"I could quite literally cure cancer in the time I spend thinking about my hair."

Scaachi Koul, author of One Day We'll All Be Dead and None Of This Will Matter, has shaved, waxed, sugared, and plucked hair from just about every part of her body.

"My knuckles and my toes, because I am a hobbit, and most of my face...I can grow a beard in about 25 minutes."

She joins Piya to talk about why brown women in particular go through the pain, expense and shame of worrying about and removing their body hair.

"There's a political side of brown hair," she says, noting brown women face different pressures than white women do when it comes to hair.

"(W)hen you're a brown girl...you have to fight extra hard for white people to consider you attractive," she says, "If you are a bushy, brown lady with a weird name and thick haunches and broad shoulders, you've got to work really hard to figure out ways to be cute."

But Scaachi is also an outspoken feminist. So, choosing to keep up with conventions around body hair presents an inherent contradiction, which she acknowledges.

"We all have different things we do to conform. It would be absurd to say there isn't anything in my life that I don't do for other people," she says.

But Scaachi admits she's working on that.

"I've got a long life of trying to tell other people to shove it, so this is on the list."

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