Shaving It All Off: Examining Social Norms of Body Hair among College Men in a Women's Studies Course

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Notes

¹The assignment specifically asked them to reflect about the following four sets of questions: (1) What did you feel like emotionally when adopting the “non-masculine” norm of shaving? What was this experience like for you?; (2) In what way (if at all) did this affect your sexuality, health, and/or your feelings about your own body? Did anything change behaviorally? What about internally?; (3) What kind of external feedback, if any, did you receive about this? How did others respond? What did that feel like?; (4) How has this experience allowed you to reflect upon the social construction of bodily norms, particularly as they relate to sexuality?

²I do not specify the racial backgrounds, ages, and sexual identities of participants (unless absolutely necessary for the analysis) so that I can protect their anonymity, as the group was relatively small and these features could easily identify them to their classmates from that semester.

³During one class, a male student told other students that he had tried Nair and had over-applied it to his body which resulted in negative side effects like a burning rash. As a low point of this experiment, this student's use of a self-identified “female” approach to body hair removal was met with intense laughter and a few homophobic reactions from nearby men.

⁴Because of the small sample size and small number of men of color (only 4), I chose not to analyze their responses by race or class in order to focus instead on the more salient gender and sexual identity issues discussed by all eight men.

⁵See Fahs Forthcoming and Fahs and Delgado 13, for a more thorough discussion of women in the body hair experiment conforming to classroom pressures.