Apparently If You Are A Real Woman, You Are Not Free To Make A Choice

I was perusing one of my favorite blogs, Already Pretty, and happened upon one of Sal’s newest bloggers, coincidentally name Nadine.  She wrote a great post about pubic hair preferences.  It is an interesting read.  Within the post she states that initially she was reluctant to remove her pubic hair, but for her own reasons she decided to get a Brazilian.  After doing so, she discovered that she liked it.  She ends her post by stating”  If I could wave my magic wand and make this The World According To Nadine, personal grooming would not be motivated by shame, mandated by popularity, or seen as an act of definace. It would mostly be about our personal tastes and what works for each individual person. ”

I thought that her post was well thought out, and well written, and she expressed her opinion on the topic quite well.  I saw nothing wrong in her post.  I read about a woman that interacted with her world, questioned it, rebuffed it, rethought it, and then discovered she actually liked it.  Where things took a strange turn was in the comments.

There are currently 77 comments on the post.  Some of the comments are in support of removing pubic hair and some of the comments are not.  Which, as I see it, is not the point of the post.  I think the point of the post is that, if you like your pubic hair, keep it, and if you don’t like it, remove it, but most of all, do what you want to with your pubic hair.  You are free to make the choice to remove it or keep it.

But many of the comments are on a different topic entirely.  It is as if they are responding to a post titled “Men oppress us by making us hate our bodies and forcing us to do unnatural things to it so that we more closely resemble adolescent girls.”

One lady commented “No matter how many times we say “it’s a woman’s choice!” it is not a choice made without societal pressure…so not really a choice as much as a compromise we make with the patriarchy.” This comment pretty much sums up my concerns about this.

Apparently, according to some women, women are not free to make a choice about removing their own pubic hair, because some men prefer for women to remove it.  I think it is this type of mentality that harms women far more than anything that men do.

Women telling other women that they are not free to make a choice based on their own personal preferences is just wrong.  I am of the thought that each of us should be free to do what we want to do to our own bodies.  If you do something to yourself just because a man tells you to, that is not right, but if you don’t do something just because a women tells you not to, isn’t that the exact same oppression?

Who owns you?  Prove it.  Do to you what you want, because you want, not because of what someone else wants.

Love you.