Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
I stopped shaving my armpits after I was physically assaulted at a Dixie Chicks concert. It was a year ago, but I remember the last time I shaved my pits as clearly as I remember the first time I shaved my legs. I was thirteen when someone pointed out I was the last girl in my class with hair on my legs. I spent a whole bus ride home dying of shame and then half an hour in the shower getting rid of the disgusting barely-there blonde fuzz. Cut forward twenty-two years to a hotel in Little Collins Street where I’m complaining to my friend about how much deodorant stings on freshly shaven skin. Three hours later a man in his sixties sprains my hand and threatens to throw me off a balcony.
We had been looking forward to that concert for so long. Years really. Three kids, a divorce, cancer, interstate moves, chronic illness diagnoses, several job changes, hundreds of haircuts, thousands of coffees, a constantly increasing collection of wrinkles, through all of these things in each others lives that we’d only seen glimpses of. Stupid geography, and love, and all the other small things that take curious people far away from each other. But now the Dixie Chicks were in Melbourne and we were together, sans kids, pumped out of our skins.
I shaved my pits specifically because I knew we’d be dancing. I knew it’d be hot. I knew my damn arms would be up in the air, because it was the Dixie Chicks, and I also knew that if you are going to get your skin up in anyone’s space, you scrape the hair off it first. Well, this is what I would have reasoned had I been over-analysing my shaving decisions at the time, which I wasn’t. I was just annoyed about the stinging and wondering if my outfit was up to scratch.
We both looked amazing. I even put on make-up, which makes me look a bit like a drag queen because I am tall and have a well-endowed jaw. But technically in every other way I was smokin’. We both were. Skirt, lips, boobs, hairless pits. My friend is incapable of looking anything other than the gorgeous ex-model she is, and I was the hottest female drag queen you’ve ever seen. We were golden. We knew all the words and ticked all the boxes and when Natalie Maines told all 30,000 of us to get up and dance, we bloody well got up and danced.
But none of it mattered in the end because we were taking up space. We were women taking up space. We were ‘fucking little bitches’ who were ‘ruining’ the night of two old white men who had paid ‘a fucking jackload for tickets’. And if we didn’t sit down for the rest of the concert they would ‘throw (us) over the fucking railing’. The man who grabbed me twisted my fingers as he screamed abuse. His buddy viciously dug his fingers into my friend’s collarbone. The railing was just in front of us and the drop was three metres onto concrete.
Good thing I’d shaved my armpits though, right?
A week later I picked up a razor – with the hand that wasn’t still swollen from the assault – out of habit. Then stopped. Who was I shaving for again? I realised with a feeling of utter revulsion that I had been shaving my underarms for him. For that old white man who physically assaulted me because I partially blocked his view for three and a half minutes. He and his fellows and their legacy of control and domination were who we were scraping the hair off our bodies for. Because of men like him, boys are recoiling at the sight of hairy female legs. Because of the standards set by old men making porn and getting rich selling shit we don’t need young women think they need to spend countless hours plucking, shaving, bleaching, waxing, tweaking and stressing about how much and where their own hair grows on their own bodies. And, in the end, it’s a losing game. Because play by the rules all you want, as soon as you take up space they assume is rightfully theirs, they’ll still try and kill you.
I didn’t want to please that guy! Fuck him! He had a whole fucking face full of hair! I was – belatedly – furious. I put down the razor.
I was still fuming about it all when I turned up at my life drawing session a few days later. The model was a girl I had an unrequited-and-almost-definitely-inappropriate-but-refusing-to-die crush on. The first time I ever saw her model I noticed she didn’t shave anything, and thought at the time it was a bit hot. Then, after many hours over several months, bodily specifics all blended into a general appreciation of how beautiful she was to draw. So that night I particularly noticed the hair again. Now this girl moves through the world with the confident joyfulness of someone who gives zero fucks about the opinions of idiots, and thinks Confest and camping are fun. She’s nearly as tall as me and she wears six-inch heels and glitter and she is utterly superb. Now she is someone worth pleasing, I thought, before giving myself the usual stern talking to and forcing my brain to reconfigure her into lines and shapes and shadows and definitely not thighs and sweeps of throat and the way her hands rest on the arm of a chair.
So next time I eyed off the razor in the shower I had both of them in my head. Him and her. Two ways of being, two versions of pleasing. I didn’t want to beeither of them. I’m clearly not interested in being an entitled violent arsehole, but I’m also not into camping or glitter. And I didn’t exactly want to please my crush anyway. I wanted, I finally realised, because I am slow, to be who I desire. To please myself and make my body happy. And at the most basic level my body had clearly demonstrated over many years, by way of ingrown hairs and pain and dryness, that it didn’t like me shaving the hairs off it.
So it’s not as useful as getting the police called, which is what my friend did at the concert. It doesn’t really make up for humiliation of crying in front of the entire Rod Laver Arena, which is what I did at the concert. And, sadly, it isn’t going to tempt someone unavailable and out of my league to want to jump my bones. But it’s something. My ongoing hairiness is my quiet middle finger, my apology to my thirteen-year-old self, and my way of reclaiming space. And next time Natalie Maines directs me to dance, you better believe I will be there with my arms way up, giving zero fucks.