There is a structural constraint that affects nearly 50% of my friends and that I directly observe; it happens everywhere in Britain and all the time. The social structure of Britain today makes nearly one half of her population do something that one cannot explain otherwise. They do it with blades, with wax or with laser: they remove their leg hair. This removal of female leg hair is the norm, around 90% of women of child bearing age do it (Toerient & Wilkinson 2003, p. 333).
To just explain this with some cover-up sentence, e.g. ‘Certain structural constraints make women do this’ which, I fear, is sometimes done in the social sciences would be insufficient. The idea of structure remains one of the most enlightening ideas one can gain from sociology. But it only shows the direction, it should not be taken as an answer. Even if my remarks that are to follow may be proven wrong and ignorant, this is exactly their merit. They can be proven wrong.
In regard to figure 5.1, I made the fact that women do have to shave their legs my starting point and always asked myself, why? I did this obviously not with the aim to link shaved legs with the industrial revolution but my humble reasoning actually led me there.
There are causes I put into figure 5.1 that one can heavily doubt. For the two with asterisks (*), which are of a quite Feminist nature, please consider the following ideal situation. If women and men were to choose again, each for themselves, to decide: What shall be considered beautiful? Is it not true that each would choose a beauty norm close to their biology? And when regarding how strongly women have to deviate from their biology to be considered beautiful, is it then wrong to conclude that rather than being chosen their beauty norm was and is being imposed? Or put another way, what is the likelihood that women would invent and propagate the burden of hair removal themselves? It seems to me that rather it was the men who had it their way by choosing what they saw as beautiful women – thus men chose women’s beauty norm.
I do agree that this argument is working the other way around though, but only since recently. Women choose clean, tidy and, funnily enough, too hairless men causing men to, voilà, shave their chests and armpits. This can be taken as a sign that women have gained power. And it is interesting to contemplate whether this gain in power rather than increasing women’s freedom has decreased men’s freedom. For if this proved true, it could be due to the market nature of the marriage market. That is, a gain in power means an increase in the ability to choose a partner but not an increase in the likelihood of being chosen. So the relation of partner selection between women and men would be mutually suppressive and the power women gained would be ‘power over somebody’ rather than power as capability.
I should mention that it is not my intention to victimise women – a danger I think every male feminist faces. The argument that women might well choose to shave their legs to look ‘beautiful’ is well covered in Toerien & Wilkinson (2003, p. 338). Very shortly: If one holds that ‘beautiful’ is socially constructed within a dominant discourse, then, according to Michel Foucault, the power relationship is already embedded in this discourse (Burr 2003, p. 69).
This entry has been informed by much of my previous reading on structure (e.g. Bilton 2002, Feldmann 2006) and Feminism (e.g. Harding 2002, Sprague 1997, Wharton 1991). Though writing about leg hair was a genuine idea, a lot of inspiration was later gained from Toerien & Wilkinson (2003).
References
Bilton, T. (2002) Introductory sociology, 4th ed., Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Feldmann, K. (2006) Soziologie kompakt : eine Einführung, 4. ed., Wiesbaden: VS, Verl. für Sozialwissenschaften.
Harding, S. (2002) ‘Must the Advance of Science Advance Global Inequality?’ in International Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 87-105
Sprague, J. (1997) ‘Holy Men and Big Guns: The Can[n]on in Social Theory’ in Gender and Society, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Feb. 1997), pp. 88-107.
Toerien, M. & Wilkinson, S. (2003) ‘Gender and Body Hair: Constructing the Feminine Woman’ in Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2003), pp. 333 – 344.
Wharton, A. S. (1991) ‘Structure and Agency in Socialist-Feminist Theory’ in Gender and Society, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Sep. 1991), pp. 373-389.