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like my Mom and really not give a shit. As I mulled that over, I went to run some errands. I ended up at Aveda to grab some shampoo. While there, I noticed some dark hairs — like wiry mutton chops — on the lady’s face who was helping me and I was thinking: See, Cindy Barshop, she can live with it. Right on, you go lady with cheek hairs! Empowered hairy ladies rule! Then I went all retroactive on myself and started thinking, but does she know about that? Should I tell her about her cheek hairs? She must want to know about those cheek hairs. I mean, she couldn’t have actually wanted them there, right?
    “You want some tea?” she asked. Aveda gives you free tea.
    “No no,” I said, backing away. “I don’t want tea.”
    I managed to keep my mouth shut.
    Even though I have weird hairs, I couldn’t help but be judgmental about other women’s weird hairs.
    I realized that it happens all the time. When I see a lady in the street with a mustache — the same mustache I could easily grow (except for that scarred part that doesn’t grow hair anymore) — the thoughts in my head are so shitty. It goes from, Right on, you nonconformist powerful woman to I’ll totally let you borrow ten bucks so that you can take care of that.
    I don’t like that my brain does that. I really don’t.
    I wondered if I was any better than Muir and Barshop.
     
    ***
     
    When I got back home, I realized how incapable I was of realigning my thoughts. I’d have to be hypnotized or brainwashed to think hairy was okay. The revulsion felt so deep-rooted that I couldn’t help but find the strands more or less... well, yucky.
    While people like Muir and Barshop upheld the ideals of hairlessness and maybe even expanded on them (and I would continue to dislike them for that), they didn’t invent them. I took the next couple days to read some books and published studies on hair removal. I wanted to know when and why this idea of hairlessness as an ideal first got into our heads.
    I got really into it, blitzing those books with my highlighter. I found out that women’s hair removal isn’t even that old of a practice. The Europeans were hairy when they came over to America. Hairy colonies. Very hairy colonies. Even up to 100 years ago, women were letting it all hang naturally.
    The hair landscape started changing in the early 1900s when advertising became national via countrywide-distributed magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Harpers Bazaar, which along with touting Crisco and Kleenex, also began promoting clean-shaven pits.
    At the same time, women’s fashions were also changing. Sleeveless gowns became the rage and the hemline moved up from the ankle to mid-calf in 1915, eventually reaching just below the knee in 1927. Women were showing more skin than ever before, which meant they were also showing more hair.
    In 1915 began a period that historian Christine Hope labeled “The Great Underarm Campaign.” This is when advertisers got nasty. About a dozen companies, including King C. Gillette — who less than two decades earlier had come out with the first disposable razor — waged nothing less than a full-on character assassination on female underarm hair. In magazine ads, they used words to change the connotation, referring to the hair as “objectionable,” “unsightly,” “unwelcome,” “dirty” and “embarrassing.” On the other hand, hairless women were referred to as “attractive,” “womanly,” “sanitary,” “clean,” exquisite,” “modest” and “feminine.”
    Kirsten Hansen, in her 2007 Barnard doctoral thesis, Hair or Bare? — which I probably should have attempted to write myself as a school report in the ninth grade — explained that advertisers tried to relate outward cleanliness with inner character. “Advertisers invoked moral values like modesty and cleanliness that had been central to Victorian America,” she wrote, “and linked them to the modern value of exterior beauty.”
    I found the ads