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(Episode previously named “Hair”)
In this episode, Dani discusses the stigmas and societal pressures around hair.
For links & recommendations, view full episode notes.
Dani is honest and refreshing in her takes on the world and society. Listen as she explains how she’s come to understand the world through kindness, both towards ourselves and everything else.
[0:00] Hey everybody! I’m here today doing something different than the previous two episodes. I listened to both of them and was, you know, kinda struggling on it not sounding exactly how I wanted it to. I listened to people’s feedback for me and this episode I’m doing something different. I have literally no outline for this, not a huge plan. Just ideas that I wanna talk about and episodes of podcasts and YouTube videos I want to discuss. Let’s just get into it. Today I’m going to talk about body hair and head hair and my experience with that, you know, kind of currently and in the past as well. I’m also going to talk about two episodes from Bitchy Shitshow, both in podcast form and a YouTube video [podcast and YouTube channel no longer available] that ex- in- inspired my want to talk about this experience with my hair. So, without further ado, welcome to this episode of Understanding Kindness.
[1:17] Theme.
[1:25] Well, let me get into it a bit. I’m -so a little background: I’ve thought about this episode topic a while ago. I- It looks like I wrote these notes on July 26th and 28th. Today’s August 6th, the day that I’m recording so, I don’t even know how long that’s been. A little over a week, a week and a half or so. I watched and listened to these episodes from Bitchy Shitshow and kind of at the same time was -well they actually inspired this decision that I made in my life that I want to do moving forward. And…don’t remember what my next thought was gonna be. Hmmm, anyway, I’ll go ahead and just start on- oh! so I have wanted to talk about this, think about it, you know, unwrap it in my mind or go process it in my mind or with other People, so that I could have a conversation with you all. One-sided albeit, but a conversation nonetheless where I can work out this experience I’m having in my life, this information and knowledge that I just consumed from Callie and Nic on Bitchy Shitshow. And I wanted it to be raw on the microphone so that this podcast is what I want it to be. Where in the previous two episodes I was still kinda struggling to figure out, just my process really. So that’s kinda why- why you’ll hear a difference in my voice and the structure’s a bit different. I just wanna be as casual here as possible and really talk to you and work out my thoughts and feelings, like I do with those close to me. I wanna do that here with you so that you can all learn from my experiences and, you know, go out and consume this media from these creators because the work they’re doing is phenomenal.
[3:30] Alright well let’s get started here. I want to talk a little bit about my body hair in general and my head hair too, a little separately. But let’s go back way to- way, way, way, way, way back to October 23, 1994, Dani is born and I was a hairy baby. Came out with a full head of black hair and I’m sure, you know, that little baby peach fuzz that’s all over newborns’ bodies; a ton of it, I’m sure. So I came out a hairy person. There’s nothing I could do about that, right? Throughout my adult -or sorry, my childhood, my sister would always nag at me -well not nag at me, but make fun of me, kinda poke fun at me saying I’m a monkey, I have like a hairy back. I’m little, she’s my older sister, we’re siblings, you know, that’s how things go. But that got to me, you know, later I- wel- I- it didn’t get to me really. I mean it was still a laughing point, but obviously I internalized that and “that’s not okay” is the message that is actually portrayed to me as a child through that. Again, my sister was still a child as well, so no judgment on her there.
[4:51] So, my hai- my head hair, this is kinda why I wanna talk about that a little separately. Cause my head hair was always so, so long. You know, I had it down past my butt when I was younger. And famously in my family, when my sister went off to college and came home with her hair cut, I took to the scissors on my own and cut my own hair off cause I wanted to be like my big sister. And my mom was devastated. Since then I’ve always had long hair. I never really liked having short hair throughout middle school and high school. Probably only because I had no idea how to do hair. Again, my sister always did my hair growing up so I never had to learn how to do it myself. As I’ve gotten older, you know, I’ve kind of learned how to just get it out of the way and make it look decent when need be. And still always had really pretty long hair, even in my adult life.
[5:48] And..alright so let’s go to, I think I was tw..twelve? Twelve years old. I was definitely in sixth grade. I may have been eleven. So, eleven or twelve or so. When, for my birthday, my sister got me a razor and some shaving cream. You know, I don’t really remember my legs being hairy at that point in my life. It was more just kind of what you do growing up. So, my sister also knowing that I was a hairy person, I think she was just trying to get ahead of the game before I started getting really hairy, and maybe being made fun of for that. So, that’s what she got me for my birthday and I started shaving at like ele- I think it was for my twelfth birthday. So, I was shaving my legs and probably my armpits once they started getting hair. Pubes weren’t even really, you know, shave-able then and I definitely was not -no one taught me how to do that or anything, so I just, you know, left that alone cause there wasn’t anything to do that for when I was so young.
[7:04] So yeah, I started shaving all my body hair -well not all of it, you know, legs, armpits, later on, pubes. And I continued to do it and continued to hate it always because my hair grows very fast, it’s dark, I’m white so my h- my dark hair you can just see the next day. And it doesn’t stay smooth for long so I’d have to shave every other day when I was shaving regularly. Hated it, all the time. I hated that other People didn’t to have to shave as often because they had light hair with their light skin or even their dark skin. Or they had dark skin and dark hair so you couldn’t see it as well. So, again, when I did it regularly, every other day, hated it. Never wanted to do it. Probably the only reason I was doing it is because that’s just what you do and probably to make other people comfortable because you definitely know that when someone who doesn’t present as male has body hair it makes People uncomfortable. Trust me, I know sometimes. I’ve definitely been in those circumstances.
[8:23] Well, I guess that’ll clue us into what I am practicing now and I’ll kinda go into that. Maybe six months ago or so -well I was playing with it for maybe a year, or year and a half, I stopped shaving my leg hair regularly. Maybe -for a while I was shaving it and then just letting it grow out really long and then shaving it whenever I -I think at that time I was wearing skinny jeans so I did shave it down pretty often because it was just uncomfortable having my leg hair squeeze down onto my legs in skinny jeans. Or maybe it was, yeah, it was the hot pants that I would wear underneath my pants when it got really cold out. That would just really be uncomfortable so I would shave pretty often and then I bought a trimmer and would, you know, let it grow out and then just trim it all the way down. Which, I was -that’s what I was doing for a while until recently where -at the beginning of quarantine my mom and I were, you know, quarantined together and I had not been shaving for a while, but the topic between my mom and I came up on leg hair and I said to her, “oh let’s do a challenge. We won’t shave during this whole quarantine.” And at that time she thought, you know, it would be two months tops and she agreed to it of course and then maybe by the second or third month she was- she had to cave in and shave. She does- she just doesn’t like the feeling of it.
[10:09] And I just haven’t shaved since. In fact, I threw out my razor during it and haven’t used a razor in maybe a y- over a year I’d say. I’ve just been -would trim, use this little trimmer I brought- bought, especially on my armpits because, aside from my legs, my armpits and my pubes would itch terribly. You know, razor burn every time that I would use a razor on them. And, again, that’s part of the reason I hated it so much. My legs were usually fine, but again I had to do that so often that it was still just as annoying.
[10:53] So, you know, I haven’t shaved. I haven’t trimmed my leg hair in a long time. I regularly trim my armpits, and my pubes everyone, but I regularly trim those, my leg hair I don’t, so they’re always hairy. Again, I’m a hairy Person, always have been, probably always will be. And now my leg hair is pretty thick, but I really like it. It’s soft, I don’t worry about it being prickly. It’s funny because I would shave as soon as it was shown, but now it’s just obvious and it’s not normal but it feels so great. {Heavy sigh} So, yes, I haven’t shaved in a while and been loving it. Now my head hair, again, has been long for a long time and I just recently- I was, I don’t know about anyone else, but definitely the thought during quarantine came through my head like, “Oh I could just shave it all off and it’ll grow back by the time quarantine’s over.” I didn’t do that, wasn’t planning on doing it. And I did want to get a trim so, about a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, I got my first hair cut with the woman that does my hair all the time. Hi Liza. Yeah, so I went to her and I was planning on just getting a trim for the dead ends and she always thins my hair out because it’s so thick that it gets really hot and she just kind of takes away a bulk of the hair so that it’s more of a normal volume to it in thickness, and not so hot.
[12:42] The morning of my appointment, I woke up and I thought “I could do an undercut! That way it’ll get rid of a lot of the heat from the back of my head and my neck. And I can pull it up and not worry about those hairs, you know, not getting in my bun or flying everywhere.” Because my hair is in a bun 90% of the time. I just want it off of me and out of the way. And it’s, frankly, probably not great for my scalp. Anyway, I decided to look up undercut pictures, found one I loved, and brought it to Liza that day, and she did that for me. I love it. It looks great. Thank you so much, Liza.
[13:24] Since then I have listened to and watched these two episodes from Bitchy Shitshow. I’ll go first with the one that came out first, which was their YouTube episode on navigating life under capitalism as an anti-capitalist. Bitchy Shitshow is run by two People, Callie (she/her) and Nic (she/they). And they are both anti-capitalist, queer anarchists, {Door squeaking} I guess you can say.
[13:57] -I think Jorge is home. I heard a door squeaking. Jorge?
Jorge: That’s me!
Dani: Hi!
[14:07] Full disclosure: it’s been a couple days since I recorded the previous part of this. Some stuff’s comes- has come up. I’m in the middle of moving right now. Don’t always have a whole chunk of time. And when I’ve figured out how to do everything and it’s working, you know, everything is just scattered right now. So we’re making do with what we have, what we can do. We’re recording the second half now. So I think I wanted to get into the episodes a little bit from Bitchy Shitshow. And if we’re gonna get started there we were going to look at…oh yeah, the YouTube video that they recently did called Navigating Life Under Capitalism as an Anti-Capitalist. So, yes, Nichole and Callie are both anti-capitalist. And I myself am an anti-capitalist. I do not agree with capitalism.
[15:03] I’ll start with this that Nichole said in this episode. They were talking about anti-c- what the work of anti-capitalism is, and they said that the real anti-capitalist work is, “dismantling capitalism from your mind, body, and relationships.” So this video was kind of talking about how do I live in a capitalist society as an anti-capitalist. And they were really just saying that we need to untrain our brains from thinking in this way. I like this as a form of just a- a- looking at changing the way that we think about things. And a little later on Callie talks about freeing our minds and the real work of changing our mindsets and how when we are able to critically think and think for ourselves, that’s when we really have power and can control ourselves and anal- when we’re analyzing things that’s when we’re really in control because we’re truly understanding what’s at work. And I want to also bring up now, the podcast episode {Clicking sound} -Woah. Bitchy Shitshow episode 25 about queer anarchism. This also has a lot to do with body hair and expression. They were both talking about queer as something that is at odds with whatever’s the “norm” or normal and legitimate, the dominant trend or whathaveyou. And there’s nothing in particular in which it necessarily refers. It’s an identity without an essence. So being queer is literally just in the mindset of going against the normal, it’s not one specific thing.
[17:11] That’s pretty- that’s pretty much the core definition of the word. Regardless of what it’s come to mean now. In the episode, they were talking about pushing against these norms that we have and that we just kind of go along with, and pretty much pertaining exactly to what I was saying with shaving my own legs. You know, I was really doing it just because it was what you were supposed to do and to make People comfortable around me because, again, when you see someone come in the room and they are not doing the thing that everyone else is doing, kind of like, you know, that experiment where you stand backwards in the elevator. It makes People uncomfortable because they’re unsure of what’s gonna happen next. Where in reality, just doing something different with your body is no threat to anyone, it’s just expressing h- who we are and what we want to do with our own bodies.
[18:20] What I got out of the podcast episode, what I wrote down in my notes here is, “Be uncomfortable and make others uncomfortable.” When we’re uncomfortable ourselves, it means that we’re challenging something in our mind. And when I was younger, I was really just doing this practice because it’s what you did. And when I started to question it and let my leg hair grow out, it made me uncomfortable to go outside in public because I knew I would get s-, you know, well I thought I would get these looks or a lot of comments about it. And, in fact before going places I would think of scenarios in my head about, “okay if they say this, this is what I’ll say back”, you know, it’s my body, I have the r- I just don’t want to do this anymore. And that’s just as valid a reason as any to do anything so, you know, I would just keep going through these things in my mind, having anxiety about it and being uncomfortable because it’s pushing boundaries and pushing the societal norms. When it’s really just something that my body does which I have no control over and I don’t feel like spending time on getting rid of it for the rest of my life. I like my leg hair even. It’s not even about that. I enjoy my leg hair. {Heavy sigh}
[Omitted from episode] I wanna discuss a little bit about the history of specifically, we’ll talk about women, shaving body hair in general. This was not a common practice up until the earlier 1900s, well actually 1940s. Pretty much, Gillette, the razor company was only marketing, and only able to market, to half of the population: “men”. To shave their beards and they were doing that regularly with these products for a while. And then of course Gillette realized, “Woah! Wait a second, there’s a whole other half of the population that we could be marketing to and taking money from!” So, -doot-doot-doo-doo!- they began marketing to women in this time to shave their armpits because at that time we were saying with the way that women’s clothing was beginning to, I guess, be more revealing, their armpits were exposed, so they said, “Hey, you know, shave that hair off. It’s not womanly”…or whatever they said then. As women, again broad term, but this is who they were marketing to at the time, as their clothes became more- more and more revealing, you can market to shave more and more parts of their body. So literally the only reason that People shave their armpits and their legs today, is because back then it was a marketing strategy to get their monies. You’re- you’re wasting your money on something that is unnecessary. Especially disposable razors. You wanna talk about the environmental impact of disposable razors? It’s absurd. (1) they’re made of plastic which has harmful chemicals, that when we touch, seep into our body. Everything that we use gets into our body, anything we consume. Anything that that has touched is now in our body as well. Plastic is just horrible and a whole ‘nother topic.
However, the dis- the literal disposal of these one-, two-, three-use items (1) causes you to continuously, throughout your lifetime, spend money on these products that you’re just using and then throwing away. Which we know there are razors that People buy once and never buy again. So, consider doing that. There are razors out there. I know EarthHero is a website, similar to Amazon, it’s like the, People call it the eco-friendly Amazon. Which, Amazon is evil so do not buy from them. But, yes, go to EarthHero. They have raz- safety razors is what they’re called. It’s a metal razor, shav- I’ve never used it personally but heard reviews of it, shaves just like any disposable or plastic razor that you buy at a store. However, (1) you do not dispose of it, and (2) the blade is the only thing that you change on it. Which is, just- I’m not sure what those blades are called, but you buy a pack of ten of them for $2, or even less than that probably. Again, never used it, so don’t know how much it is. Much cheaper is the point. And a lot less waste because they are metal blades so you can also recycle those. Wow, tangent. Sustainability is also a topic that we will be talking about frequently on this podcast because being sustainable is being kind and we all need to understand more about the products we consume and what actually goes into that.
But anyway, leg hair and such. Why on Earth are you gonna be spending your money constantly throughout your lifetime on these products that you don’t even need. They literally just tell you you need them so that you give them your money. So, that’s- stop using disposable razors. I’m not saying stop shaving. If you like it, cool! Do it! Maybe try it in a more sustainable, wallet-friendly way with a safety razor that you can purchase on EarthHero.com. [End omission]
[19:50] So making others uncomfortable too allows them to also step into that mindset where I’m at, but maybe a shifted perspective. But if we look at that it does allow them to start questioning things. Obviously, you know, why did that- why was that Person breaking that norm. Maybe, hopefully they would come up and ask me questions personally so I could talk to them about it. Then just not be judge-y about it because there’s no reason to be. But hopefully it gets them thinking about maybe why they shave their legs or why anyone shaves their legs. Really I just want to be an example out there in the world too that it doesn’t matter. You can do whatever you want with your body and this is a natural thing that happens. If you wanna do that too, come and join me because fuck shaving. It sucks. No one’s gonna tell you it’s fun. We all know it sucks. I believe it was, maybe both the YouTube video and the podcast episode, Callie and Nic kinda called out to the audience asking for something that has changed in them during quarantine. You know, qu- queering things around your life that you may have discovered you wanted to go in quarantine. Just kind of changing your appearance and things like that. Or your way of thinking in general because, you know, capitalism, we’re seeing it imploding around us and it has changed People’s mindsets. You know, why do we pay rent? Why is that something -that we understand that People need shelter, yet we’re making them pay for basic needs that we kno- like, if we have this knowledge, let People live. It’s- it’s, okay so, yes, we’re thinking in anti-capitalist ways. We’re kind of queering our thinking, going against these societal norms.
[22:02] That got me thinking about things in my life that I could second-guess, or think more on, deconstruct in my mind, and I had this thought that…-well my thought was who is my hair really for? My hair is up in a bun all the time, I don’t enjoy it really, I don’t- I- I knew once I asked that question, I knew it wasn’t for me. It was for other People, it was for Jorge because he says he really likes it and everybody says it’s so pretty and long and thick and beautiful, and never in my life have I felt this connection to my hair and that it’s a part of me and makes me look better. Never have I had that. I’m more just like, “Get this outta my face.” It sparked this desire in me to get most of my hair cut off, you know, shave it down and just have a little bit on top that can go down and look cut in a little bob but most of the time it’s probably gonna be up in a little bun, which I do like the bun, just not with so much hair. I’m really excited to do that and see how it’ll make me feel. I have this, you know, when I was sitting getting my u- my undercut done a few weeks ago by my friend Liza, I was smiling the entire time. I’ve- I was so happy to just try this out and see how it felt. I’ve loved it ever since I got it and I just know that this will be a similar experience.
[23:51] Yeah, so, it might take some getting used to, styling it a little differently, but I am super excited and can’t wait to look at other things in my life now. Deconstruct them and really think about why I’m going this thing. Is it for me, or is it for other P- is it for one Person specifically? Is it just to make the general society around you comfortable? Why do I do this? Any time that I- most of the time these are coming up around something that keeps coming back to my mind. I’ll find that, “Hmm, that keeps comin’ up and I’m trying to convince myself of reasons why I do it. When in reality I just don’t like doing it or I just don’t like something.” Then I’ll kinda start to think about it a little bit and once I think about it enough, this- these thoughts or questions come to my mind and it all kind of starts to click and make sense. And when we can question the things that we do before doing them, we can really -that’s what I’m saying, we can control ourselves better and our actions because we’re not just {Snap} reacting quickly. We’re stopping and thinking about it. Being in the moment. Is this really something I want to do or am I just doing it to go along?
[25:13] I don’t know if I have anything else after that. I’m really diggin’ the no outline and just come in with some episodes or some book I wanna talk about that’s kinda tied to an experience that I’m having in my life. I loved just talking through things on the microphone. So, I’m gonna try to do this with my next episode. I’ve already got another one lined- an episode lined up that I would love to talk about.
[25:45] If you enjoyed this episode, help support the podcast! All this content is free and I’d love to make it my job one day, so if you’re financially able join our patreon or send a one-time or recurring donation through paypal! You can also share an episode with family or friends, and give UK a kind rating and review!
Check out UnderstandingKindness.com for all episodes, transcripts, and blog posts. And why not take a listen to my other podcast, Better When Awkward, co-hosted by my childhood best friend Jasmine!
Get in touch with me by emailing UnderstandingKindness@protonmail.com, or through social media. You can find all links in the episode notes.
For now, be kind, be compassionate, be understanding, and question everything. I’ll be here. Thank you for listening to this episode of Understanding Kindness. [End transcript]