Unlearning

Often, because I live within days that sprint through time in one go, a lot of things get overdue. Like waxing.

Before the pandemic, I would never touch a razor because my mom always told me that the hair growth is harder, which basically meant the hair were difficult to wax off. But, well, when a virus gets the whole world…anyway the point is I couldn’t go to the salon for waxing, and so when I’d lift my arms up in front of the mirror and see under-arm hair, I’d cringe. Like want-to-shut-my-eyes-and-back-away-from-the-mirror kind of cringe.

I never questioned the rightness of ripping hair out from underneath my arm. Almost like it was written in some holy scriptures as the word of God. Maybe because I never saw a model or actress with under-arm hair. None of the women in pageants had hair like that. None of the women other women saw as beautiful and as the ideal of femininity had underarm hair, same for the women that men were crazy about. On the other hand, most times the reactions of men and women to under-arm hair were those of disgust whether in comments or videos or even among some of my male friends. I saw that, absorbed it and mirrored it until it was my own reaction. Hair, except on your head and eyebrows, is disgusting (what weird creatures human beings are). Even when I understood that technically it’s one of many beauty double standards, I just couldn’t do anything but shrink away from the thought of publicly displaying under-arm hair.

Recently I found this Instagram account of a person who is a young model and into breaking beauty norms. And they literally put up pictures of their hairy armpits. So my first reaction was split into three – a part of me cringed and stared, another part of me was in awe of how brave they were and adored them for it, a larger part of me was GRATEFUL to them. Because they just took the pressure off to be a certain way, a way that in my head I still consider ugly (and never ever underestimate what the fear of feeling ugly will make a person do). Over the next few days I saw all their posts – old ones and of course, new. It was their thing to showcase under-arm hair. And a strange thing began to happen. The more I saw it, the more the ‘cringe’ factor lessened. The more I focused on them overall, the beaming, cheeky smile knowing they were wrecking enforced beauty standards, the gorgeous hair, the beautiful words they used, those under-arm hair became more and more a part of a beautiful story. I’m not saying years of conditioning will go in a few days of following them, but…if we see more people do the ‘odd’ things, not mainstream things often enough – those things will become mainstream and normal too.

I had a similar journey with how it became easier for me to relate to same-sex couples. Let me clarify, I have never ever been homophobic, but I have only seen and heard heterosexual stories, narratives, myths, legends etc. growing up. While I comprehend the right of people to love who they love without fear or judgement, it wasn’t that I understood it like I understood heterosexual love (which isn’t surprising since I identify with it, but even so, empathy is like a sixth limb for me and to not be able to wrap my head around something just because it wasn’t my story caught me by surprise). It was, unexpectedly, my foray into K-pop stan Twitter, where I became close friends with a lot of incredible gay men and women, that made me become more and more comfortable with same-sex love. I began to watch movies with such storylines and even with the ‘odd’-ness that I felt watching things go that way, I also felt like closer to understanding what a friend from Twitter told me, “You love a person, not a gender.”

This is why representation is important. When you see images of women with under-arm hair, modelling, or women with gap between their teeth being hailed as gorgeous actresses, or ‘fat’ women and men being body confident like how recently Jonah Hill was while surfing and enjoying his day at the beach, or two women kissing, or two men flirting, the more you see it, the more normal it becomes, the more you get over hesitations, discomfort, and inability to understand. All you need to do is keep an open mind and unlearn what you’ve been taught as the limited, hurtful ‘should be’s by a whole lot of people. Unlearn it, because it’s worth understanding this big, beautiful world out there with more colours than we know now.