blickblocks:

tuuli: 77825225672443: Fuck you, it’s called dysphoria. Ever notice how all the anti-shaving feminists (the ones who make no exceptions) are ALL cis women? Yeah, and it’s totes ableist to demand it from everyone. This! Just because someone engages in normative beauty standards…

I describe this phenomenon of a “feminist” declaring actions taken in the name of normative beauty in an oppressive society to be verboten “cargo cult feminism.” It has all the trappings and hallmarks of feminism—recognition of oppression, recognition of the artifacts of oppression, recognition that sexist ideas of whether or not a woman is sexually available and desirable lie at the heart of female value—and then aims and fires at the wrong target. They had a brush with a second wave feminist and liked what they heard but didn’t fully grasp the point. They, like the cargo cults, are making all the motions and are crying out in outrage, but lack the understanding of why feminists fight the battle of beauty standards.

They see smoke, and know that when people see smoke they grab a fire extinguisher, and after using it there’s no more smoke. They missed the part where you’re supposed to aim at the base of the fire, not the smoke.

That’s what they are doing when they attack other women—and this goes double for attacking trans women—over how much they shave, or whether or not they have mascara on. They are attacking the smoke, and not the fire: they attack the razor and not the societal notion that a woman who does not shave is lazy, disgusting, or “an angry feminist lesbian”.

And I’m not even going to get into (in this post) the, as a whole, infantilizing ideal of feminine beauty as this as-youthful-as-legally-allowed, pre-pubescent form: narrow hips, perky breasts, hairless body (special focus on a hairless vulva), soft and unblemished skin. I’m just going to focus on the hairless bit.

How about she doesn’t want this?

Those are ingrown hairs. Mine, to be precise. TMI? Too fucking bad.

See, when some women shave, they get to play a little game: pop a zit, and win a prize! Sometimes, one of these buggers comes flying out instead of acne pus. If it does, you win! It means it’s been cleared from the follicle and is no longer causing a skin-damaging blockage. It can be highly damaging to the skin to let ingrown hairs remain trapped and form a cyst, but extracting them can be equally damaging and scarring. At the very least, even in a best case scenario, you’re looking at a week of a big red spot as the area heals.

This is just one element of the ableism remarked upon above. Not every woman can shave without having to deal with this little side effect. And even when a woman does it to her legs with no problems, that doesn’t guarantee that the thicker and coarser pubic region will be as cooperative. So, leaving aside the fact that not every woman can achieve the weight, proportion, and bone structure demanded by ideals, even these “simple” things that every woman is “expected” to do can cause problems.

Pivoting slightly, I read a thread in r/2XC where a young woman was fretting about complying with her boyfriend’s request that she shave her pubic area. I bring the point up not to counter what I said above, but to clarify it so as not to turn anyone reading this into a “shaving is always a horrible, kryriarchy-reinforcing act based on internalized oppression!” cargo cultist.

Several in that thread expressed concern about his desire, citing points similar to what I stated above, including some likening it to pedophilia. Others pointed out that, paraphrasing: women wouldn’t even shave if not for societal pressure to please men. The reasoning goes that someone put that idea there, and but for that oppressive act of indoctrination, women would exist in a “natural state” of serene, womanly awesomeness. After all, who would spontaneously do something like that to themselves?

Now we’ve gone too far again. We are social creatures, meant to interact with other people. There is no such thing as a perfect state of being. This often comes up as the oft cited “Would you do [shave your legs] if you grew up on an island with no other humans around?” Variations on this are typically brought up as “would you transition to male/female if you didn’t have gender roles” or “would you be offended by the word fag if you grew up without language” etc… The obvious flaw with “pure, perfect, natural state” reasoning is that there is no such thing. Our natural state is to live our entire lives interacting with other people, influenced and taught by others how to be a person.

Now, that does not mean all of that interaction or learning is ideal, so I will not defend it as such. But it is enough to say that a person without any signaling from other people would not develop certain cognitive capabilities to full capacity, if they could survive at all.

We don’t adopt every behavior that we are taught without any filters. Do you behave exactly like your parents, or like your parents want you to? Do you behave exactly like your peers, or how your peers want you to? We all have the capacity to adopt only those behaviors that fit within our personality framework. Coercion is a factor, of course. A Hobson’s choice is no choice at all.

But there are also behaviors we adopt immediately because they suit us. Just because the idea would not have arisen spontaneously for every person ever does not mean that the idea is inherently wrong, or bad, or “unnatural”. It just means that it wouldn’t have occurred to us. How many people would have thought to cook food if no one taught them? Or to bathe regularly? Neither of these things were necessary for our ancestors, but in modern society, living with crowds and crowds of other people and globally transported food products, hygiene and cooking are essential.

So let’s return to shaving: The idea of shaving my body would never have occurred to me but for the idea being introduced to me from the outside. My curiosity over the matter was always trumped by social rules that said “men don’t do it, women do.” So once I started my transition and that injunction was no longer there, I found that contrary to the world that says it must and shall be done to please men, I just plain liked it. When I miss a day, or a week, I don’t sweat it because I do it for me, not for you, or for my partners, or for society.

But I also have a problem with ingrown hairs. So I have to manage that or forgo something I like. I’m not enduring skin damage to conform. (It would be disingenuous to say that there is nothing that I do that is influenced by normative beauty standards, but shaving is not one of them) But it also means that I can stand up and say “I don’t need to do this, and therefore it’s not worth the red spots this week.”

So in reply to the poster on r/2XC, I stated that she should do it for herself if she wants to do it, or she should not do it if she doesn’t want to do it (or endure ingrown hairs like I do). However, if she genuinely does not care one way or the other*, then she is free to try doing it for her partner and forget what any cargo cultists try to say on the matter.

The problem isn’t with shaving. It’s in setting up the expectation that she, or any woman, do so or else give up her femininity. What a cargo cultist does is then set up the opposite expectation, that she never shave or else give up her right to call herself empowered.

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* I find it problematic that mainstream feminism often can’t account for situations in which a person just doesn’t have a strong opinion on something. It is often dismissed and rationalized as the person having internalized their oppression, or even worse, callously disregarding the suffering of others. Attempts to acknowledge that a partner’s (not specifically a man) pleasure really is important to you is dismissed as “fun feminism”. I call BS.