S6E2: The Origins of Women's Beauty Standards

Leen: Yesterday, I got called into the parking lot by the police. So I left my station, went to the parking lot, and some person fell between the cars.

Margaux: What?

Leen: Yeah, the nurses were dragging the stretcher outside and we were slamming into all the doors, which they newly remodeled. Maybe we shouldn't put that in there because now they know who broke the doors.

Margaux: Sounds like a scene from "Grey's Anatomy."

Leen: My gosh. It's too much. I'm so exhausted.

Margaux: Well, then on that note, we'll talk about something completely different than the ED, unless maybe you have some stories about this topic in the ED, which would be interesting.

So hello, everyone. Welcome to "Bundle of Hers." We have myself, Margaux, Lina, and Leen in the virtual studio today.

Lina: Whoop-whoop.

Margaux: Yeah. Today, I wanted to talk about body hair, body hair removal, makeup, and sort of those kinds of things, how they relate to our identities. But I thought it'd be fun to start off by sharing an embarrassing story because I think we all have embarrassing relatable unfortunate stories about body hair removal. So I will start.

When I was in college and I was newly single and in a sorority, all the sorority girls were saying . . .

Leen: Set up is all ready. Set up is all there. What else can we say?

Margaux: Set up for a good time. And through the chit-chat of this new social group that I had found myself in, I learned that the only way a man will do anything with you is if your pubic hairs are shaved off and perfectly groomed and whatnot. And I was like, "Oh, no."

So then I was invited to this . . .

Leen: Just normal dinner casual conversation. Totally fine. In a sorority, of course. This feels like what every sorority movie starts out like. Okay.

Margaux: So somehow I find myself in the basement of this house that's being rented by some seniors and who have a home-waxing kit, and we do the whole thing.

Leen: Oh, no. This is like some weird torture in the basement. Oh my god.

Margaux: It was a lot. It hurt so bad, and it was not done in the most sanitary way because then I got lots of folliculitis.

Leen: Oh my god.

Lina: Oh, no, Margaux.

Margaux: Maybe TMI. But all of that to say, I think I have gone to great lengths to remove hair from my body and often felt like a strong need to do so, whether it was shaving or waxing or even considering laser hair removal.

But I think in conversations that I've had with you all before, this is not just related to me. I think we all think about body hair a lot, and it's one of the things that has been really hard for me to unlearn and understand where I had been socialized to have these negative ideas about body hair. But also, why is it so hard for me to unlearn these things, I guess?

But anyway, I wanted to open the floor to either you, Leen, or Lina if you have any stories or . . .

Lina: Yes, Margaux. I have a story for you guys and it's kind of when I first noticed that, "Oh, I'm ashamed of my body hair." It was in the 8th grade. It was the first year that we were here in the U.S. There was gym class and I've never done gym class back home, and someone gave me just random shorts just to participate in this gym class.

And I remember stepping out. It took me a while because I wasn't used to like wearing shorts in public. And I remember stepping out into, I guess, the room or whatever and people were playing dodge ball, and then everyone just pauses and stares at me, pin drop silence. And they all just stare at my legs. And one boy commented. He's like, "I didn't know that girls could grow hair like that."

Margaux: Rude.

Lina: "That's disgusting." And ever since then, I feel like, "I'm different. This is something that I need to change. This is something that I need to be aware of."

And I knew that body hair removal was a thing, but in my mind, it was like, "Oh, that's just something that grown-ups do. That's just something that I will eventually do as a grown-up. It's expected. It's kind of like what everyone does." But I think I didn't expect to be exposed to that or to feel that much shame at such a young age.

Ever since then, it's just been also a really hard thing to not feel shame about. And whether hair on your legs or eyebrow, like extra hairs that are not perfect eyebrows, or even hair on your face, it's just all this stuff that I have a hard time being okay with since then. And it's just wherever I go, I feel like it's always something that weighs on me in a sense.

Margaux: I feel that too. The common denominator for our two stories, Lina, is doing it for men or boys. This idea of like who's critiquing our bodies and our hair and making us feel that way.

Lina: Yeah.

Leen: I guess as a girl growing up in a very Middle Eastern traditional household, and especially raised in the West, there are a lot more "protective measures" that I think our families were trying to secure us from in the sense of not being too westernized, or at the same time, the whole modesty picture.

It's interesting because I think it was around 14, 15 . . . It was definitely middle school where a lot of people in the class . . . it was kind of the time where girls would talk about all the types of ways they would like shave their hair and all these . . . It was mostly focused on shaving, if anything.

And I remember the boys in the class one time were asking the girls to see their legs to make sure that they're hairless and things like that. It was just these weird stupid shenanigans in middle school that absolutely set the standard for bullying and things like that further.

And so I remember being like, "Oh my gosh, I don't want to be the hairy person." Granted, I am raised in Southern Utah as a Middle Eastern woman and hair is kind of genetically dominant with us.

And so I remember thinking . . .

Lina: It comes with the territory.

Leen: It comes with the territory, right? And I remember it was the 2000s when the skinny eyebrows were in trend and I have really thick eyebrows, which have done me glorious wonders now in the late 2020s where everybody wants thick eyebrows.

But I remember thinking, "Oh my gosh, I want to shave my legs. I want to have thin eyebrows. I don't want to be looked down as 'oh my gosh, the ugly person because she has so much hair.'"

Of course, my mom was like, "No, we don't do that." And I was like, "Yes, I do, I want to." And this is kind of where I'm trying to refer back to the whole being raised in a Middle Eastern family. They never explain why. It's just, "No, you can't do that."

So I remember just sneaking into the bathroom one time, locked the door, and I just tweezed my eyebrows. I took that unibrow right off. And I did it right before I went to school. So I know that my mom can't stop me because I'd be late for school. So I did this, "All right. Five a.m. Let's go."

So, as I'm leaving, she noticed that and she was like, "Wait, wait, wait. Let me see your face." And I was like, "No, there's nothing." She's like, "Let me see your face." I ran into the car and I was like, "We're good. Let's go." And she was like, "Why? Why do you have to do this? You're still young."

And I never understood what that meant, right? I was like, "What do you mean still young? If I have the hair, I have the hair. Get rid of it, right?"

I just kind of took it onto my own control. And she's like, "Fine. Well, just never shave. Shaving is bad for you. That's a man thing. Instead, we wax." And it's not wax like paper wax. It's the sugar lemon mixed wax. So she taught me how to make my own sugar wax eventually.

Anyway, to this day, she's never actually given me . . . We never talk about how we get rid of hair and things like that, but I've definitely just kind of developed my own methods per se and choose what I like. I'm constantly going to the threader. I freaking love threading.

But I'm just thinking it's crazy how much we focus so much on hair to status, to age, to sexuality. Come on. Get over it. It's freaking protein. Get out. Who gives anything about it?

My biggest argument I remember growing up was the protein coming out of your face is the same protein coming out of my head, so leave it alone.

Margaux: I love that.

Lina: What's interesting, Leen, is that there . . . I don't know if you knew this, but there are poems, Palestinian poems, talking about how sexy a unibrow is on a woman. I'm like, "When did that stop being a thing? When did we get here? How did we get here?"

Leen: Colonization, maybe.

Margaux: Hair removal genuinely is rooted in, first of all, patriarchy, as we all described. We've done these acts of hair removal mostly for the intent of male gaze, or that's how we heard about it, right? And the surprising thing for all three of us, and I'm sure it's common for many people, is this came to us in middle school through talking amongst our peers. And so it's just a thing.

Leen, with you, your mom didn't really have a formal conversation with you about it, but it was something that was just expected or not. There were rules that you didn't know and you had to figure out.

Leen: "You're too young to do this." I'm like, "Okay, but my unibrow ain't saying anything about being young. It's right there."

Margaux: Yeah. And I think that shaped me in a way to be super conscious and self-conscious of my body hair and constantly doing the mental labor of, "When do I need to shave? How does this look? How does that look?" And the fact that I even shaved in the first place, having blonde hair on my legs, is the stupidest thing I can even think of. Why did I even do that?

There's so much variability and yet we're all expected to be boxed into this standard. And I want to kind of talk about where the standard came from.

My first question that I want to talk about and highlight is do you guys have any recollection of your mothers or grandmothers or other people in your life that maybe embraced their body hair or . . .

Leen: Absolutely not.

Margaux: Fair.

Leen: All I remember is my mom making the sugar wax and then I'd be like, "Why the heck is she doing that?" And she'd be just ripping it off her arm and stuff. Oh my gosh, my poor mom. I swear she's probably mortified I'm even talking about this on here.

Lina: I feel like it was before our mothers' times and maybe before our grandmothers' times, but I've heard of it. And unfortunately, yeah, like you mentioned, colonization came in and standards of new beauty came in and changed that. But it's interesting how far away it traces back to.

Margaux: I went to do some learning and unlearning about how colonization, patriarchy, imperialism, basically all the bad things that we talk about have influenced body hair removal and how we perceive body hair in sort of this western colonized view of beauty, is ALOK. And they're on Instagram. They're an author, a comedian, just a great resource. And that's ALOK on Instagram. I highly recommend you go follow them and support them.

They have amazing content. They do book reviews on a lot of critiques of the gender binary. And so a lot of the information that I'll be talking about here is from three different book reviews that ALOK did. One is from the book "Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture." Another one is "Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards." And the third is "Plucked: A History of Hair Removal."

And basically, from this information, there's data to suggest that almost more than 99% of women or people who identify as women in the U.S. voluntarily remove their body hair.

And this wasn't always the trend. Like you were saying, Lina, maybe before our grandmothers' times it was not the norm to do this. And it kind of started in the early 1900s when there was an effort, of men of course, to make women's hair removal mandatory, like make it mandatory for women to remove hair as a sign of racial and social progress.

Because a lot of "scientific" people at the time, who we know were not real scientists . . .

Lina: Yeah, the evidence-based medicine was not that strong back then.

Margaux: No, definitely not. It was a way to differentiate the White supremacy views and bodies as better and a physiological marker. If you didn't have hair, it was a sign of racial progress. And so they started to implement that women, especially White women, be taking all the hair off their body.

And so then I think that also trickled into influencing other cultures around the world that were maybe trying to westernize or being colonized. So that was kind of how it started, which isn't surprising, right?

It's also the same with makeup. And I know we have kind of started talking about body hair, but in a way, I think makeup has had the same trajectory for me.

Also, in middle school, I heard other girls talking about putting on mascara and wearing makeup, and I had these ideas of, "If I just wore mascara, I would finally be beautiful."

It's like the cure-all to putting on makeup and other ways to sort of mask our natural beauty in a sense. And so it also shapes the way I thought about myself and think about myself.

Makeup also used to be considered a sign of racial inferiority by the so-called scientists, because when they came here, native peoples to the Americas were having their faces painted in different ways. And also, in other cultures around the world, it was thought of as not the White ideal.

But then all of this shifted when photography became mainstream and magazines were a big thing. And then, of course, White people with flash and photography are looking like ghosts. So what are they going to do? You've got to put makeup on and make them look better.

So then everything shifted to the focus on body hair and . . . And so instead of face paint, it was rebranded as makeup, right?

The whole thing of it is this is all driven by men and driven by their bullshit ideas about race. So I want to open the floor to you guys.

Leen: But perpetrated by women, right?

Margaux: Yes.

Leen: That is a huge problem and I think that's . . . Among each other, we tend to say . . . I mean, we've all experienced it. Like, "Well, this person had this or this person . . . " Point out the unibrows. We'll be like, "Why don't you take this off? Why don't you do this? Why don't you try that?"

I mean, even though the standards were initially maybe set by men and what men thought was perceived as attractive and/or sexually attractive, whatever, it is women who continue to also perpetrate it. And I think it's not going to stop until we kind of in a sense stop it for ourselves.

I think it's not a matter of liking or not liking hair removal. I think it's a matter of stigmatizing the presence of the hair, right? We've seen people, mostly I guess women, where they'll keep the underarm hair. Sometimes I've seen images of them dyeing it as well and people just automatically think, "Ew, that's gross," or, "Oh, that's so unsanitary. Ew."

And it goes back to that whole idea of it's not truly unsanitary. It's not like there's more dirt there or anything like that, for the love of God. That would go the same thing with your head. Your head has more hair than your underarm, right?

It has more to do with the fact that back then, these scientists or the people of power within each society, mostly men, referred to this as a woman being unsanitary, unclean, unkempt. And it's just crazy how much that's been now embedded in our thoughts that people automatically think that.

I don't know. I just think, "Why do humans focus on something so trivial?" What are we going to do, pluck out our eyelashes next? Get out of here.

Oh, and the nose hair? Oh my gosh, don't even get me started. That's the weirdest one. Yeah, nobody is looking up. First of all, they're totally different function. Anyway.

Margaux: I wonder if we'd have better viral protection if we had more nose hair. I think it still continues today and, like you said, Leen, it is driven by everyone in society.

And when I think about decolonizing or unlearning this idea of body hair and body hair removal, it's been really difficult for me because I'll try to not shave my armpits and then I'll go in the summer to the pool and I will be mortified. And I don't know how to get over that.

I think it just shows how deeply ingrained it is and how much we all were socialized to sort of police each other's bodies to fitting into this model as well. And I think it comes back to its original purpose, which was to oppress and organize society in a certain way that the White men wanted it to be.

Lina: I mean, even thinking about just kind of removing hair, I think about kind of depigmentation that happens with people who are more colored or Brown or Black people, and it's just a very real thing that happens.

It's even the appearance of hair, not necessarily hair, that's looked down upon. You have all these things, like whitening creams, to get rid of the darkness. And it just goes back to kind of that racism that comes to the point that we need to try to be White. We need to be perfect, no imperfections, meaning that hair and darkness is imperfect. And it's just constantly this cycle that we're trying to get to "the perfect image," which is very racist and problematic in origin.

Leen: I think it ultimately has to start from a very young age, because if you think about it, the things that really stick with us the most in terms of a brainwashing sense, whether you do it consciously or unconsciously . . . I'm talking more of the unconscious part. For instance, you're going to this pool and you were like, "Why do I care so much?" This usually starts more from a younger age, right?

And if you think back to it, the very first instance of when this hair was "introduced" to me as problematic was among the other children that I was hanging with. It was among my classmates, was in schools in this preteen, pre-puberty kind of era, right?

And it was never introduced as something as, "As hormones start to change or your body starts to change, you're going to start developing this hair and whatever. This is what it is. Don't be freaked out." It wasn't ever introduced first as that.

It was always introduced first as some kids saw my leg and were like, "Now spread rumors. Leen has hairy legs," or, "Oh my gosh, can you believe that girl has a unibrow?" or, "Oh my gosh, this girl has a mustache." That's how it was always first introduced.

And I don't know where those kids got that idea. It's probably media and it's probably the amount of how much we . . . Go anywhere, go to any mall, go open any magazine, go turn on the TV, it's always these very perfectly groomed appearing, thin "women" with perfectly clear skin, with not even hair follicles showing, right? They have been photoshopped to the point that they are just like clay. There's nothing there.

So, obviously, if that's the image of what beauty looks like, anything opposite to that, anything to damage that idea is going to be called unsanitary or gross.

And that's not going to change from an adult standpoint necessarily. I think it's now something you have to teach the kids to start recognizing, because that's where the deepest cuts occur.

If you're a freaking preteen and all these people are talking about your hair, that's it. You're forever going to be damaged about this. Doesn't matter if you're 10 or if you're 50, you're going to be like, "Oh my gosh, I cannot have my hair showing."

Even in the healthcare field when I have patients, I'm in the emergency room, I'm an emergency room resident doctor, and patients don't necessarily plan to come groomed to me or anything like that, and I don't expect that. I'll have people apologizing to me, like, "Oh, I'm so sorry about my legs," or, "Oh, I'm so sorry about . . ." I'm like, "You're here for a medical emergency. I do not care."

And it's not that I should care, and I don't care. I just think it's so crazy how you can be dying, but this is what they care about. This is really deep. This is a deep psyche.

Margaux: Oh, yeah.

Lina: Going to your point, Leen, about kind of what the standard image of beauty is, I think about my curly hair and how much I hated it. Even in kindergarten, I hated my hair. It was not kind of the straight, flowy hair that everyone loved and talked about. It was just very unruly. It was all over the place.

Back then, I was called a broom head, but now I say it's rays of sunshine around my head because I love my hair. But it took me a very, very long time to love my hair, and even maybe up to the last couple of years, because that was not the standard.

Unfortunately, it took a lot of people loving curly hair to me being like, "Oh, wait, my hair is so pretty. I like it." But I had to wait for society to approve of my hair to be like, "Oh, I really like my hair," in a sense. And it was not something that I approved of back then, even at such a young age.

Leen: Yeah. I mean, same thing. From 4th grade all the way up until 17 years old, so 11th grade, I straightened my hair every day. And if there was a curl in my hair, I was mortified to leave the house and I would just sit there being so self-conscious all day if my hair was not straight.

Straight hair is not necessarily something that is genetically found per se in Mediterranean genes. It just tends to run in very specific regions. Same thing with body hair. Same thing with light hair, dark hair, all these things, right?

It's just crazy how much that era in time we just really forced ourselves to fit into this perfect model of what an attractive person looks like.

Being here in the U.S., it was expected at that preteen age that you should be trying to make yourself look like the ideal attractive person. Where from my Middle Eastern culture, it was, "That is what attraction looks like and you should not do that."

My mom or people I hear, the older generation, are like, "You should not fix your eyebrows until you're married." It's like, "Okay, you're still perpetrating the same idea that attraction is for men. An attraction is a very set standard and this is what they like." Even though you're trying to be modest by preventing us to do it, super strange. It's a paradox.

Margaux: Yeah. And I want to go back to something you said earlier, Leen, which was even amongst our peers as middle schoolers or as adults and/or with our parents, we never talked about the fact that body hair is natural and how it becomes more of a . . . It's part of puberty and part of something that we need that our bodies just have. That's never part of the conversation.

But also so interesting that this ideal of the beauty standard is hairless, which is prepubescent, right? And if that's what is . . .

Leen: Oh my gosh, girl.

Margaux: . . . "attractive," is this prepubescent body, it's very disturbing from that sense and aspect.

Leen: Emotional damage. My gosh.

Margaux: Emotional damage.

Leen: What is wrong with people?

Margaux: But true, right? Why is hairless the standard? I think part of that stems from the pornography industry where they needed to have hairless women or bodies so they could see things with the camera.

Leen: You're right. It's an industry. It's the fashion industry. It's the oppressive woman beauty standard industry, and it's very . . .

Margaux: And it's capitalism, right? Everything we spend to try to remove hair.

So I think, like we've all talked about, we have taken steps to sort of unlearn these deeply rooted and socialized ideas about our body hair and whether we should remove it or not. And if we are removing it, is it for us, or who is it for? And what are those ideals rooted in?

I will say just another funny story to end on. Mom life, I hadn't shaved my legs in so long. And it's winter now, so I was wearing pants, but I was wearing three-quarter pants that were showing my ankles. I was working with teenagers in child psychiatry, outpatient.

Leen: Oh, no.

Margaux: Day treatment program. And I was sitting there and then I just like got triggered back to middle school, like, "Oh my god, they're all staring at my ankles. They're all looking at my leg hair." And it was so fascinating how much just being around that younger age when I started being mentally socialized and groomed for body hair removal is when I started to feel like, "Oh my god, I need to shave my legs."

And so that kind of is what prompted me to want to have this discussion with you all. And I think it's one that we will all continue to keep having off of the podcast and unlearning and . . .

Lina, like with you, learning to love your hair took years and years and years. And I think this is something that also will take me years and years and years, hopefully not too many, to fully be comfortable in my own true natural body.

Leen: But what honestly made it much more eye-opening to me that it is something that you can still be very feminine per se, if that's what you identify with in that sense, is that seeing confident women who are still put together, who are very professional in a sense, very strong, having that.

I don't know. I just remember throughout my years, I'll meet women, whether it's working or whatever, and they'll be dressed in the fanciest clothes, but maybe their legs are not completely all shaven, in a sense. You can still see, whether it's ankle pants and things like that. And I'm just like, "Oh my gosh, it's a sign of being a woman."

I think that's very elegant and I think that's very classy and I think it's very . . . That started making me more confident, per se, especially around the younger generation, younger kids. When they see that, they do stare. You kind of notice. But as long as you're confident in it, then they're just like, "Wow, look at her be totally mature, because that's what I want to be. I want to be mature." That's what they all strive for.

Lina: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you both brought it up. I think a big part of it is deeply rooted. It is something that we kind of try to fight every day, whether we remove body hair or not, but I think a big thing of it is de-stigmatizing it.

I feel like lately on TikTok, I feel I've been getting a lot of videos about people just natural beauty, natural hair, and really showing all the pores in their face and all the facial hair and the leg hair and just feeling very, very confident in themselves. And honestly, that helps. That helps seeing that. That helps how I think about it.

More and more people are trying to destigmatize it and feel more comfortable in their body and comfortable in their hair, and I think that definitely is what we can all work on day by day. It's not perfect, but I think just feeling confident in who we are and what we have is a big key to it. And also teaching our kids, "This is okay. This is natural. This is part of your body."

Margaux: Representation and existence is resistance, right? So show your body hair, love your body hair, and that's how we're going to smash the patriarchy, the capitalism, and everything else that's bad about this world.

Thank you both for having this conversation with me and being vulnerable, sharing your embarrassing stories, and letting me share mine.

To our listeners, I hope that you also have learned something. If you have a story to share, please check us out @bundleofhers on Instagram. We'd love to continue the conversation there.

Keep listening to us. I don't know. What are we saying these days? Download our podcast.

Lina: Listen to us wherever you listen.

Margaux: Yeah, there we go. Listen to us wherever you download your podcasts. Keep listening to Season 6 because it's going to be amazing. And until next time, bye.

Lina: Bye.

Margaux: Yay, Lina.

Leen: She's going to make you redo it. I just have a feeling.