A Tale of Adolescence

I’m very much pro-choice when it comes to how a woman takes care of her hair situation – your body, your way. Women are drowning in a plethora of unwanted advice about our personal grooming and I myself fell victim to this at a very young age. As I’ve grown up it’s become clear to me that unravelling the social constructs dictating how we are ‘supposed’ to look is imperative to understanding why we should tell those same constructs to shove it.

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In high school (some 15 years ago) my friends and I were waxing and hair removing and shaving and tweezing every inch of our bodies because the magazines we read told us that’s what we were supposed to do. Literally. When doing some research to find old Dolly Magazine articles to prove my point, I was lucky enough to come across this one via Pedestrian TV (https://www.pedestrian.tv/entertainment/dolly-magazines-00s-articles-features/) – looks like I’m not the only one who thought it was WACK that we were being taught to shave, epilate and pluck our pubes as well as our facial hair!! Fuzz aside, the articles are filled with all the things we should do to nab the right guy accompanied by models showing us that the beauty required to bag them is completely unattainable.

The advice reads like this: Get rid of any facial hair – it’s not a good look, be curvy and skinny at the same time, wear perfume that the specific kind of man you want would like, pubic hair should be removed at all cost, meet the boy of your dreams at the skate ramp or fish and chip shop, don’t be the girl who parties too hard because guys will think you’re “a bit slutty”, ensure you’re the perfect mix between a sporty chick and a girlie girl, nail femininity and elegance without coming across as ‘too cool’ which can be annoying, if you really like a guy then maybe try to help him with his homework to get him to notice you, don’t dress too ‘skanky’, don’t use too much tongue when you kiss, don’t kiss 5 dudes in one night….

HELP HIM WITH HIS HOMEWORK TO GET HIM TO NOTICE YOU? Lol. I’ve got an idea, how about he does his own fucking homework?! I’m sorry Johnny but I can’t help you with your English essay today because I haven’t quite nailed tampon insertion so I’m really busy trying to make sure my period doesn’t leak all over my uniform again. I’ve also got a tonne of waxing to do because apparently the idea of hair on my vagina makes you (and everyone else) think I’m totally gross. Don’t worry about your pubes though. Let your ball-fro run wild! I’ll just be over here bleaching my facial hair, covering up my acne with cheap foundation, burning my labia with wax that I’ve left in the microwave for too long and tweezing my eyebrows to within an inch of their lives because it’s the early 2000’s and I don’t know any better. Despite all of this, I’ll still manage to get my homework done whilst enduring the pain of my uterus lining making a very heavy escape from a now hairless vagina.  

Now I know the tone of my writing might make you think otherwise but I want to make it clear that I don’t hate men and I certainly don’t hate Johnny – he wasn’t the one handing out the advice we adolescents so willingly paid for (plus, you know, he’s not actually real). I love men and understand that they have their own set of imposed standards to ‘live up to’. However, back in my high school days the internet wasn’t the place where those standards were found. It was a place for MSN chat and plagiarising assignments. We were taught how to look, how to dress and how to kiss from Hollywood movies that we watched on DVD or magazines that you had to buy at the local newsagent. Home and Away and the OC dictated more of our lives than MySpace ever could. We texted each other via Nokia 3310’s and called the home phone when our credit ran out. We went to shopping centres to buy our clothes and our idea of a good time was meeting up in the city just to stand around all day.

The adolescents of today grow up in a completely different world. The internet is a vortex of photoshopped images, opinions, advertisements and influencers telling them (and the rest of us) how to look and what to feel. We already think we’re too hairy or too fat or too much but have the added stress of 24 hour a day reminders on our phones. “Why don’t you just turn them off?”, some might say. Well yeah, I guess we could. Or maybe we could take a break from our scroll hole. Sounds easy enough but if you’ve seen The Social Dilemma you’ll know it is far more complicated than that. Particularly if you’re young, impressionable and easily influenced. We now have access to this information 24 hours a day. The algorithms know just what to do to peak our interest and technology takes away any of the effort required to access content. We don’t need to buy the magazines telling us how to look because there are millions of people on Instagram who do that for us. Cat Stevens was right. It really is a wild fucking world.

Unfortunately I don’t have the answers as to how we fix any of this this but if you’re sitting on the other side of the screen nodding your head, perhaps it’s time to ask yourself a very important question: What is your feed feeding you? Alternatively, you might ask: do I even want to wax my vagina anymore? If the answer is no, great! If the answer is yes, still great!

For the record I’m now in my 30’s and am yet to pick up the boy of my dreams at the skate ramp…or the fish and chip shop…or a bar…or a club…or a café…or work…or anywhere else. I've partied in all of the ways – too soft and too hard and have found neither of those things to declare me “a bit slutty” or a bit anything else for that matter. I was always more of a tomboy than the feminine type growing up and if ever I’ve used “too much tongue” I haven’t had any complaints thus far. The pleasure of macking on 5 guys in one night has yet to be mine but rest assured my intelligent stretch marked ass will not be doing Johnny’s homework just to mack on 1.

With love from my landing strip to yours,

J

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