You Should Grow Your (Body) Hair
Don't let pedophiles dictate your beauty standards
I’m not in the habit of telling women what to do with their bodies. But if you’ve been feeling a vague, sick helplessness in the face of the astonishing fuckery surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the rhetoric of Nick Fuentes, and the steady legal erosion of bodily autonomy, growing your body hair is one small, immediate way to make the personal political.
The few straight friends I have who don’t shave ooze sexuality — not because of their body hair but because they’re genuinely comfortable in their own skin. Ask almost any man: confidence is hot. But this piece has nothing to do with “being beautiful regardless” or attracting men.
It’s about not giving a f—k whether you’re beautiful in the eyes of a culture that increasingly prefers women to resemble girls.
Smooth legs.
Hairless vulvas.
No wrinkles.
No pores.
No smell.
No evidence of adulthood.
The ideal woman, in other words, is post-pubescent enough to be sexualized but pre-pubescent enough to be non-threatening—sexually visible, socially powerless.
We treat shaving as neutral grooming, like brushing your teeth, instead of what it actually is: a historically recent beauty demand that requires women to erase the secondary sex characteristics that signal maturity.
So why do we bother with the rituals of shaving/waxing/threading/epilating/tweezing/sugaring/lasering/IPLing?
Men posting on Reddit will argue that men are biologically programmed to like shaved women because hairlessness exaggerates the sexual dimorphic trait that already exists (women having less hair). But I can assure you, men and women have been hooking up for millennia.
The slide into the childlike aesthetic
For most of human history, women were not expected to be hairless. That changed in the early 20th century when sleeveless dresses and rising hemlines exposed women’s skin for the first time and razor companies discovered an untapped market. In that moment, body hair shifted from normal biology to social failure. A “problem” was invented and a billion dollar solution followed.
Across the decades, the visible signs of adulthood were increasingly shunned. Mid-century media fused sexuality with teenage aesthetics.1 Think bobby socks, cheerleaders, schoolgirl imagery. Late-20th-century porn standardized the hairless vulva, removing one of the clearest biological markers of sexual maturity, and Sex and the City sealed the deal with the infamous Brazilian wax episode in 2000. Here we are in the 2000s and anti-aging culture is all the rage: expensive skincare for babies, serums for children, botox in your twenties, and a body defined by the absence of time.
And “barely legal” became a genre.
We’re told men prefer youth because it signals fertility. But as Jameela Jamil notes, “Nothing says ‘fertility’ like a bald vagina that looks like it has not yet reached puberty.”
Centuries of art and literature depicting male desire show women with voluptuous figures, textured skin, and yes — hairy legs, pits, and pubes. They looked like adults. Childlike was not the aesthetic.
The more autonomy women gain, the more demands there are on their bodies. A culture uneasy with women’s power prefers women who appear not to have it. So we socialize men to fetishize vulnerability, power imbalance, and naivety, and the visual shorthand becomes smaller, smoother, shinier bodies.
Which brings us to Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein is the patriarchy’s logical conclusion
We do ourselves a disservice when we call Epstein and his ilk monsters or a bizarre glitch of elite decadence. They are the logical conclusion of systems built to protect powerful white men; an extreme concentration of ordinary permissions. The same culture that tolerates sexism and racism, teaches women not to “make a scene”, doubts girls’ experiences, hands down little punishment for sexual violence, and protects men’s reputations at the expense of women’s safety is what allowed Epstein to operate. Wealth just let him industrialize it.
His network didn’t invent entitlement; it scaled a pattern that exists everywhere from locker rooms to campuses to courts: access to women as status, male bonding built on female violation, institutions choosing stability over truth, and disbelieving women functioning as social lubricant. Women may express shock. But we are not surprised. It is the white noise of our lives.
We are not surprised it took millions of pages of evidence for people to start believing survivors. We are not surprised by how many powerful men, and the institutions meant to safeguard us, helped themselves to the glee of dehumanization or stood by and protected themselves instead.
But we are hopeful. Hopeful that maybe people will finally connect the dots to abuses common at every level of society: incest, domestic violence, child marriage, sex tourism, violent porn, racism that fuels the idealization of white femininity. And also the ambient violations we’re trained to dismiss: being followed, being pressured after saying no, images shared without consent, teachers’ “special attention”, choking normalized during sex, policing girls’ bodies, deepfakes, workplace retaliation, and the constant lesson that discomfort is the price of being female.
These are treated as separate categories. They aren’t. They are variations on the same lesson about whose words, wants, and needs matter.
Epstein is what patriarchy looks like with unlimited resources and no oversight: a world where consent can be negotiated away, witnesses can be exhausted and silenced, and adulthood in women becomes inconvenient because autonomy disrupts access.
Beauty standards live downstream of that logic.
Why grow your body hair
Epstein’s assistant wrote to him: “I ordered sweet young coconuts from Thailand for you and they just arrived…just so you don’t have to drink juices from old hairy things.”
You don’t need every individual man to be a predator for the aesthetic to drift toward pedophilic cues. You only need a culture that rewards it—and women to internalize the reward structure.
We say we shave because it feels good. Because it feels cleaner. Because we like the look. And those things can be true. But preferences don’t grow in a vacuum. They grow in systems of approval. Turning body hair from a fashion issue into a morality issue is just another way of controlling women’s bodies.
The question isn’t: Do I enjoy being hairless?
The question is: Why is this the baseline of femininity at all?
Growing your body hair is not morally superior.
It won’t make you a better feminist.
It won’t fix legislation.
It won’t dismantle patriarchy.
But it does something psychologically clarifying: it exposes how much femininity operates as pre-emptive compliance.
The first time you go out with visible leg hair, you feel watched. And if nobody is actually watching, even better—because you understand more deeply the invisible lines you’ve been staying inside your entire life.
Control over women has always depended less on force than on self-surveillance. A woman worrying about stubble is a woman not worrying about power. A woman evaluating her desirability is easier to govern than a woman evaluating the legitimacy of authority.
Hairlessness isn’t oppression.
But compulsory hairlessness is rehearsal for it.
So no — you don’t have to stop shaving. But it’s worth asking whether your grooming habits are self-expression or cultural fluency; comfort or camouflage.
In a moment when women’s autonomy is openly contested, there is something quietly radical about looking unmistakably adult.
I stopped shaving a few months ago. Not because I suddenly love how it looks — it’s hard to love something you’ve been trained to see as gross or wrong. But it’s growing on me (so to speak). Unlike when I moved to the Midwest as a nubile twenty-something trying on hairy legs, I haven’t gotten any biting comments or side-eyes. And there are some days at the gym or while dancing in a sleeveless shirt that I feel like a badass—which is to say like a woman tired of playing the pick-me patriarchy game and knowing I’m doing one small thing to help burn down the system.
Join me.
Mid-century media began centering images of youthful femininity in ways that fused sexuality with teenage aesthetics — a trend scholars associate with the rise of the “Lolita effect” and the growing cultural focus on teens as objects of desire in advertising and film.
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