A Client Asked Me Why I Choose Not To Shave

The answer is actually pretty simple: because body hair isn't a flaw. It's an adult human sex characteristic. Women naturally grow hair on our legs, under our arms, on our stomachs, and in countless other places. Yet many of us are taught from a young age to see that hair as dirty, embarrassing, masculine, or something that needs to be hidden before anyone else sees it.

What's fascinating is how completely normalized that expectation has become. Most people rarely stop to ask why women are expected to remove a natural part of their bodies in the first place. Instead, hair removal is framed as basic hygiene, self-care, professionalism, or simply "what women do," even though none of those expectations are applied equally to men.

This wasn't an inevitable cultural development. Beauty standards are shaped by history, economics, media, and power. The modern expectation that women should remove nearly all visible body hair is relatively recent in historical terms, becoming widespread during the twentieth century alongside changing fashions, mass advertising, and the commercialization of women's beauty. Entire industries have profited by convincing women that a normal biological characteristic is a problem requiring a lifelong solution.

What I find even more interesting is the broader pattern these beauty standards create. Many of the traits idealized as feminine involve minimizing visible signs of adult female maturity: hairless skin, smoothness, softness, smallness, youthful facial features, and an emphasis on looking perpetually young. While each of these preferences can exist independently, together they form an aesthetic that often distances women from the physical markers of adulthood.

I'm not suggesting that people who prefer hairless women are attracted to children. Human attraction is far more complex than that, and individual preferences are shaped by countless social and cultural influences. But I do think it's worth examining where those preferences come from. We should be able to ask why natural markers of female adulthood are so often treated as undesirable while youthfulness is consistently elevated as the feminine ideal.

Feminist scholars have long argued that beauty standards are not simply about aesthetics; they also function as systems of social regulation. When women are expected to devote time, money, emotional energy, and physical discomfort or even pain to altering perfectly healthy bodies, those expectations become more than personal choices. They become cultural norms that shape how women are perceived, valued, and even how they learn to see themselves.

Body hair is one small example of that process. Girls often learn to feel ashamed of it almost as soon as it appears, ironically, at the very moment puberty marks their transition into adulthood. Instead of recognizing body hair as evidence of healthy development, they're encouraged to remove it immediately, as though becoming an adult woman is something that should leave as few visible traces as possible.

What's remarkable is how invisible this expectation has become. Most people don't notice it until a woman chooses not to shave. Suddenly, a natural body is seen as making a statement, being unprofessional, or rejecting femininity altogether. That reaction says far more about the strength of the social norm than it does about the woman herself.

None of this means individual women are wrong for shaving. Many genuinely prefer it, and everyone should have the autonomy to make decisions about their own body without judgment. The problem isn't the act of shaving, it's the assumption that shaving is the default, that femininity requires it, and that women who don't participate somehow need to explain themselves.

I don't remove my body hair because I don't believe my body needs correcting. I don't believe adulthood is something women should disguise, and I don't think femininity should require the erasure of natural female characteristics. Women don't owe anyone hairlessness. We don't owe anyone youth. We don't owe anyone the performance of perpetual girlhood. Adult women have body hair. It's just biology and it shouldn't be seen as taboo or controversial. The only thing worth questioning is why we've spent generations pretending otherwise.