Much ado about some hair
Just hours after the following pic made it to the Internets, it collected tens of thousands of likes and even more comments, some of which were quite extreme and outright hateful:
It's Laura De, a Belgian student in Philosophy, who made a photo session, deciding to display some beauty in its natural form. And then Facebook exploded. Some users called her a "pig" and accused her of having no hygiene. She doubled down with the following:
"Things can go very far. Too far. I am a girl who decided to do what she wanted her body. And the consequences of this were collective humiliation, harassment, insults, threats. I’m often told that in Belgium and in France we do not need the feminism, that women have enough rights. All this violence proves [that’s not true]. In Belgium, a country that calls itself free and developed, when a woman wants to say no to waxing, it will be punished until she goes inside the standard again. I wanted to tell you all: Thank you. The hundreds people who came to support me with their comments, their private messages, their sharing my photos and artistic projects. Girls, boys and non-binary that fight for a fairer world with courage and inflexibility, you are my heroes."
This issue was tangentially mentioned here recently when we were discussing the burqa ban. An argument was made that it would be naive to judge Muslim women in terms of "freeness", since Western women are just as slaves to the common social mores of the time and place as they are. This is a good case-in-point in that respect. In fact, it extends much further beyond mere hygiene than some are trying to present it.
And it is not a new topic, either. Actually it's thousands of years old. Removing body hair is as old as ancient Egypt - women used seashells and sharp stones to do that procedure, they used various potions to suppress hair. And in ancient Rome, shaven armpits were considered a mark of high class. In the Middle Ages, the focus was on the face, particularly the forehead: having a clear forehead with tiny thin eyebrows was considered beautiful. Probably the only time when body hair was OK, was the 18th and 19th century.
My point is, as times change, fashion fads and social norm does, too. But in a presumably developed 21st century society, which claims to have transcended prejudice, mass responses like this to acts of individual autonomy (like the decision what to do with one's own body), quite eloquently show us otherwise. And this may come as a shock to some. More of a shock than some hair in the armpit.
It's Laura De, a Belgian student in Philosophy, who made a photo session, deciding to display some beauty in its natural form. And then Facebook exploded. Some users called her a "pig" and accused her of having no hygiene. She doubled down with the following:
"Things can go very far. Too far. I am a girl who decided to do what she wanted her body. And the consequences of this were collective humiliation, harassment, insults, threats. I’m often told that in Belgium and in France we do not need the feminism, that women have enough rights. All this violence proves [that’s not true]. In Belgium, a country that calls itself free and developed, when a woman wants to say no to waxing, it will be punished until she goes inside the standard again. I wanted to tell you all: Thank you. The hundreds people who came to support me with their comments, their private messages, their sharing my photos and artistic projects. Girls, boys and non-binary that fight for a fairer world with courage and inflexibility, you are my heroes."
This issue was tangentially mentioned here recently when we were discussing the burqa ban. An argument was made that it would be naive to judge Muslim women in terms of "freeness", since Western women are just as slaves to the common social mores of the time and place as they are. This is a good case-in-point in that respect. In fact, it extends much further beyond mere hygiene than some are trying to present it.
And it is not a new topic, either. Actually it's thousands of years old. Removing body hair is as old as ancient Egypt - women used seashells and sharp stones to do that procedure, they used various potions to suppress hair. And in ancient Rome, shaven armpits were considered a mark of high class. In the Middle Ages, the focus was on the face, particularly the forehead: having a clear forehead with tiny thin eyebrows was considered beautiful. Probably the only time when body hair was OK, was the 18th and 19th century.
My point is, as times change, fashion fads and social norm does, too. But in a presumably developed 21st century society, which claims to have transcended prejudice, mass responses like this to acts of individual autonomy (like the decision what to do with one's own body), quite eloquently show us otherwise. And this may come as a shock to some. More of a shock than some hair in the armpit.