Echidne of the Snakes, riffing on anti-feminist angst over women’s armpits, says something deep and true about what the “shaving” wars say about the effort required to construct gender from the mostly-undifferentiated material of corporeal humanity.
I would love to stop discussing the “to shave or not” topic in feminist circles and to start focusing more on what the ridiculing opposition is really saying. Just think about it for a few seconds. Their message is that it is not nature that defines what a woman is, but they, the namers and deciders. And they have decided that a woman in this culture should be without body hair but with very large and perky breasts and basically no hips. It is not some historical or theological concept of womanliness but a purely cultural one, and it is based on the accentuation of gender differences, with a few cultural quirks thrown in.
I see an analogous case in the discussion about cognitive differences between men and women. The anti-feminist point is always to try to make women and men into two quite different species, two “opposite sexes” as the saying goes, whereas the evidence I’ve studied and my life experiences all suggest that men and women are like two overlapping Venn diagrams in almost everything. Partly different and partly the same. This messiness, like armpit hairs on women, is unacceptable to the patriarchal mind.
Once again it’s not that there are no differences between men and women. It’s that the real differences are enough. Oh yeah! And hooray for all of our respective orientations and our shouldn’t-be-surprising discernment of those we’re drawn to. By which I mean there are enough differences that it’s foolish, willful, conceited, and fundamentally insecure about or orientations and of those around us to require more than nature gives us.
And once again it’s not that there’s no need nor interest in decoration of ourselves, others, or our environs. Quite the opposite — decoration appears to be a fundamental quality of humanity!
But while referencing the expectation that we participate in gender construction, Echidne puts the problem in context (even more emphasis mine)
...we all know how a real man will not wear pink (in this culture and time period) or lace (in this culture and time period) or skirts (in this culture and time period).
Sticking with hair for the moment, the classic example being that in some cultures in the world today men can be punished for having a beard on the one hand (in most of the U.S. military, for instance) yet be punished for not having a beard in others (in most of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance.) Another being that for women to have no body hair is considered sexy in some parts of the world (white America for instance) because of its association with high-status femininity while in other parts of the world (white/European South America for instance) women’s body hair is associated with high-status femininity because “native” South American women are believed to have relatively sparse body hair.
In each case, in each culture, in each time, in each location, gender might be constructed, yeah. But if it’s constructed differently in different places…
Sigh.
You know what’s most peculiar of all? For roughly 99.999% of the .001% of cases where for whatever reason someone else’ biological sex really matters, but where for some reason you’re not able to tell, you can usually ask.
