Cut & Paste Sessions Vol. 01: Female Body Hair
The Cut & Paste Sessions are born
Cut & Paste are creative conversations around different topics relevant to our everyday lives and the world we live in. These sessions are designed to come together to make art and crafts while having good yarns. Every Cut & Paste revolves around a particular topic and the goal is to hold a dialogue where we question why things work the way they do and whether we would like things to carry on as they are or if we would like anything to change. We, as a group, imagine alternative futures through a creative activity.
For the first edition of Cut & Paste, we had three creative sessions at the Hamilton City Library (New Zealand) on the 16th, 17th and 24th of February 2024. Each session was unique as we had different participants on each date. Each participant created a series of collages and a zine (a hand-made booklet) based on the session’s topic and the dialogues that we held around it.
Female Body Hair
The topic of this Cut & Paste was ‘female body hair.’ I chose this theme because, presently, hairless female bodies are the norm. A lot of us ladies engage or have engaged in body hair removal practices but I wondered how many of us ever pondered on how these practices came to be in the first place. We ladies are born with hairy bodies after all, so why and when did we decide it was a good idea to get rid of it? Body hair removal practices are also not the most pleasant, so what motivates us? And what happens when women can’t be bothered or decide not to comply with the norm? Is there a place for non-conforming hairy female bodies? Are they accepted? We explored these questions and the history of hair removal practices in the 20th century during our sessions.
Is it really our choice?
One of the most interesting questions that came up during our conversations was, is it really women’s choice to remove or not their body hair? During our conversations we learnt that the first body hair removal products for women appeared as a result from a desire to make money. But for those products to sell (and money to be made) companies like Gillete needed to ‘create’ the need for their products first amongst the female population. They succeeded at creating that need through the use of advertisement. Ads played a powerful role in changing women’s behaviour by shaping a negative attitude towards female body hair. Companies carefully selected negative language in their ads and used used phrases like ‘objectionable hair,’ ‘an embarrassing personal problem,’ ‘ugly, noticeable and unwanted hair,’ when referring to female body hair.
Over time (more than 100 years) we accumulated an extensive pool of information that tells us what the collective thinking and norms around female body hair are. We saw that this pool of information influences our behaviour, thoughts, the kind of products we consume and hair removal practices we engage in. It also influences the kind of products and services that are produced and offered to us.
The change we would like to see
The general consensus in our conversations was that we would like to see a society with a much more relaxed perception of female body hair. Most of us agreed that we don’t like to feel the pressure of having to comply with strict beauty standards or having to have perfect ‘smooth’ bodies all the time. We don’t like to feel ashamed and self-conscious of our (hairy) bodies. And we would like to be able to bring and show our hairy bodies whenever we feel like it without being judged.
What we can do to see that change become a reality
We saw that our behaviour around female body hair has been influenced by the information we have accumulated over time, the pool of information, and other things like profit-making drivers. So one thing we could try would be feeding the pool of information with new information on normalising female body hair. This could look like bringing our hairy bodies into the public space every now and then and maybe increasing the frequency over time. Or sharing photos or artwork with a more realistic representation of female bodies, that is, female bodies with body hair! Perhaps feeding our visual input with hairy female bodies by following hashtags like #normalizebodyhair and #projectbodyhair on social media. And practicing mindfulness around the way we talk about our body hair.
What we created
Here are some images of the artwork we produced during our sessions. We used these artworks to produce a zine (hand-made booklet) and wrote our thoughts on female body hair. You can see an example of a zine in the video. This is our contribution to the pool of information normalising female body hair!
