Recently, Irish writer Emer O'Toole issued something of a call to arms in London's Vagenda Magazine. She encouraged women to press pause on their hair removal regimes and contemplate the idea of letting hair do what it does best; grow. An article in the Guardian followed and then an appearance on breakfast television, upon which Emer raised her arms and proudly showed the effects of not taking a razor to her armpits for eighteen months. Effects which are, let's face it, quite natural. Because, let's face it once more, growing hair is quite natural, despite the overwhelming belief otherwise.

The result of Emer's tussocky arms being broadcast to a breakfasting England was an uproar of mixed sentiment. Many people applauded her, revealing their own struggle with the assumption women should be permanently bald, save for their sumptuous lashes and extended head hair but most, predictably, in one collective recoil, yelled 'GROSS.' Men and women alike shrieked, hair should not grow there! That is unnatural! It isn't feminine! There we were in 2012, appalled at female underarm hair and instead of taking a long, hard look at ourselves for being appalled by something quite ordinary and female, behaving as if the the very crux of femininity was under direct attack.

Emer O'Toole shows off her under arm hair on morning TV in the UK.

Emer's arms and the public's response demonstrated just how far removed we have come from the idea of women having body hair. So removed, that women who leave their hair – who let their bodies do what their bodies do – are 'brave' at best, 'offensive' at worst. Brave – as if sitting back and saying no to regular, painful procedures involving hot wax, electric pulses and blades is brave. Brave – because it is so terrifying to exist in a natural state in an age that so relentlessly promotes what is unnatural. When you think about it, it is all entirely, utterly bizarre.

Save for patches, history's female landscape is remarkably smooth. Thousands of years before Americans, Australians and the British began shaving their arms for the fashions of the early 1900s, wealthy ancient Greek, Roman and Middle Eastern women were pumicing and plucking, their smoothness symbolic of their class. In these third wave days, off the back of a century of shaving, waxing, Silky Mitting (remember them) and lasering ads - the hirsute 70s the only decade really flying the follicle flag - and the normalisation of porn star waxes that remove every pubic hair you could conceive of growing, we have a different take on body hair. The body hair conversation is no longer just predicated on the knowledge women have hair and the subsequent opinion they are more aesthetically pleasing if they remove or contain it to the line of a classic brief – it now seems to be predicated on the presumption to be female is to be utterly hairless the vast majority of the time and hair that does dare sprout from surfaces not scalp-related should not just be contained, but completely removed. Eviscerated by preferably permanent means.