The Leg Experiment

During the break between Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 semesters, I stopped shaving my legs. I was tired of having to constantly worry about my legs and their hairiness. Simply put: I was lazy.

After three months of nary a drop o’ Nair on my legs, I feel I understand that shaving has been conditioned into us. I knew it before, but I hadn’t thought about the ways in which it is conditioned. I recall summer volleyball practices just before the beginning of my senior year of high school where we would compare length of leg hair. I wore knee socks while playing to keep my legs warmer and to scrape of some of the dirt my shoes picked up. But I also wore them to cover up my hairy legs, and I only shaved the part of my thighs that showed between the sock and kneepad and my spandex.

It seems to be a practice among teenage girls – or at least as much as I can remember – to say how long it had been since they shaved. “I haven’t shaved in five days,” might have been the average, but then if someone reached the two week-period, the façade of disgust displayed by the other females in the peer group would turn into real repulsion. Any hair longer than a quarter inch was taboo. As we were stretching before practice one day, one of my sophomore buddies and I were chatting, and we got onto the subject of shaving. When she showed me the growth, I said that was nothing and pulled back my sock to reveal how much my own hair had grown. She winced as she laughed.

When we shaved our legs, we would make sure our teammates saw. We would know they knew we were performing this act of femininity. We would make our friends come over and rub their finger up and down our shins to feel how silky smooth we could get our skin. (Oh goodness, I’m really a feminist now. Yay! But I feel conditioned to say that running a forefinger up and down a fellow female teammates’ shin is symbolic of sexual desires and desire for the other body that is still the same as yours, that is like yours. I don't actually believe that last sentence.) It would tickle. If I rubbed my own legs, I couldn’t tell where I was feeling the most sensation – in my fingertip or in the skin of my shin.

My leg looks nothing like our society’s conception of a female’s leg. The feminine leg is supposed to be made of clear-cut lines and curves, a distinct barrier between the end of the skin and the air surrounding it. When I see the dark, inch-long hair, I think of my brother’s leg. I almost feel as if it’s not part of me.

Then I go jogging outside. Sensation suddenly floods back to my legs, sensation that has been denied for the eight years I’ve been shaving. I can feel the air currents my legs generate, and it is like Aeolus is continually kissing my shins, my ankle, whatever the skin covering the gastrocnemius is called (Calf? I must really have wanted to use the name of that muscle). My body is me. My legs are me. The hair sticks into the air at odd angles, exploring the world around my legs and interacting with it. The boundaries are not clear anymore. The hairs catch every cross-breeze. As fish can sense the change in water pressure and move accordingly in a group, so my legs can now feel air pressure when they move against one another. They are fuzzy. The prickle has gone out of them. Whenever I shower, my hair gathers in small bunches to mimic the rivulets that form as the water drips off me.

I can feel the world around me with my calves. I've gotten part of myself back again.