Thread: Why do we shave?

Years ago, one of my favorite kink bloggers (who has since found domestic bliss and shut down her blog) posed the question: why do women shave? Is it for comfort? Is it to make us feel sexy? Is it to please/arouse our partners? Is it because society says we should? Is it to suit the clothing we wear?

I shave for all of those reasons, but I think fashion and comfort top the list. I don't feel right wearing shorts or stockings if I haven't shaved my legs. If I have armpit stubble, I have to wear a top with sleeves. Before I started shaving my girly bits, I hated that coarse-fuzzy feeling... and getting hair caught in elastic. To me, there's something inherently feminine in being smooth and hairless in certain areas.

What do you think, ladies? How do you feel about body hair and its removal?

Lilith, I see you are up early today! Good grooming is always in fashion. Women appreciate it and men don't do enough of it. I, myself, want a woman to smell fresh and clean and have a smile. Shaving is secondary. But hey, thats just me.

I would definitely say vanity is up there on the list. I don't feel sexy and pretty with a toupe under my arms while wearing something sleeveless. However, that's all society based. If we had never started, we wouldn't think anything of it. I'd also go with hygiene on the list. Excess hair traps moisture and oils that create odors that aren't really comparable to a nice body spray. Gotta keep that attractive clean, fresh smell so I don't smell like I just came out of the gym. The girl parts? I'm going to have to go with sex and hygiene there, but I won't elaborate.

Sometimes I just want to move to a mountain top where I don't see anyone and stop shaving completely... but that's not going to happen because I like the warm weather and the beach too much. When I lived in the cold climate, I'd let my legs go for about 3 months in the winter just to see what it was like. It was hairy... not sleek, didn't feel sexy, so it had to go.

All this talk... I'm going for a walk on the beach now!

Well... good thing there's this ladies bit of the forum. We gentlemen, in a gentlemanly fashion just might learn something, right? There's not much to learn concerning the face shaving bit, but on other topics. Ok... didn't come out right... sorry.

Hair removal is a thing of fashion, mostly, a social imposition of what is right and wrong. And we tend to go with the flow. For instance, before WWI facial hair was in style; in the 70's, if you didn't have facial hair of some kind, you were still in the 50's...

But for us gentlemen of all nations and creeds, knowing hair-stuff on our faces is ok, it's part of the business. But concerning ladies... that's different. And this just might be the right place to ask the questions we are affraid to ask...

So... I was talking about this same subject (the cultural relationship between women and hair that's not on their heads...) with my girlfriend and one question appeared: today women, by all methods know to (Wo)Men remove hair from their legs, armpits and other much debated areas; but... how was it in the 19th century and even in earlier periods, for instance?! What did Queen Victoria's legs looked like? And how about Martha Washington's armpits?

Just a thought...

Originally Posted by fpessanha

So... I was talking about this same subject (the cultural relationship between women and hair that's not on their heads...) with my girlfriend and one question appeared: today women, by all methods know to (Wo)Men remove hair from their legs, armpits and other much debated areas; but... how was it in the 19th century and even in earlier periods, for instance?! What did Queen Victoria's legs looked like? And how about Martha Washington's armpits?

I have a feeling that, because fashion didn't permit bare legs or upper arms in public, they wouldn't have shaved.

I just spent a few minutes on Google and found this:

http://www.quikshave.com/timeline.htm

It says that as early as 4000 B.C. women were making depilatory creams to remove their body hair. By 400 B.C. Roman, Indian, and Greek women were shaving, plucking, using creams, and/or burning off their leg hair.

From quikshave.com:

"Another marketing campaign around [World War I] convinced the women of North America to shave their body hair. Notably, women in the other parts of the world do not engage on masse in this ritual. Even in French Canada, the habit is not largely undertaken.


"It all began with the May, 1915 edition of Harper's Bazaar magazine that featured a model sporting the latest fashion. She wore a sleeveless evening gown that exposed, for the first time in fashion, her bare shoulders, and her armpits.


"A young marketing executive with the Wilkinson Sword Company, who also made razor blades for men, designed a campaign to convince the women of North America that:
(a) Underarm hair was unhygienic (b) It was unfeminine.


"In two years, the sales of razor blades doubled as our grandmothers and great grandmothers made themselves conform to this socially constructed gender stereotype. This norm for North American women has been reinforced by several generations of daughters who role-modeled their mothers."

There you have it. We've been removing hair for thousands of years.

Hey Lilith! I read your profile, it seems we have alot in common. I Love chainmail and also live in CT and I always wanted to be a welder. I wanna be you when I grow up!

About the shaving tho, mostly I feel cleaner when I shave. Although its nice to get all scruffy sometimes haha.

Hi Lilith!

Thanks for the information... It was just a little question I had to make.

Lilith points out something I have been researching lately.

"Another marketing campaign around [World War I] convinced the women of North America to shave their body hair. Notably, women in the other parts of the world do not engage on masse in this ritual. Even in French Canada, the habit is not largely undertaken.


"It all began with the May, 1915 edition of Harper's Bazaar magazine that featured a model sporting the latest fashion. She wore a sleeveless evening gown that exposed, for the first time in fashion, her bare shoulders, and her armpits.


"A young marketing executive with the Wilkinson Sword Company, who also made razor blades for men, designed a campaign to convince the women of North America that:
(a) Underarm hair was unhygienic (b) It was unfeminine.


"In two years, the sales of razor blades doubled as our grandmothers and great grandmothers made themselves conform to this socially constructed gender stereotype. This norm for North American women has been reinforced by several generations of daughters who role-modeled their mothers."

The invention of the disposable razor blade was a major coup in marketing. What was invented was a way to sell a mass produced, inherently consumable product with a high profit margin.

So....I suppose what you get is alot of people that ride the new technology train and find new ways to sell it....like this one.



An interesting design that holds the blade in a bent position to accommodate the contour of the under arm.

There was one called Schermack.... this one was a round safety razor with a round blade.

I found one here with pics... but its eBay... couldnt find any on the net.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Schermack-Round-...QQcmdZViewItem

personally...I think that idea was rather brilliant..... but I imagine the blade price was the coffin nail.

I think that women shaving en masse is result of provided technology and ease....and a little help with marketing and advertising driving it home.

Cents meant dollars..... and stamped blades fit the bill....

This really applies to pubic shaving, but I found it interesting and maybe you will too.


The earliest shaving devices discovered are flint blades possibly dating as far back as 30,000 BC. Not only does flint provide an extremely sharp edge for shaving, it also becomes dull rather quickly, making these the first disposable razors. Did prehistoric women shave their pubic hair? We'll never know, but you can be sure some prehistoric males were urging them to do so.

From 4,000 to 3,000 BC, women removed body hair with home-grown depilatory creams made from a bizarre combination of such questionable ingredients as arsenic and quicklime. Copper razors appeared around 3,000 BC in both India and Egypt. The most elaborate razors of prehistory appear around 1,500 to 1,200 BC in Scandinavia where Danish Mound Graves yielded razors in leather carrying cases with etched bronze blades and carved handles. No doubt the Vikings liked their women shaved.

The practice of pubic hair removal goes back to the dawn of civilization. To early Egyptians, a smooth and hairless body was the standard of beauty. The practice first gained total acceptance when it was practiced by the wife of Farao; afterwards, every upper class Egyptian woman made sure there was not a single hair on her body with the exception of her head. They used primitive depilatory creams and a form of waxing that utilized a sticky emulsion of oil and honey - the forerunner of what we now call "sugaring."

The Greeks adopted the ideal of smoothness, capturing it over and again in their sculpture. Ancient Greek sculptures of women are universally clean-shaven, whereas the sculptures of men have pubic hair. The Greeks believed that a smooth, hairless body exemplified youth and beauty. In "Sexual Life in Ancient Greece" by Hans Licht, the author describes how the Greeks disapproved of women with pubic hair and considered it ugly. It was considered a sign of class distinction and subsequently all upper-class women and practiced pubic hair removal, as did many women of the lesser classes.

The Romans also disapproved of pubic hair; young girls began removing it as soon as the first hair appeared. They used tweezers, which they called the "volsella" as well as a kind of depilatory cream called the "philotrum" or "dropax" which was sometimes made with bryonia and foreshadowed modern depilatory creams. Waxing with resin or pitch was also used to depilate. Furthermore, the practice of pubic hair removal wasn't unique to Rome - it was practiced in even the most remote parts of the empire. Julius Caesar (101-44 BC) writes that, "The Britons shave every part of their body except their head and upper lip." It is reported that Poppaea, wife of the Roman Emperor Nero, used depilatory creams to remove unwanted body hair daily. At that time, the latest available creams included some wonderful ingredients like resin, pitch, white vine or ivy gum extract, ass' fat, she-goat's gall, bat's blood, and powdered viper.

Islam also has a long history of pubic hair removal. According to the Sunnah, every adult Muslim, as a part of keeping his/her body clean, should remove the hair from his pubic area and armpits. The hair may be removed through any method that one feels comfortable with. The spread of Islam brought the practice to India, Northern Africa, and the other vast areas of the world under Muslim influence. In 1520, Bassano de Zra wrote that "The Turks consider it sinful when a woman lets the hair on her private parts grow. As soon as a woman feels the hair is growing, she hurries to the public bath to have it removed or remove it herself." The public baths all had special rooms where the ladies could get rid of their hair. Even today, the hamams (public baths) still have special rooms for the ladies to depilate.

The returning Crusaders (1096-1270) brought the practice back to Europe. In many European castles built between 1200 and 1600 AD, a special room was constructed where the ladies of the court could gather to shave. During the Renaissance, the practice of pubic hair removal flourished. Sixteenth and seventeenth century artists portrayed women as having little or no pubic hair. The work of Rubens, whose models typified the ideal in feminine beauty at the time, most dramatically reveals this.

The habit of depilating started to wane (publicly at least) during the reign of Catherine de Medici (1547-1589) who was then queen of France and something of a religious zealot. She forbade her ladies in waiting to remove their pubic hair any longer; however, it was still widely practiced until the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) and the smothering prudishness of the "Victorian Era." Even then, it remained popular in private, especially for the ruling classes. There is some photographic evidence ranging from the time of the Civil War to the "blue movies" of the 1920s and 30s that shows that the amount of pubic hair during that time varied from full to none. Even though repressed by the outward morality of the era, it appears pubic shaving never disappeared but instead more appropriately went underground.

The modern industrial age saw the rise of such razor manufacturers as Gillette, Schick, and Wilkinson. With the availability of cheap, quality razors, the practice of women removing their body hair became more publicly acceptable again. When women's clothing styles began showing bare arms and legs in the 1920s, leg and underarm shaving followed immediately. In fact, armpit shaving was not common until May of 1915 when Harper's Bazaar magazine featured a model in a sleeveless evening gown that showed her bare shoulders and hairless armpits. Shortly thereafter, Wilkinson Sword launched an advertising campaign to convince women that underarm hair was "unhygienic and unfeminine." Sales of razors doubled in two years, perhaps the result of pent-up demand.

With leg and underarm shaving now publicly accepted, it wasn't too long until pubic shaving was once again more widely, and publicly, practiced. With the advent of the bikini, there became a need to remove "bikini line" hair. From the bikini line to complete hairlessness was not a large step, and pubic shaving began to be widely practiced again in the 1960s. A quick scan of Playboy and Penthouse magazines over the last few decades will show that full bushes in the early 1970s trended towards the little or no hair that is common today.

See that? I learn all kinds of things when I peruse random threads...

Thank you, ladies, for the informative research.