Have I actually written about how I feel about my body hair in detail before?

Okay, that’s a big topic and tonight my brain is small. Smaller topic:

Why I only shave my legs for other people.

I shave my legs when I want to go out in public wearing shorts or a skirt, and sometimes for Sparkly (although ey doesn’t really care about them being hairy most of the time.) I don’t ever shave them just for myself.

I like the feeling of smooth hairless skin, it’s nice in itself and the novelty of it is nice, too. I don’t like stubble, but I don’t find the feeling of longer body hair unpleasant at all, just different.

Last time I tried to shave my legs for no reason other than to have them be hairless, I found that as soon as I started, I couldn’t help thinking that I needed to shave because my legs were gross. I kept thinking things like “Wow, my legs are so disgusting, I should have done this a long time ago. I can’t wait until all this hair is gone.”

It was pretty disconcerting. Especially since I’d had no particular negative feelings about my legs five minute earlier.

I only shave my legs for other people, and for me that’s the less body-hating option. Ignoring what other people want and only shaving or not shaving for myself sounds great, and in a perfect world I would enjoy both hair and occasional hairlessness without any difficult feelings. But in the world as it is, for me, if I shave my legs without an external reason, the internal reason society has given me jumps up and fills the space, despite how hard I’ve tried to get rid of it.

I just thought of something

There’s a fashion for cute cartoony body-positive art on Tumblr– cute cartoon people with big natural hair, cute fat cartoon people, cute cartoon people in wheelchairs, cute cartoon girls with body hair, etc.

But it just occurred to me…

When people draw “if you prefer not to shave, you are still cute and awesome!” they draw stubble. Little short straight lines. That to me indicate not “I don’t shave my legs” but “I last shaved my legs a week ago”.

That’s not what my legs look like. And I’m not even actually committed to not shaving them. Not even a little bit. I shave my legs every single time I show them to the general public, I just don’t do that very often. (Especially not in the winter.)

My legs look like hobbit legs. My calves are just as hairy as those of most of the men I know (and hairier than some.)

And I’m by far, by far not the hairiest cis woman around, I know I’m not.

So this makes me think that the people who draw those things do shave their own legs, on a regular basis. They base their idea of “if you don’t shave” on what they consider hairy on themselves, which is going more than a few days or weeks without shaving.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. I know people who are scared to be even that hairy. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with celebrating that.

It’s just disappointing to me that even things that are specifically about portraying body hair as positive aren’t actually something I can identify with.

Below is what my legs looked like after doing No-Shave November the year before last. They’re significantly hairier right now.