Hairy legs

[TiggersLikeToBounce]

This is me. I hate shaving, waxing etc. It irritates my skin. I hate the way Gillette 100 plus years ago advertised us to shave. He made millions...
But! I am still embarrassed to show my hair in public...why?

Time40 there's definitely a vibe amongst pornified young men and teenagers that women should be completely hairless, because that's all they've ever seen

Yes, I've heard a lot about that, and I find it worrying. It's a sign that our society is going backwards. I have a nasty feeling that today's teenagers don't have the same sense of freedom about their appearance that I had when I was growing up.

I shave my legs once a fortnight on average, it's just part of my grooming regime and I like the feel of my smooth legs (I also occasionally use a sandpaper mitt to get them extra silky smooth!). DH shaves his face every morning, so it's not only women who are conditioned.

I prefer to have no hair under my arms as I sweat and use a deodorant. If I have hair there I find it holds a lot of deodorant to transfer onto clothes.

I like clean lines in art and architecture, and bodies are no different.
I think hairless is more aesthetically pleasing - think Michelangelo’s David, rather than CSLewis’ Mr Tumnes.

I zap the hair I don’t want with a Philips Lumea.

Ahintofpercy - do you still think you would still do it if you had to do it everyday? Once a fortnight would be a dream!

I don't like beards, armpit hair or hairy backs on men. It's a preference.
My legs are lasered, my armpit hair never grew and I have a full bikini wax . Because I like it. I'm 60.

Well that's terribly convenient for men, isn't it?

Maybe, though there are some men with little body hair, and some women don't like it.

Men shaving body hair seems to be more common now generally though.

just curious but do men look unkempt when they do not shave their legs?

No, but you have to consider that in any social or business setting that's at all formal, men are expected to keep their legs covered.

I don't shave anything and haven't since my 20's. I trim my pubes and armpit hair a little.

IMO saying body hair is "disgusting" is the same as saying breastfeeding is disgusting.

Thinking on what googefoot has said below, When and how did it become commonplace for women to remove body hair?

Replying t9 myself

www.mic.com/articles/151191/the-unusual-and-deeply-sexist-history-of-women-removing-their-body-hair

To be unpleasantly explicit, I have to do something with my pubic hair or it forms an impenetrable woven barrier.

Zhizzh up the middle with a beardtrimmer would be sufficient. But I tend to take off more to try and combat my trich (There are many reasons someone might remove body hair.)

I am hairy in winter and then bald, red and blotchy in summer...

Aren’t we looking at this with a western, modern, white eye.

The Mughals threaded all body hair away, the ancient Egyptians used beeswax.
The mongols also scraped hair away in fashionable patches with flints and blades.
Middle Eastern and Indian sub continent also threaded hair away through history.

As far as I know only ancient Greeks preferred the unibrow for women... but then the Athenians didn’t allow their women out in public, and were very prescriptive about what they wore and did, and where they could go.

It’s more hygienic not to have hair on your head when there are ticks and fleas... hence the short back and sides styles for soldiers in WW1, and the buzz cut in new military recruits, and the tarred ponytail in the British Navy.

Lightweight dunno about you but I'm Western and white, so that's the only perspective I can really talk from within, and my friends are nearly all from Western or Western-influenced cultures. And there's more to it than culture — different ethnicities have different body/facial hair patterns, both for men and for women, though in any given population there will be lots of individual variation obviously.

I assume everyone here is modern, too, but I suppose I shouldn't discount the possibility of time-travelling ancient Romans.

Last 😂😂😂😂

Watchingthemoon - no. But I would find it deeply unattractive if men shaved their legs.

TeiTetua yes, men do usually keep their legs and underarms covered in formal situations like work, if they work in an office. But not if they work in a gym, swimming pool, instructing sports etc etc.

I think the more we have an open attitude to body hair on anyone the better.

It's interesting that a few pages back someone said that that looked 'disgusting'. A very strong word. I wonder if I would dare to tell men with beards I found them disgusting? Actually, I would not; because I do not find beards or mustaches or hair on men disgusting.

You see I found the phrase 'deeply unattractive' acceptable because we are all entitled to find things unattractive if we do; but the word 'disgusting' suggests something else ('arousing revulsion or strong indignation').

We all need to be making the choices that suit its best, are aligned with our values, etc.

As for me, I once went a year without shaving when I was 19. I remember the hair grew to such a softness. It isn't for me but I'll never forget it.

Times change, and fashions change. I doubt Victorian women shaved, with their covered up legs and armpits.
However, a lot of attractiveness comes down to the differences between men and women. Men tend to have squarer jaws than women, so square jaws is seen as attractive in men and unattractive in women.
Women are less hairy that men, so hairyness in women is seen as unattractive but attractive in men. Look up Sean Connery's and Tom Jones' hairy chests from the 60s ad 70s!
Convenient for men, maybe, but I think it comes down to biology.
Personally, I hate hairy men. DH has no body hair above the waist, his armpits look almost shaved naturally.
His legs are hairy below the knee, which I'm not keen on, but then they're not visible usually.

A lot of women stopped shaving in the seventies and interestingly enough during the late eighties early nineties the men started shaving their chest hair and pits for that metrosexual look.
Fashions come and go. Some people follow them, some do not.

DonutManloads of blokes these days have very busy beards. It's totally fashionable.

As do I, but I no longer work for a blue chip company in a very corporate environment. A well maintained beard actually takes more grooming than a cleanly shaven face. I have to oil mine at least once daily to stop is becoming scratchy, and regularly get it trimmed by a barber. But the Castaway look is a different matter. Some hipsters certainly have it but it'd be frowned upon in a lot of white collar jobs.

Do elaborate,DonutMan.

I'm just saying that there are also societal expectations of men's appearance. And above that we have the 'ideal male physique' of action movie stars which takes a lot more work to achieve than just being slim - getting ripped without steroids takes a few years of cutting and bulking and managing protein intake so that you don't catabolise muscle while losing fat. Many people don't think about it but the whole bodybuilding thing which many of us men get swept up by is really not so dissimilar from women trying to achieve the perfect slim figure IMO. Steroid abuse had been on the rise amongst young men for years.

But of course it's not a competition. It's unhealthy for both sides.

I think what historical practices maybe show is that we can't assume that fashions like this are clearly attached to some sort of oppression or misogyny. There are societies where men did shave, or women didn't, and the correlations aren't clear in terms of how women were treated.

The Viking men used to shave their body hair, at least chests and bellies and I suppose maybe backs, I'm not sure about their nether regions. But they had full beards.