Along with ‘Dry January’, ‘RED (run every day) January’ and ‘Veganuary’, ‘Januhairy’ is one of the challenges which comes with the ‘New Year, New You!’ onslaught of how to become a better person. In my last Beauty Demands blog I commented on the dramatic change which has happened as we see ourselves not as ‘inner’ thinking and doing beings, but as ‘outer’, to-be-looked-at beings. Indeed we have gone so far on this trajectory that a better self now means a better body. In a visual and virtual culture, our bodies are ourselves. Januhairy is a month long challenge which aims to get women to ‘love and accept’ their body hair while raising money for charity. It was launched by students from Exeter University, and has received lots of press, taking off around the world.
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| Photo: istolethetv (CC Attributions 2.0 license) |
In Perfect Me , I write a lot about body hair. I call body hair ‘the canary in the mine’. It is a very clear example of the normalisation and naturalisation of the modified body. Something which can only happen if an ideal is global; a key difference between the emerging global ideal and previous beauty ideals. To illustrate, think of some of the most demanding beauty practices. In very many different times and places there have been very demanding global ideals, with corset-wearing and foot-binding being but two. However, while these were demanding practices, and yes far more demanding than body hair removal, they were not – and could not be – normalising or naturalising. While the aristocratic Chinese women might have regarded the bound lotus-foot as desirable, beautiful and even perfect, she could not have thought it was normal or natural. She knew it was artifice, it was made. It is this normalising and naturalising which a global ideal enables. The hairless body becomes regarded as a normal or natural body, and body hair removal shifts from a beauty practice to a hygiene practice. I have written about body hair and the increasing normalisation of the modified body; and the normalisation thesis is a main argument of Perfect Me.
- · It calls out the demands of the practice. It recognises that hair removal is time consuming, sometimes painful and unnecessary. Hurrah!
- · It clearly shows that hairless body is not normal. Bodies grow hair. Hurrah!
- · As participants recognise that growing body hair can be uncomfortable, it shines a light on some of the (false) rhetoric about engaging in beauty being mere choice. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
Heather Widdows, Professor of Global Ethics, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham. Follow me on twitter @ProfWiddows
Find out more about my work here [https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/strategic-framework/Research/perfect-me.aspx] and read the introduction of Perfect Me here [http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i11281.pdf].