Not making a baal ki khaal of it – but for the amount of money we, as women, spend on waxing per year, we could enjoy a nice, beachy trip to Thailand. Instead of vacaying and sipping martinis in Bangkok, we are left, instead, arguing with our parlour wali aunty on how we can do without their fancy (read: utterly useless) chocolate wax!
While speaking to a friend who was cribbing about her monthly mowing expenses, I became interested in the huge difference between how much men have to spend on their monthly grooming and how much women do – and what I found is an absolute joke! Men spend substantially less on their hair grooming, despite having more hair!
This, while we are still earning less than them!
For years, we’ve gotten our bodies waxed, because society expects nothing less than for us to be hairless hotties. But this gendered shame of hair is actually a deep sexist and capitalist conspiracy, which was started by advertisements who began using shame as a tool to get women to shave their bodies.
Since then, body hair removal companies have gone on to make billions off of us, their success fuelled by their success in branding body hair as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘deeply shameful’ for a woman to possess.
The attempt here is to show how even such an inane thing as a strand of body hair has a sexist story to it. And how it’s time to move away from feeling bad about ourselves, and to call bullshit on this fuzz phobia (and sexism) straight away.
Editor: Puneet Bhatia
Camera: Abhay Sharma
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