Why do women feel pressured to shave?

(CNN) -- Google "when did women start to...." and one of the first search suggestions that comes up is “when did women start waxing?”.

The answer goes back centuries. Waxing, or the removal of body hair, has long shaped gender dynamics, functioned as a class signifier, and has also defined notions of femininity and "the ideal body."

In its most recent evolution, however, body hair has been embraced by a growing number of young women who are turning this source of social embarrassment into a sign of personal strength.

Increasing gender fluidity, the positive body image movement, and the growing inclusion of the beauty industry have all contributed to the new wave of hair.

“This has been deeply stigmatized – still is – and added a component of shame,” Heather Widdows, professor of global ethics at Britain's University of Birmingham and author of “Perfect Me: Beauty as an ethical ideal”. “(Body hair) removal is one of the few aesthetic traditions that has gone from being a beauty routine to a hygienic one,” she added.

She noted: “Today, most women feel they have to shave. As if they had no other choice. There is something deeply charged about that, although perceptions are slowly changing."

Ancient Egypt to Darwin

Removing body hair did not become established as a mandate for women until the early 20th century.

Before that, removing body hair was something that both men and women did—even as far back as the Stone Age, then into ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Roman Empire—using seashells, beeswax, and other methods of cleaning. hair removal. In these ancient times, as Victoria Sherrow writes in Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, hairlessness was seen primarily as a way to keep the body clean. In ancient Rome it was also associated with class: the smoother your skin, the purer and more superior you were.

In the Middle East, as well as East and South Asia, threading was used on the entire face. Although, ridged eyebrows (also known as unibrows) were actually attractive on both genders, and were often accentuated with kohl pencil.

In Persia, plucking and defining the eyebrows was an indicator of adulthood and marriage for women, and was mainly reserved for that occasion. Whereas in China, body hair was considered normal for a long time, and even today women face much less social pressure to shave.

The same is true of other Asian countries: while hair removal has become routine for many young women on the continent, shaving or trimming pubic hair, for example, is not as common as it is in the West.

In fact, in Korea, pubic hair was long associated with a sign of fertility and sexual health, so much so that some Korean women were reportedly undergoing pubic hair transplants in the mid-2010s to add more hair in that area.

Now, Europeans weren't always so obsessed with a hairless body.

During the Middle Ages, good Catholic women were expected to grow their hair as a display of femininity, while keeping it hidden in public. The face was the only place where hair was considered unsightly: 14th-century ladies would pluck their forehead hair to recede their hairline and give their faces a more oval appearance. When Elizabeth I came to power in 1558, she made eyebrow plucking fashionable.

At the end of the 18th century, European and North American women still did not consider hair removal essential, although when French barber Jacques Perret invented the first men's razor in 1760, some women used it too.

It wasn't until the late 19th century that women on both sides of the Atlantic began to include waxing as an integral part of their beauty routines. The modern notion that body hair is unfeminine can be traced back to 1871 with Charles Darwin's book The Descent of Man, According to Plucked: A History of Hair Removal by Rebecca Herzig.

Darwin's theory of natural selection associated body hair with "primitive ancestry and an atavistic return to earlier and 'less developed' forms," ​​wrote Herzig, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at Maine's Bates College. In contrast, having fewer body hairs, the English naturalist suggested, was a sign of being more evolved and sexually attractive.

As Darwin's ideas caught on, other medical experts and scientists in the 19th century began to associate the presence of hair with "sexual reversal, pathology of disease, insanity, and criminal violence," according to Herzig. Interestingly, those connotations were mostly applied to women's body hair, not men's: not only due to evolutionary arguments, but also, the author noted, to apply "social gender control" to the growing role of women in society. Leading women to think they had to be hairless to be considered worthy of attention was a heteronormative way of controlling their bodies, and inherently themselves, through shame, Widdows explained.

In the early 1900s, white, middle- and upper-class American women increasingly viewed hairless skin as an indicator of femininity, while female body hair was associated with something disgusting. So removing them offered “a way to separate oneself from the more vulgar, lower-class, and immigrant people,” Herzig wrote.

A Female “Need”

During the first decades of the 20th century, changing fashions – with sleeveless dresses exposing skin – further popularized body waxing in the United States.

In 1915, Harper's Bazaar was the first women's magazine to publish a campaign dedicated to removing underarm hair (“a necessity,” as it was described). That same year, the men's razor blade company Gillette released the first razor marketed specifically for women, the Milady Décolletée. Its advertisement read: "A beautiful addition to Milady's bath table – and one that solves an embarrassing personal problem."

The short hems of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as a shortage of nylon stockings during World War II, meant that more and more American women began shaving their legs, too. And the arrival of the bikini in the US in 1946 also led shaving companies and female consumers to focus on trimming and shaping their nether regions.

In the 1950s, when Playboy hit the newsstands and magazines (its first issue came out in 1953), heavily shaved women promoting lingerie set a new standard for sexiness. By 1964, 98% of American women between the ages of 15 and 44 regularly shaved their legs. Wax strips and the first laser hair removal also debuted at this time, though the latter was quickly abandoned for its damaging effects on the skin before returning to the market decades later.

“And yet, waxing was far from as extreme as it is today,” Widdows said. “In the late 1960s and 1970s, body hair was nothing unusual, even in Playboy. At that time there was also a second wave of feminism and the spread of hippie culture, which rejected hairless bodies. For many women, body hair was a symbol of their fight for equality. It didn't look unnatural, not yet," he explained.

That change, Widdows said, began in the decades that followed, with the growing popularity of waxing, pornography and an increasingly explicit pop culture. In 1987, seven sisters from Brazil (known as the J Sisters) opened a salon in New York City that offered the so-called "Brazilian," a full waxing of the genital region. Celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Naomi Campbell began to to become “Brazilian.” The masses followed his example.

“Removing body hair went from being 'expected' to becoming the norm,” Widdows explained. “Being shaved came to be seen as the only 'natural' and clean way to present the body. Except it really isn't."

With advertising and the media further promoting the ideal of completely hairless bodies, the idea that female hair is gross has only grown. In turn, hair-free methods have become more precise: the last four decades have seen the rise of electrolysis, pulsed light, and more advanced laser technology.

"Anything associated with the 'abject' — that which we expel from our cultural worlds to define ourselves — almost by definition evokes disgust, shame and hostility," Herzig told CNN in an email. “Visible hair on the female body certainly tends to be treated as abject today. It's worth noting that those are ideas about cleanliness, contingent social norms, rather than actually removing 'dirt'. Most hair removal practices tend to introduce new opportunities for abrasion and infection," he said.

Welcoming Body Hair

In 2008, Breanne Fahs, a professor of women's and gender studies at Arizona State University, gave her students the task of growing their body hair and then writing a article reflecting on the experience. Fahs then expanded the exercise to include the men in the course, who were asked to shave their legs. The project continues to this day.

“The activity has brought to the fore the cultural inevitability of female waxing,” Fahs said in a phone interview. “Over the years, those who have participated in the exercise have shared fairly consistent problems: a deep sense of shame, struggles with their self-confidence, and even social ostracism,” he recounted.

“There have also been cases of heterosexism and homophobia: this idea that growing hair on your legs automatically means you're queer, or waxing your legs means you're a gay man. Women often don't realize how much society, family, and friends influence what we do with our bodies. And how much of what we believe to be a choice, that I choose to shave, has been taught and applied to us for generations."

But Fahs has also seen feelings of empowerment, rebellion and anger coming from the project. “Especially in the last two years, in the wake of the elections and the #MeToo movement, there has been a deeper awareness of the restrictions surrounding women's bodies, of feminism, gender and sexuality, and a willingness to reject everything, or at least get out of the comfort zone," he said.

And it's not just Fahs students.

A new population of young women is embracing body hair, especially on Instagram. The phenomenon has also reached the magazines. In the September issue of Harper's Bazaar, actress Emily Ratajkowski posed with her armpits unshaven (a complete 180 for the publication from her early anti-armpit hair posts). YouTuber Ingrid Nilsen and artist Halsey also showed off their body hair.

Recently launched women's razor brands are also championing female hairs and fostering positive conversations about it. The Flamingo razor, from the popular Harry's grooming line, emphasizes the right to choose whether or not to shave with advertising messages such as "We are a growth option."

Razor startup Billie, established in 2017, is another company that markets the idea of ​​choice. Instead of showing the perfectly shaved models typical of ads in this market, their campaigns featured diverse groups of women shaving, combing their underarm locks or lying on the beach in bikinis with varying levels of hairiness.

“For a long time, advertising has only reinforced the taboo on the subject,” Billie co-founder Georgina Gooley said in a phone interview. “We wanted to acknowledge that women have body hair, show it off, and say that shaving is a choice. If you want to keep your body hair, we celebrate that. And if you want to remove it, that's fine too," he added.

Photographer Ashley Armitage, who has worked on Billie's campaigns and cleverly depicts body hair on her Instagram account, agrees. "Body hair is a personal choice," he wrote in an email. “Shaving it, waxing it, or growing it out are all valid options, and it all depends on the individual.”

The idea that not waxing is also an option may not seem revolutionary when it comes to normalizing body hair. But it could be an important step to reformulate the topic.

“I think more women are realizing how deeply connected body hair is to gender and power,” Fahs said. “The emotional nature of what causes body hair in people has enormous potential as a tool for activism and social change,” he concluded.