair, some don’t actually care as much as they pretend to. Women are the same way about their own bodies—some want to feel smooth, some want to feel natural, some just want to do the least amount of work and get on with their life. None of that is a moral position. It’s just preference.

My own tastes have shifted over the years—what seemed essential to attraction at twenty isn’t the same thing at thirty-five. But that’s just my taste changing. It’s not a verdict on anyone else’s body, and it definitely shouldn’t be. The person whose body it actually is should be the only voice that matters.

So do what you want. Not what some partner expects, not what feminist theory demands, not what whoever’s loudest online says. What you actually want. Everything else is just noise from people with opinions about your body.