My battle with body hair: A rant
There is a famous Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painting of a woman reclining in a harem, entitled La Grande Odalisque (1814). Her pose is elegant but seductive. She is both objectified and exoticized, and Ingres’ version of an idealised white beauty culturally appropriating the shit out of a fictional Orient.
In the same century as French artist Ingres’ painting, the Qajar king of Persia, Naser al-Din Shah became enamoured with the new invention of photography and there exists various photographs of his wives sitting in their veils and full skirts, donning some exquisite facial hair – moustaches and unibrows galore – which became the idealised beauty standards for which mere Persian plebs were to imitate.
We live in a postcolonial world dominated by the ideologies of Europe and so our beauty standards have been and are still set by ‘whiteness’. Whiteness is about upholding power and superiority over others and one way this is done is by normalizing it. For example, it is easy to not think about race when you are the dominant race. It makes it easier to disregard systemic and everyday racism, because you are the dominant and so do not see that which does not affect you personally. That is how whiteness becomes ‘normalised’ and everything else is just an Other.
There are of course other forms of beauty that are localised but if we look at it globally, it is whiteness that still reigns supreme. Whiteness is not just regulated to skin colour but everything that comes with it – small noses, slim figures, and the eradication of hair from certain body parts.
I come from Iran, the same place as the moustached beauties in the Qajar courts, and yet despite never having being directly colonized, Iranian women still adhere to European beauty standards. So much so, that Iran has one of the highest rates of rhinoplasty in the world. But for me personally, nothing has completely encapsulated my life, nothing has cost me more, nothing has been more embarrassing nor more annoying than my battle with body hair.
If I could write an epic poem for it as my Persian ancestors would, I would entitle it, ‘Oh Moustache, How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways’
10. I am ten years old and my eyebrows have decided to meet for the first time and party. I do not approve of such courtship as it is the 1990s and what the (white) Kate Mosses and (white) Drew Barrymores of the world are telling me, is that thin is in. And this includes the lines above your eyes. I take my mother’s tweezers into our bathroom and like the time I tried tampons for the first time, make a right mess of it and learn nothing. When I emerge, seemingly victorious an Aunty immediately recoils in horror, ‘What have you done?’. Aunties, as we know, have no filter system and so I run back in, in tears until my mother attempts to fix them later. Since then I have plucked, waxed, threaded and even bleached my eyebrows to appease the (white) beauty Gods.
13. I am in my first year of high school and dread the annual Waterwise event where we are thrown into learning water safety such as sailing then capsizing and canoeing and capsizing. In one frightful hour we are huddled as a group in the water, lifejackets on and legs crazily wading, when one of the girls comments on my hairy legs constantly ‘stabbing’ her. Later, it becomes a cruel joke, ‘Being next to you was like being in a hairy sandwich’. I was not allowed to shave my legs as my mother, a worrisome over dramatizer, feared I would cut too deep and bleed to death in the shower and dash all her hopes of me becoming a doctor or lawyer. Since then I have shaved, waxed, epi-Ladyed and lasered my legs to appease the (white) beauty Gods.
16. I am in an acting class, playing a middle aged mother to Hamlet (clearly, I am excellent) and a fellow actor suddenly cries in cruel delight and points to my head, ‘Oh my God, your eyebrows and hairline have no natural gap. They meet. Look!’ and everyone else proceeds to ogle. I feel like a newly discovered ape in a Victorian zoo but civility prohibits me from throwing my poo at them. The cruellest word in her jab of course, the word natural. Do you know what is natural? Being born with hair on your body. Do you know what is not natural? Socially constructed beauty standards that uphold one set of artificial held beliefs over another. Since then I have shaved, waxed, bleached and lasered my face to appease the (white) beauty Gods.
There was also the time a Pakeha friend remarked on how I had a ‘beard’ because the baby hairs on my chin were darker than hers; the time where a beauty ‘technician’ looked aghast at having to wax ‘all’ of my lower face rather than just the tiny bit above the lips like a ‘normal client’; the time a boy expected absolutely no pubes; the time I cut myself, burned myself, stretched my skin, tore it, jabbed it, bled, cried, yelled and gave up.
These painful (and expensive) standards are in me, drilled in to the point where I cannot let them go. That is sadly the power of ideologies, that even when we are very aware of them, they are so far into our psyche that they become a part of our very makeup.
BUT, that is not the case with everyone and everyday I am elated to see people forgoing such standards and giving a big fuck you to these very ideologies. I see it with people my own age, with people online, on the street, in the media, and the younger generations embracing their body hair, not just to declare anything but because it is what makes them, them.
It is our right to have hair if we want it or not, and not the right of some outdated, harmful ideology that was constructed by those who want to control us. For as we know, anything to do with our bodies, has always been about control. There is nothing natural or unnatural about what you choose to do with your body and the hair that grows, or doesn’t grow, on it. We can be both Qajar Princesses or nudes reclining on silken throws, it is our choice.
Ghazaleh is a writer and filmmaker based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her first book of personal essays The Girl from Revolution Road (Allen&Unwin) was published in 2020 and is available at all good bookstores.
Words — Ghazaleh Golbakhsh
