I DISCOVERED my eight-year-old daughter frantically rummaging through a drawer as I walked into the bathroom one day last summer. She tearfully confessed it was in an attempt to find a razor. Shocked and upset, I gently asked why.
It all poured out, as she reluctantly revealed a classmate had called her a “monkey” because of her “hairy legs”. Despite my daughter knowing the child was a bully , she had taken the comments to heart and told me she hated her legs and did not want hair on them. She wanted to be “normal”.
I immediately came out with all the cliches you would expect — how she is beautiful as she is and should be proud of her body. I explained how everyone is different, that there is no “normal”, apart from the fact human beings are all different. I told her this bully was just perpetuating an ignorant stereotype passed on to the girl, most likely, by her mum or older sister.
That they would have been brainwashed by impossibly perfect images on TV, in magazines and on the internet. “Everyone grows hair and it’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I reassured her. But she then asked: “Why do you not have hairy legs, Mummy?” It was a question that I could not answer.
From the age of around 11 or 12 I have had hairless legs . I have spent more nights than I can remember plucking strays, ripping off wax strips or, ouch, running an epilator over my thighs, one of the most novel forms of self-harm in the name of beauty. I mindlessly accepted spending hou.
