Women Learn From An Early Age That We Look

“To be hairy ... is to risk a range of negative connotations, which serve as sanctions against non-conformity to the hairlessness norm. This norm may, therefore, be understood as a form of social control" (454). Fahs was interested to discover what happened when women who had never second guessed this normalized practice of shaving stopped doing so - essentially allowing themselves to exist in an entirely natural state for the first time in many years. Her findings were varied, but not entirely surprising. First, her bisexual and lesbian students “confronted issues of sexual identity disclosure and direct homophobia and heterosexism, often prompting them to feel outed in public” (458). Because of their hairer limbs, women were seen as definitively more masculine, and therefore many spectators automatically assumed that the women were gay (gay women are incorrectly seen as women who lack femininity). In fact, some of her straight students were asked if they had “turned lesbian” (459). Other students faced criticism from family members - particularly mothers and brothers. Students wrote things like: “[My brother] said that any woman with body hair certainly