Culture, colonisation and the short and curlies

Western women have been pushed around by powerful marketing for around a century to maintain the hairless beauty standard, but that's not the same for all ethnicities. In episode four Charlotte Cook looks at the cultural and religious aspects of body hair.

By Charlotte Cook

Society for hundreds of years has told women to be hairless.

Until recently women are rarely ever shown with any hairy bits anywhere in the media. I certainly never braved my pits in public. (Until now).

But slowly people and brands have started to challenge what is seen as 'normal' - although we still have a long way to go.

As a pakeha woman, the westernised ideal of hairlessness has been the standard I've tried so hard to meet.

Billions of dollars every year is spent telling me how I should look, behave and dress.

But the women of New Zealand are all kinds of body shapes, types and have various amounts of hair.

So I got off my hairy butt and went out to find some other women to tell me how - their ethnicities, cultures, upbringings and religions impacted their decisions around body hair.

Firstly I heard from Ana Mcallister, she's a artist writer, Instagram influencer and a body positive wahine Māori [e-mail]

There has been a lot of mahi around wahine and the decolonisation of their periods. Ana said there isn't the same focus on this in terms of body-hair but it's definitely on the rise around beauty standards as a whole.

She said there was no shame or whakama around body hair until colonisation came on the scene.

As part of her decolinisation and acceptance of bodies she chooses to grow it all out and make it sexy.

"Disrupting that by doing things that they would consider gross or unfeminine or not sexually attractive is a way to disrupt that whole system of how we've been represented for 251 years..."

Talking to her, about how she embraces her body, made me feel instantly better and more sexy in mine.

But what we choose to do is not always about beauty, for some people it is religious.

Anjum Rahman is someone we hear from on topics about hate speech, terrorism or the Christchurch Mosque attacks.

But in this instance, I got to hear her most wonderful giggle as we talked about what her body hair means to her and her faith.

Muslim men and women are both required to remove their armpit and public hair. It's not gendered, it's just about keeping clean and following the religion.

"As long as you can't wrap it around your finger it's okay..."

It's not scientific, but it's the measurement some people go by to know when they need a trim... …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details