Article content continued

The body hair acceptance movement is hardly new — feminists in the ’70s were loud and proud about shaving equality. But women who have made this new brand of feminism more visible include young artists like Toronto-born Petra Collins, and Arvida Bystrom, who have based their practices on laying bare the realities of womanhood long suppressed as improper: pubic hair and period blood feature prominently in their work. Teen sites like Rookie, which launched in 2011, rail against prescriptive behaviour norms for teens, and even before that, there were influential Tumblr bloggers who combined their razor-sharp style with a feminist bent.

One of these bloggers is Celia Edell, a 23-year-old MA candidate from London, Ont. who pens a blog with over 35,000 followers, comprised of mostly young women. Edell, who stopped shaving around five years ago, says that not shaving your armpits is an easy starting point for a lot of young girls with feminism. “It’s feminism 101, but for a lot of people it’s the first step towards reclaiming their body from reading magazines all the time,” says Edell. “It’s just such an obvious double standard. That’s why people latch onto it at first.”

Edell stopped shaving around five years ago in her second year of university as a conscious act of rebellion. “It was very much ‘I’m going to do this so people can be aware of my beliefs,’” she says. But what once felt like a radical proclamation of feminist politics now feels very pedestrian. “I don’t even remember that I have armpit hair now because it’s just something on my body that I don’t think about.”