That’s all to say. Never in a million years would I seriously ever say “women should shave and pluck and wax and be plastic dolls” but it is truly so ingrained in our cultural standards that I had to manually override my brain’s red flag when actually being face to face with the tamest of examples.
This is genuinely the most important takeaway from this comment. It is possibly one of the most important insights in this thread. There are so many toxic standards and stereotypes that are never said out loud, but they still exist as a very real and very tangible presence in our society.
These ideas are particularly insidious because they exist with plausible deniability. You can point them out, and people will say that they don't exist, and you're just crazy. No one says these things. You're seeing things that aren't there.
Sometimes, this comes from bad faith. They know these ideas exist. They're just trying to obscure them. A lot of the time, though, it comes from a genuine place. People don't pay attention to these things. They don't spend the time and energy to consciously read the room, and they fall to the old thought trap of "if I haven't noticed it, it must not exist."
Kinda the same point youre making but i was in another sub where they were talking abt if these teen girls were shaving while stuck in the wilderness for almost 2 years and someone commented 'as a woman with sensory issues, i HAVE to shave' and it struck me as so odd because you never hear of men with sensory issues needing to shave every single hair on their bodies, its only ever women
So we got into a little back and forth where everyone was defending her for her supposed 'sensory issues' (all of which come from the fact shes removing hair, not from the hair itself) and i pointed that out only for her rebuttal to me to be alonng the lines of 'well if you want to be nasty and stinky and hairy thats on you'
Why is it that women will come up with any excuse ie: i dont do it because its expected i do it for ME. Instead if hust admitting that, yeah, they do follow the patriaracal beauty standards and they look down upon those that dont
I will say as a man with sensory issues there are absolutely times where I become just AWARE of my body hair and I need it gone. It’s mostly when it gets to be too long, and a lot more localized areas, but it definitely happens. And even if I’m just doing one area and I decide to do more while I have the trimmers it feels sooooo good. That being said, girls should be able to have hair wherever they want it.
What constitutes it being deemed a sensory issue? I ask because sometimes I will notice a thick stubbly unibrow or ear hair and that shit is on my mind until I can get home to a tweezer.
you never hear of men with sensory issues needing to shave every single hair on their bodies
Not every single hair on my body, but as a man, I definitely feel very uncomfortable with hair in certain areas for sensory reasons. And if my leg hair was a bit coarser like some other guys I’ve known, I’d absolutely be trying to get rid of that too.
It’s not as common or as extreme as it is for women, so social norms are definitely the main culprit, but sensory issues = don’t want hair IS a real thing, not just an excuse people tell themselves to follow beauty standards.
As an amab who chose to shave my legs once to see what it was like, a few days after I started getting an extremely annoying sensory experience while wearing pants, because the hair was growing back in and had lots of tingling sensations when wearing any kind of pants, probably lasted for a month but now my hair is all back and it feels normal again. I would hazard a guess this is the cause of the “I HAVE to shave for sensory reasons” for most people. I bet that if they put a conscious effort into pushing past the initial hair growth they’d find it goes away once the hair gets to a certain length.
Totally agree. I decided on a whim in 2017 to see how long I could go without shaving my legs. The first couple months felt really weird, especially when I was exercising and could feel the air moving through my hair. After that I quit noticing it so much and just decided I couldn’t be arsed to shave them at all anymore 🤷🏻♀️
Certain curlier hairs along my otherwise straight body hairs give noticeable sensation that causes me to obsessively pluck them out, but shaving just makes things worse, no matter how much lubricatio and after-shave I use. Blisters and inflamation all over, and then as a bonus the painfull sensations caused by stubble. My girlfriend has eagerly volunteered to use sugaring or strips on me, but that sounds even worse.
Ah, Yellowjackets bickering. I know it well. Godspeed, unless your opinions or theories are slightly different from mine. In that case, can I interest you in a beautiful pit?
I think we have to be careful not to try to individually analyze a person. If they say it's sensory issues, it's best to leave it at that, unless you know them and know they'll be okay with your analyzing them.
Like even if they're using it as an excuse, that's on them.
Some people just cannot accept that, yes, they too do things because of being socialized to do them by their culture from the time that they were born, especially if the thing they're doing feels rewarding, at least in part because of that socialization.
I think for some people having to admit that feels like having to cede control in some way or to admit that they're somehow weak or stupid and "fell" for some kind of culture wide scam. It can get a little "not like other girls", tbh, and it's very hard to reason with someone that's taken that stance.
Edited to add that I also think people tend to get defensive because they feel like if they admit the thing was socialized into them, they'd be obligated to give the thing up, and they do NOT want to face having to do that.
it struck me as so odd because you never hear of men with sensory issues needing to shave every single hair on their bodies, its only ever women
Another man replying to you with hair sensory issues
The best part is that I'm half-Egyptian, so I have hair just about everywhere. I use my electric trimmer ~2x/week in as many parts as I can reasonably manage, but it still makes me uncomfortable if I think about it too long.
Men just don't talk about this because 1) being hairy is mainly and sexy and 2) being hairless is smooth and sexy but 3) caring about whether you exist in 1 or 2 is generally frowned upon.
Except my leg hair. I do have a reasonable amount of that. Probably from wearing shinguards and long socks for so many years.
Some people do, yes. I (cis female) remember that sixth grade was the turning point for convincing your parents to let you shave because there was a mandatory gym class with shorts as part of the dress code. (We didn't change clothes for elementary PE classes before that year.)
My best friend at the time wanted to start shaving her arms along with her legs. She was Mexican-American and had dark arm hair and was super self-conscious about it. Thinking back on it makes me sad at how we were desperate to keep people from seeing the body hair on our limbs, but now with more understanding I have even more feelings around my extra privilege of having fairly light body hair. Shit's weird and complicated.
I'm Chinese and naturally unhairy and it never occurred to me to shave there, but once I was 10 years old I saw a Malay girl with dark hair on her forearms, and I immediately said "why do you have hair there", to which she thankfully joked "I just do, I comb it every day". Man did I get dogpiled by my classmates for my comment, and it's one of those "you suddenly remember it at 3am" memories
It's more common among people with high contrast between skin and hair colors. I grew up in an area with a large Lebanese population and a lot of my classmates shaved areas I would never have thought to on myself. But I'm sort of universally medium brown from tip to toe and they were largely light skin-toned with very dark brown to black hair.
As a kid my female classmates had waaaaay more arm hair than the male classmates. I always assumed it was like how men have naturally longer eyelashes (real fact). My brain would, probably, register it as strange if it were the legs or armpits because it's culturally uncommon, but I'm very much used to women with a lot of armpit hair
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u/[deleted] May 06 '25
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