Ep 106: History of Hair Removal and Sexual Self-Esteem with Prof. Rebecca Herzig
Art by @reesabobeesa
In this episode, Effy and Jacqueline are hanging out with the author of Plucked: A History of Hair Removal Prof. Rebecca Herzig to talk about hair removal and sexual self-esteem. They are curious about:
What is the history of hair removal and what role have race, gender and age played in it?
What caused the medicalization and then industrialization of hair removal and why?
How does what we know about hair removal bust the myth of personal choice and individualism in America and expose how the unrecognized impact of conditioning play out in US society?
To guide us in our exploration, our guest this week is Prof. Rebecca Herzig:
Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies Rebecca Herzig is the author or editor of several books, including Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America, The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (with Evelynn Hammonds) and the series, Feminist Technosciences (with Banu Subramaniam). Herzig’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Macarthur Foundation.
Herzig is currently writing a book about the past(s) and future(s) of higher education. Herzig’s most recent work on that project, on labor in the pandemic university, was published in 2022.
She grew up in California, earned her PhD at MIT in Massachusetts, and now teaches at Bates College in Maine.
To find out more about Prof. Herzig’s work, buy her books from independent bookstores.
To find more about Effy Blue and Jacqueline Misla, follow them at @wearecuriousfoxes, @coacheffyblue, and @jacquelinemisla on Instagram.
If you have a question that you would like to explore on the show, reach out to us and we may answer your question on one of our upcoming episodes. Leave us a voicemail at 201-870-0063 or email us at listening@wearecuriousfoxes.com
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TRANSCRIPT:
Effy
Welcome to the Curious Fox podcast for those challenging the status quo in love, sex, and relationships. My name is Effy Blue.
Jacqueline
And I'm Jacqueline Misla. And today on our ongoing exploration of the impact of conditioning on our perception of beauty and sexual self-esteem. We're talking with Professor Rebecca Herzig about the history of hair removal.
Jacqueline
So the other day, I am home and my daughter emerges post-bath which is an experience she does like a bath it's followed by like a skincare routine. I imagine there's like eucalyptus involved like there's this whole thing that she does, but she then do zoomies around the house my dog she emerges from the bathroom and announces to me or just not even announces but informs me that she is shaving her legs. But oh, she is 10, I shouldn't know. Now we are you can imagine a very body-positive household right? So I am often unshaven and she has seen my body we don't talk about being skinny. We talked about being healthy. Instead of talking about being beautiful. We talk about being comfortable. So it's there's not a place of space in which I am putting these regulations on a row what beautiful is, but she's certainly picking them up. She asked me not too long ago about the hair on her toes, whether that was normal. And I was like, yes, everybody does. And they showed her mind and she had asked me about shaving her legs before and he's like, it's gonna require conversation. There are a lot of decisions to be made want to make sure you're doing it safely. I don't know if you're ready. But apparently, she decided that she was ready. And in that moment, I had to think I was like, Okay, how am I gonna react to this? I don't want to punish her for doing something that is about her body, but also, that doesn't feel okay. She's okay.
Effy
No, I do feel sad about this. I have questions, though. One. Do you shave your legs?
Jacqueline
Yes. Not often.
Effy
Okay, so I can see it's hard. Right?
Jacqueline
Right. I'm role modeling it of course. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes. No, that I understand. To me, it was more about it wasn't that she was never going to do it. I just wish that the conditioning didn't impact her so young, like I don't remember, was 10 when I wanted to do it. I don't know. Well, okay, actually, I'm gonna step back. You know what, now that upon reflection, I was, I think I was 10 years old. I was 10 or 11 years old. Because I remember the first time that I shaved was before my first day of middle school. So that was sixth grade. So that was about 11 years old. And I remember having the conversation with my parents will actually my parents had signed me up for summer school at the middle school the summer before the school year started. And they told me about it the day before. And so of course, I was horrified because it's a big deal. Now going into middle school, I have to choose the outfit all the things and so I told them because they had not told me they needed to give me permission to shave. That was the deal that we were making. I wouldn't be as mad as I should be. If they let me shave and they said okay, so I went to the bathroom and my father had those like old school razors that like you twisted it and put the blade in and then twisted it and it like closed. And so I started to shave with that never achieved before and in the process. The Razor went sideways as I was shaving, like from my knee up. And I essentially slit from my knee to my groin to my thought that the entire length of my thigh. I just cut open to you could see the white as I cut to the skin where it was like white there's like major artery is going fine. Oh, and so I look at it and it hurts, and then immediately blood just pouring out of my leg. So then I'm freaking out my dad comes in so I'm in the shower now and have a shaven cut and bleeding. My dad comes in and I'm like ah and he just goes and like grabs me pulls me out and takes me to lie down. I'm like oh, so I'm getting ready for middle school. I'm naked my dad is holding me bleeding like it's too many things. It's too many things happening right now. And so I had this big scar that has, you know, since gone away, but I had this big scar that existed and I had one shaven leg then and one non shape and it was a whole mess. And so yeah, I had this big old scar from the first time that I tried to shave and like and be grown up. And so certainly I was traumatized by that and was concerned that that would happen to my daughter, but she she apparently did a much better.
Effy
Job leading. Yeah, good.
Jacqueline
For not naming herself. Yes. Exactly. For not permanently scoring yourself. Good job.
Effy
Absolutely. But you know, I'm sad. I have a big sad face for her because Yeah, exactly. Like she's 2010 For you too early as well. Too early as well. Yeah, I have never put a ratio to my skin. So I've never shaved ever. I know a crazy couple of reasons. One, sort of the mild reason is that I'm just not very hairy. I've won the genetic lottery. My mum and dad aren't hairy. I'm not very hairy. I get a few hairs that I can either pluck or, you know, like, just manage myself, I never really need to shave. That's one reason. The other reason is when I was little younger than 10 because I was still living at home. The hair removal piece I learned from my mom, which I'm sure most women do. Most girls do. She would sit in the living room. And you sugaring. So like melted sugar. So what we would eat as caramel essentially delicious, to remove her hairs remove her from her legs that she only had a few hairs as well, she would do it herself. And she would make a bowl this like sugaring bowl, and then she would put both of her thumbs on it and she was pushed this ball down her shins, make a thin layer, and then she would hold one hand of it and would head off. And she would then make another bowl, she would move to the next patch, push it down her skin, pull it off. And then she does what she would do and should do it really quickly. And it just didn't seem painful. No. And she would do kind of regularly. And it just was part of her taking care of regime things. I would ask her like, what are you doing? She likes her room, my hair. And then when you're ready, like I'll show you how to do it and what kind of stuff? And then I was like, Well, I don't know, like people shave. At some point, I knew that you could also shave and I wasn't really sure why she was doing this thing. So we're having one of those conversations and my dad happens to be around. That also gives you an insight to our household, shakes my hand and rubs my hand on my dad's stubble, right? And she says, If you shave your legs, your legs will be like your dad stubble. Its course. And it's like, you know, it doesn't feel very nice, right? So my dad hadn't shaved him probably for a couple of days. And I knew he shaves right because I see him in the morning. And that was her reasoning teacher like if you ever shave anywhere in your body, or be like your dad stuff. So I was horrified. I was absolutely horrified that any part of my body was like going to my dad's stubble, so I was like never achieving anything anything. And then eventually, when I did have the few hairs that I do now, I learned the sugar in voltric. And that's how I take care of my hair.
Jacqueline
Wow. Yeah. If you all have interesting stories about where you learned about or started removing hair from any part of your body, please call in right in send voice memos, because I imagine there's just a collection of stories around what we understood about her hair, you and I for Patreon. Did podcast after hours. Oh my god, we're gonna talk a little bit more freely. And candidly, and we talked about all of our kind of Nether hair, if you will. So around our role is and what we learned and how we each store that and how I shampooed and conditioned mind for a fairly long time as a younger person, because I didn't know no one told me what to do with the hair. So I did what I did in my head. So your Patreon member you should go in and listen to the whole story because is fantastic and hilarious. All of these stories show us that in our lifetime with our families, there's conditioning around what hair removal is and what hair is appropriate. And in our conversation with Dr. herzliche. She illuminated were the origins of our current understanding about what is appropriate with hair comes from.
Effy
And it was both fascinating and horrifying description of some of the stuff was horrifying. Yeah.
Rebecca Herzig
Hi, my name is Rebecca Herzig. I'm a writer and a teacher based in Maine and I'm also currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Science and justice in California.
Jacqueline
So excited to have you on I read your book last year and change the way that I saw things. I think I understood that every day. Isn't what I've made has been constructed over time in history and capitalism for me to make that particular decision. But really understanding the roots of the history of that was fascinating. In this show, we have explored the history of things like Valentine's Day, and some of the holidays and always going through the history helps to illuminate how we have autonomy and choice to go down that path or make a different decision. And so I'm hoping we can just start with you giving us an abridged history of hair removal so that we can all start with the same context of understanding how we got to the place that we are right now.
Rebecca Herzig
So really a bridge the book kind of, you know, tries to drag this out over three or 400 pages, but really abridged if you go back in what we might call US history. Obviously, even what we call the place where I was sitting on is a little bit congested. But if you were if we go back in US history and tell, say about 1830, it was not common among white Americans to remove hair, whether they identified as men, whether they identified as women, it just wasn't a standard normalized thing. In fact, at that time, and for the couple of 100 years preceding that European settlers in again, what's now called the United States would have thought that removing hair was one of those strange things that was their word, that the people they called the Indians did all the indigenous peoples of the Americas who they all again, white settlers kind of lumped together under this one word Indian. And they wrote among themselves a lot, a lot a lot about the strange practices that the Indians did, of seeming to pluck out or singe out or scrape off every single hair on their body. Then they would debate whether lol actually, are they removing all their hair, or were they just naturally less physically hairy than the Europeans. And there was enormous debate about this. And from all kinds of people we still consider famous Thomas Jefferson wrote about this, Alexander Humboldt wrote about this, Lewis and Clark on their journeys across the continent, wrote about this, but if you fast forward just 100 years, it then it become completely normalized for all kinds of people, especially people who didn't find his women to regularly every single day remove hair from some part of their bodies, usually their face, but increasingly by, say, 1930, women and girls were removing hair from their armpits, and some of them were starting to remove it from their legs, and so on. And so I got interested in how in just 100 years, norms completely flipped upside out. So the idea that no, only those strange other native people would do this practice to only strange for and maybe immigrant people wouldn't do this practice, if you want to be like us, if you want to be, quote, civilized, if you want to be, quote, white, if you want to be, quote, American, of course, you would take off all the visible hair in your body. And to me, it's not just interesting, because it makes this kind of 180 degree shift, but that everybody got on board with something that takes so much time, so much daily labor, so much money, if you just think about like how much it cost to buy razors, or waxes or depilatories, or whatever it is. And you know, for anybody who's ever done it, and not trivial amount of pain, you know, blood, like discomfort, sometimes downright pain, depending on where you're removing the hair, or who's removing hair from you, and that sort of thing. So that's the part I got interested in and what the story I was trying to tell in the book.
Jacqueline
Can you talk a little bit more about where you saw that shift as a relates to, to your point the indigenous communities and looking at that and saying, actually, that feels like that is not dignified to show up that way to that reversal? And in reading your book, it sounds like each non-white population that the white explorers got introduced to, at some point, something was determined about them based on their hair.
Rebecca Herzig
Absolutely. So things start changing. I argue in the book in the early 19th century, as more and more of those European settlers start moving into cities. And as they do, they're moving away from their like kin communities and their historical practices, the things they might learn in their own households from their own relatives, and starting to have to learn how to be a person from people who might be strangers. So they're learning more and more from newspapers, magazines are getting published at this time, and people are starting to kind of read about what norms of body care might be. So the changes are starting to happen slowly, partly just through different patterns of living for European settlers. But I think the real change to your question takes on a little bit later in the 19th century with the rise of Darwinian theories of evolution, because as people start adopting, and disseminating the idea that human beings weren't maybe created by God and in specific ways for specific purposes, but might have evolved from other animals. The idea Have anything that associated human beings with animals became sort of more and more repugnant for, again, mostly white European settlers. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about indigenous people, thought that the reason they were removing their hair is that it was too animal to have visible body hair. And this is in notes on the state of Virginia, I looked and looked and looked for records written by indigenous people in their own voices and say, the 18th or 19th century about what they thought about it and had trouble finding it. It's all filtered through European kinds of publishers and so on. But by the late 19th century, there is more and more kind of popular writing in the United States about being connected to apes and not wanting to be connected to apes. And I'm suggesting that hair removal and all of the kind of medicalization of hair removal that came on in that late 19th century period is connected in some ways to those ideas, those new ideas, and with that all the kind of xenophobic and white supremacist ideas about racial hierarchies and national hierarchies and gendered hierarchies, and how specific people might be arrayed along those hierarchies and marked in particular ways by their bodies.
Jacqueline
Yeah, we had a conversation recently where the guest was talking about the paper bag test and the comb test. So the paper bag test is that one would put a paper bag next to someone's skin. And if you were darker than that, that would deny you entry. And similarly, if you could not put a comb through your hair, that was an indication that you were different, right? So if you had straight hair, that comb would go freely if you had curly or coiled hair, then that that comb would get stuck. And so, you know, naming that as continued examples throughout history of this obsession with and leveraging hair as a hierarchy to your point. Yeah, and even what I'm hearing is not even hierarchy, but humanity is what I'm hearing you said.
Rebecca Herzig
Yes, absolutely. It's a really important kind of distinction. And the debate that again, this is how I wrote the book from like, asking questions about the dominant class, white educated, mostly eastern seaboard based men. So the perspective is very much from that sort of slanted point of view, you could say, but yeah, they were obsessed with these rankings. And the rankings as you said, we're not simply about social status, but we're about entry into the category of humanity. And the reason that all these 18th and early 19th century, white writers were obsessed with the Indians, as I show in the book was that they saw the kind of physical appearance of the body as linked to their possible capacities for self governance, really. So the question was, should these native peoples be allowed by the white colonizers to govern themselves? They asked that question by thinking, well, then we have to know what kind of this is their language, not mine creatures they are, are they governed by Caprice by whimsy by irrationality? Or are they are they capable of the sort of prudence and judgment that it requires to be a self governing kind of person and all kinds of European observers weighed in on this question? And one of the fascinating tables I found in my research was by the great naturalist, Linnaeus is just name that people learn in middle school when you're learning scientific classifications, right? That genus species thing that's all in a nomenclature. And he made an actual table that had ranks of people, what we would call racial ranks of people listed both according to their capacities for self governance, like, Can they do it? Or can they not on a scale right next to their hair type? Is it curly? Is it straight? Is it you know, all this sort of stuff, so explicitly linked by the leading authorities of the day, were these ideas about citizenship and governance and all those things and what we would think of as just physical features, in one way or another, they tied those two things together.
Effy
As I listened to you, what I'm noticing, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that there seems to be this social, cultural, cognitive dissonance of first kind of looking at the native folks, as Oh, they're removing their hands so that they're, they're not sort of close to apes, to then deciding that that's what they're doing and not really asking them or taking any record of it. But assuming that's what's happening, then we kind of adopting it. The white Europeans are adopting it and then looking back at the native saying, but you are closer to ape so you're not you can't govern yourself. There seems to be this like weird cognitive dissonance, even though we've decided to remove hair because what we think they were doing.
Rebecca Herzig
I absolutely hear what you're asking. I think one of the things that happens is that the kind of the normalization of hairlessness among whites in the US starts after a lot of the Indian wars have ended. So after whites have successfully, forcibly removed genocidal ly displaced, most of the indigenous populations to reservation lands have to of confinement essentially, then they can start valorizing hairlessness as a mark of civility and hygiene and all of those kinds of things. So it kind of happens sequentially. At that point, those same white authorities start judging new immigrants to the United States. So new people arriving from eastern and southern Europe who tend to be physiologically more visibly hairy, with thicker, darker hair as lesser than because they're more visibly hairy than the the native born US whites who are already there. And you start seeing medical literature's in the late 19th, and early 20th century, new taxonomies. So replacing the Linnaean one, but new taxonomy is super intense gradiation of like, how hairy the Celts are, how hairy the Greeks are, how hairy the Italians are, how hairy the Jews, and they all call is when people are this sort of thing, and then showing what normal hair distribution patterns are in these various types of people, by men and by women, and how you can sort of grade them according to these hairy types. But at that point, too much Aryan a student want, you get the development of new medical terms like hirsutism, or hypertrichosis that literally didn't exist before the late 19th century, as they start naming some kinds of hairiness a disease or a pathology, that is typically found, they said, in certain types of people, racial or ethnic groups, we would call.
Effy
So there's definitely a link between race and hair, amount of hair distribution of hair that is very well documented and almost used as a cosmic classification from the beginning, and also a whole bunch of pathology that came from it as well. So it became a real signal to identity and race in where you rank in the world. And it's such an important part of how you fit into the society. So it's super interesting. And I don't think this is why Jacqueline was like, when she read your book, I was like, we have to talk about this, because I've never heard it spoken in this kind of way.
Rebecca Herzig
Absolutely, it's all of those things. And one of the things that shocked me as a researcher, because I came at this as a historian of of race and science and technology that was sort of what I specialized in and graduate school. And what my first couple books were about researching one of those earlier books, I was in the anthropology library at Harvard, which is a giant, like compendium of books for the last hundreds of years of people studying human difference and what makes it and all this kind of stuff. And I was surprised given what I had learned about the history of both of race as a social character, but also of racial science, like how scientists had studied human difference and what kind of claims they made about it. I had assumed especially somebody raised in the US that skin color had always kind of been the dominant marker, right in the same way that we use it casually. Now, people are black, or brown, or white, or this sort of thing. In the 19th century, for sure, at least according to all the racial anthropology sitting there in the library, hair was much more on the forefront of people's minds. And again, like all the leading naturalist of the time, humble Linnaeus a bit earlier, all this sort of stuff. They're all talking about body hair. And I found that fascinating. The first big survey kind of study by historians of statistics now is one of the first big statistical compendiums collected in the US, it was a big study of volunteers in the Union Army during the Civil War, the guy went out and tracked how much body hair this and made these big tables and would hide, have somebody hide in the bushes, and so could look at soldiers bathing, so he could see where the hair growth was on, you know, the parts of the body that were usually clothed, and then wrote about this in a statistical Compendium. And again, people reading at the time, must have thought that was typical enough the sort of fascination with hair that they didn't think it was odd that a US Army researcher was hiding in the bushes watching people bathe and writing down what they saw, you know, now this would raise questions, but at the time, of course, you'd want to know about their hair growth and distribution, of course, you would make them racial tables based on that and put them in your study, which are there. Now if you go look at it.
Effy
It's fascinating. And I also imagine that this also applies to gender. How is that then translated into gender and what's okay for women? What's okay for men, you know, beards and mustaches versus not? How was that then sort of decided?
Rebecca Herzig
It was always twined together, so it was always racialized, gendered and gendered ideas about race. They're always kind of inseparable in that way, in the medical literature, where you can see these things laid out most clearly. Doctors who see patients are making kind of tables of what's normal and what's pathological primarily with an interest towards their their women identified patients because those are the people who are coming to them saying, Doctor, Doctor, I have this thing can you help me with it? I have this issue that I don't like, can you help me with it? And they're making tables for another one? They're but they're saying things like, this is normal in a woman of this basically racial type, this is abnormal and a woman of this racial type, this is what standard and then they're debating with one another. No, no, no, no, this is normal in that racial type. No, I think that's abnormal in that racial type. And they, they add, often another category of this is beautiful. So like a really thick brow, we might actually want to keep, but make sure you get the mustache off this kind of stuff. So they're like, What to my eyes look like, obviously, subjective aesthetic judgments, but they're being presented in the medical literature as medical fact, you know, as like, this is obvious that this is where the line between the normal and the pathological should be. And I got interested then in how hair, its appearance, its removal, all the practices we have around it becomes really early on one of the key features that late 19th century scientists, physicians naturalist are using to make binary sexual categories at all. And we tend to think about us historians who care about these kinds of things tend to think about how those binary sexual classifications came about is primarily through studies of either the genitals, what became a normal penis, or normal vagina, and so on normal clitoris, or hormones later in the 20th century, what became considered standard amounts of estrogen or standard amounts of testosterone and so on. But I'm seeing a lot earlier in the 19th century, all kinds of work to try to like force what is obviously a continuous category, how much air is on a body into these binary piles. And that took a lot of work took a lot of debate among the physicians themselves and a lot of pushback or adoption by patients into like, yes, I want to fall into this binary category. So I'm going to have you remove my hair through whatever technologies you have available to you, or I'm not going to follow what you're telling me to, and I'm going to push back and allow my beard to grow my mustache or grow whatever, despite what you're telling me about binary categories.
Jacqueline
And that way, I would love to actually go back to you saying that, you know, helped remove my hair, and whatever technologies are available at the moment, because in your book, you really highlight all of the different ways in which we were removing hair, and sometimes at the risk of everything from a skin rash to death, based on whatever you were using. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that about all of the ways and creative ways in which we have removed hair over time as our technology has developed?
Rebecca Herzig
Oh, that's great. I'll start by telling a little story. So I started this project actually is a graduate student when I was sitting around with a bunch of other graduate students. And we were we were joking about papers we might write for, for the end of the term. And one of the students kind of dared me to write about this thing she had received as a holiday gift one year called an epilady, which almost nobody I know now has heard of, but a lot of us have a certain age, remember that it was this handheld device that just had metal coils on the end, and you plug it into the wall, and you turn it on, and the coils rotate and vibrate. And the idea is you're supposed to hold it up to the hair on your body, the coils catch the hair, because they're moving around, yank the hair out. And the company that started this sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these things over the holiday season where they were first promoted when this cohort member in my graduate school got one. But then it collapsed right away when people realized this was not going to work way too painful. And nobody wanted to buy things again. So they dared me to write a final term paper about the history of this thing. I was like, I'm gonna do that. I'm up for that there. So I tried over the library and I start trying to research this short lived technology. And as I was doing it in an old business magazine, I found just a half a phrase reference to people removing X rays to remove hair. And I was like, Wait, now that can't be and I started kind of digging into that it took me forever to find things. But that was what opened up this whole world. To me, it turned out that using X rays to remove hair was not a fringe phenomenon. But for 50 years in the US and all over the place all over the US territories all over North America. There would be salons as far as I can tell as kind of common as nail salons are now where people would offer prolonged exposure to x radiation in order to remove your hair for essentially cosmetic purposes. So people would hold these things up to their face or their armpits, their legs, in some cases, their genitals.
Effy
And just as with anybody who's gone through radiation treatment might know like that will make your hair fall out right and give you cancer at the same time.
Rebecca Herzig
Absolutely. And people had horrible cancers because they've been holding like an x ray up to their face. You know, for week after week. They go once a week, you know for 20 minutes. It's just horrible cancer the people who were researching this deck It's later named this North American Hiroshima Maidan syndrome after the survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I don't know about you all, I had never heard that story at all, even though I considered myself a kind of historian of, of these things, never heard about it. And so that got me interested in all the rest of the ways that people have done this over the years. And it turns out, there are a lot I could list more if you're interested. So
Jacqueline
as you were describing things in the book around even the things that have gone from organic and natural concoctions, to then leveraging the the tools that were used to strip fur off of animals and the production of meat, and then looking at that and saying, if it worked for this, this cow, it could work for a woman to win, like marketing and selling that it really made me pause and say, like, what is in there, and like what is in some of these other things that we have been using to strip our hair over time, not thinking about and making the connection between Oh, they may not actually be that thick, yeah, they may not actually be something that we want on our bodies. And so that was a moment of pause for me where I was reading that and thinking over time, again, just all of the ways in which not only have we been creative, but we have been willing to harm our bodies over time, in the name of beauty in the name of fitting in, in the name of status, the way in which we look on the outside has been our focus, and we've done so much harm as a result, I just, yeah, it continues to to be something that I sit with even now. And I'm wondering for you has it impacted the way that you've thought about hair removal, or the folks in your life, or your students as they've been reading it, and they come to you and say I'm never going to shave again.
Rebecca Herzig
And absolutely has, because it's both the things that we're putting on or in ourselves and the consequences of that. And, you know, as I point out in the book, a lot of these have been not just painful, but downright lethal. You know, there were depilatories that had thallium acetate in them that killed a whole bunch of people who use them, you know, and laser therapy, very painful has burned people disproportionately with darker skin, because they're often designed in standards for people with paler skin. So you know, there's, there's a whole not great history about all this, the part that I was trying to tell him the book that I hadn't seen in a lot of histories of beauties I'd seen before is then what the larger, both ecological and labor ramifications of all of that are too. So like, you know, where the wax is that people might use to wax their legs or their eyebrows, or their genitals or whatever. Where are those coming from? Well turns out, you know, all the same kind of planet destroying global productive processes that we're concerned about in a lot of environmental stuff, but we never quite bring all the way down into our personal care practices, that sort of things. So there's a growing movement, a younger people who are asking great questions about this and more and more trying to make their own personal care, beauty items and things like that. What I come to at the end of the book is Yeah, but for all of us living in this transnational capitalist society, we don't get outside of all of those flows, just because we might make our own beauty products at home, right? We still buy those things from somewhere, and they're coming from somewhere. So even if you buy palm wax on the internet, and then make your own things at home, yeah, where'd that come from? You know, DeForest did something in order to grow carnauba palm trees for export to, you know, wherever people are purchasing them now. So I come away from it, that it it's extremely consequential to think about what you're doing. That's kind of the big point always, in my teaching my writing is we just need to think about what we're doing. It's as simple as that. But I also I don't harbor any illusions that we can ever be free of this stuff, just because we think about it. So I might not shave my armpits anymore. But where's my clothing coming from? Where's my food coming from? Where are my medicines coming from? You know, all that sort of stuff? I don't get out of it all just by going, Harry?
Effy
Yeah, yeah. I want to bring in sort of the third factor in the way that we think about people which is age, I think we have it also correlates to age as well. The rhetoric is that as you grow older, you become hairier, especially in your face for women and on the other side as well. Things like full Brazilian waxes, right? Like being so hairless that you are, you know, closer to a younger girl has so many connotations and it gets really dark places. Can you speak to that at all? Is that is that a part of the way that hair is treated?
Rebecca Herzig
Absolutely. It's both a huge part of the way hair is treated now and I'll bet your listeners have ideas about this. Like who was the first person who introduced them to hair removal and how what was that relationship like? I learned through the research just from the letters that I could find in archives that often it was mothers who are bringing daughters in to either hair removal salons or to doctors to Ask about things. So there's an intergenerational thing that's very important around hair and what we do with it. There's that classic thing of a father, perhaps teaching us on how to shave for the first time, you know, there's so much stuff about age and generational transmission and knowledge and things. One of the things that surprised me was even in the medical literature in the 19th century, so circling back to something we were talking about with the racial and gendered categories, the doctors were really explicit that these were also age based categories. And one of the doctors I found said, you know, we're just not even talking about women over 45, because the doctor was very frank in the writing, nobody really cares what they look like anymore. So we're really talking about women between and girls between 15 and 45, when the is when their charms are of most, you know, concern or whatever. So they were explicitly interested in the appearance of women, girls of reproductive age, essentially. And they didn't shy away from saying that, obviously, people had their own ideas about this and would reach out to doctors or would do their own practices, you know, despite whatever the doctors were saying, but certainly age from way back has been a part of what gets considered normal and what gets considered pathological and what gets considered ideal and what gets considered acceptable.
Effy
I want to go back to the gender piece again, I'm curious to how please men once again, got away with it, right? So if we've decided that we want to remove her, because we don't we want to prove that we're not, you know, we're not able to get as far from the idea of an eight as possible. And then somehow along the way, men were like, Oh, it's okay, we look like apes, but women could just never be ever even considered anywhere near being an ape, or and it just became much more of a severe thing for them. At what point we've kind of said, Oh, it's okay. It's not really about I mean, is it about sort of industrialization and capitalism? Is that what kind of put the onus on the women and that men get away with it? Or what was the thing that made the gender split?
Rebecca Herzig
It's a great question, I'm gonna give a sort of wonky answer, because I'm going to skip around time periods a lot. So at this period of when, when Darwin's kind of ideas were seeping into popular culture, I think it was widely understood that the females this would have been their language, females were closer, inevitably, to apes, because they were the birthing ones, they were inherently kind of like, closer, this varied. And people made all kinds of complicated back bends, and whatever, around racial categories of femaleness and would make completely racist white supremacist ideas about this, where sometimes white females were posed as the most civilized and the ones that white men needed to look up to, in order to become civilized and domesticated properly, and all this kind of stuff. So there was a lot of sort of mixture around this. But my sense reading the medical literature was that the idea was, females were always going to be more primal, because they're the burning ones, right? And they, so we want to like remove hair on them to make sure that they look their proper human, civilized, you know, non-mustache, self. And that way. It remains pretty static until fashion trends start changing in the early 20th century, and more and more of the body starts becoming revealed. But if you think about it, mostly for people who are identified as women, so first, the kind of shorter sleeves on the kind of new woman or flapper look, and then eventually, hemlines start going up for women, men aren't really showing leg or arm in the same way and popular fashion. This varies across classes and races, of course to but if you're thinking about that sort of dominant image and popular magazines and stuff, it varies by gender in that way. So there's just more skin visible on a woman for things to get normalized or idealized in that way, moving forward into the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. My sense is that it even as I was reading the book, I said, it just hasn't caught up with men yet, but it will consumer culture, essentially, because women were the primary consumers in most US households. So they are the ones who personal care industries, and beauty industries were targeting for consumption. And it made sense to me that, you know, eventually, they're going to figure out that they've tapped that market and they need to move on. And that is precisely what happened to start in the late 90s, early 2000s. Were large companies as very explicit marketing strategy, in a lot of cases realized they needed to move into targeting older women who remember that said over 45, we're not going to worry about them. They've realized there's this giant untapped market. So yes, we do need to promote ideas of hygiene, beauty, personal care, obligatory care, all this stuff to older women. They started targeting even younger women. So now 1112 13 So instead of just 15 1670s and they started targeting people identified as men, and you can start seeing the growth of ads like concerned about too much hair on the chest or to material on the back. Women started being encouraged to brand their boyfriends or husbands in for hair removal treatment of various kinds, and it's absolutely exploded like the growth in men's beauty Personal Care Products has totally grown over the last 1520 years. I'm very interested to see you can find on social media and stuff like men starting to push back on that saying, No, I'm not gonna wax my chest. It's painful inches, and I'm not gonna do it every month, you know, but so there's pushback on it, just like there always has been from other people who have been kind of pushed to remove hair. But yeah, so it was only a matter of time, essentially, before markets realized they were missing a market. And then they got it. Yeah,
Jacqueline
just want to go back to what you shared because that as soon as you said, women are seen as more primal because we are the ones who give birth. And that is why we need to regulate more. It just like opened 12, more like made so many connections, around the way that we dress, the way that we act the way that if that is the guiding belief, no wonder there are so many restrictions on limiting how we show up and who we are. Because it is for the greater good of not allowing us to fall into our natural beast Ness. And primal state. I don't know if I've ever made that connection before. And I think that that's incredibly powerful. And sad.
Rebecca Herzig
Absolutely. No, I'm right with you. And it's always in US culture, always racialized. And it's always a part of the colonial story about who has a right to be civilized, essentially. And with that the rights that we think of as attending participation in US society, right, they haven't always been granted to everybody else we know. And that kind of demarcation between the citizen and the non citizen has often been linked to the demarcation between the human and the not quite human. And that kind of what's going to make you more human has always been racialized, gendered, age based, right children are still not seen as entirely human enough to be citizens, my child pushes back on me about this a lot. So yeah, all those things have always been kind of tied together. And I, one of the things that I just find fascinating is, body hair is one of the places where we work all this stuff out as a culture, where all that complexity, all that violence, all that hope gets put together. So people trying to make themselves one way or another hair is really malleable. And you can try to make yourself look quote unquote, more feminine, or quote unquote, younger or quote unquote, whiter, right? With these X ray people I mentioned the X ray earlier, it was really clear in the ads that they were trying to push mostly young inner city, immigrant women who probably had really rough lives, if you think about it in the early 20th century, they were they were trying to suggest to them, if you do this, if you whiten lighten your skin through this new scientific modern technology, you will have access that has been denied to you. And they were extremely explicit in the ad. So that access meant material comfort, it meant essentially white privilege and all kinds of ways. And you could get that by x raying your skin. Right and, and a lot of a lot of people went for it, it must have looked extremely appealing and circumstances they were in.
Effy
It's both right. It's like removing hair from sort of eyebrows down while enhancing hair from eyebrows up. Right? Because there's also that, yes, hair removal and then the other side, wanting to be as close to blonde as possible the hair bleaching the reverse happens on you know, above the eyebrow, where there's also an entire industry billions, trillions of dollars spent in enhancing the hair above our eyebrows, and our and our eyebrows, and then removing the hair below kind of crazy because I think you're right hair is malleable, it's visible. It really can add change someone's appearance and his signal to all these things. That's fascinating.
Rebecca Herzig
And again, as a historian, I'm just mesmerized but if you read the European colonizers, travelers, missionaries accounts from the even the early 19th century and the 18th century, all of the things that we do now the shaving, the plucking, the sugaring, the waxing the threat, you know all those things. They're seeing the indigenous people do and they're narrating as what makes them so weird. What makes them so strange, what makes them so other? And now, again, most Americans, not all of them, but definitely most like we're talking like 90 96% of Americans are removing their hair in some way in a super regular way as just taken for granted. Standard. You know, of course we do this it's strange if you don't maybe unhygenic if you don't, it's certainly not attractive if you need all this kind of stuff. So we got from one end to the other in a remarkably short period of time.
Jacqueline
Yeah, I think that again, that was one of The big takeaways from from the book was this myth about personal choice and individualism and the unrecognized impact of conditioning. I would want to talk about this for hours longer. There's just so much more. And we want to be respectful of your time. And we want to spend just a few minutes getting to know you a little bit better. And so if you're comfortable, there are four rapid fire questions that we would love to ask you to end our conversation.
Rebecca Herzig
I would be happy to.
Jacqueline
So the first is, what is one piece of advice that you would give to your younger self about love sex or relationships?
Rebecca Herzig
Oh, I love this question. Because it's so hard. I think I actually lately for reasons that I'm not going to bore you with, I've been trying to put a lot of work into just loving my younger self, instead of like, telling her you know, coulda, shoulda woulda, just saying, like, Hey, you did the best you could with what you knew at the time. So I wish she'd just trusted her gut more. So if I were talking to younger people, now, I might say go ahead and trust your gut, listen to it and act on it. But when I think about my younger self, I mostly just try to say, Yeah, you know, you did what?
Effy
You're here. Yeah, it's a good practice period, for sure. Okay, what is one romantic or sexual adventure on your bucket list?
Rebecca Herzig
This also might sound strange, but I've actually I've actually done all the things on my bucket list. Probably need some people to give me some new ideas. But no, I actually, I actually went after all those things.
Jacqueline
So love that answer. Yeah. How do you challenge the status quo?
Rebecca Herzig
Oh, honestly, the status quo, partly, I guess, because of what I study. And what I think about always looks really fragile and precarious. To me less, less subtle than we tend to think it is. So I like to remind myself that I like to remind other people of that that like things haven't always been this way. And they definitely won't always be this way. And as soon as you open up that kind of space, you can imagine all kinds of other ways you'd rather it was right. And that that I think is the essential step that we need is the ability to imagine life looking differently. And once you realize that the way it looks now is, you know, definitely not that old and took a lot of work to put together in this way you realize it could be done very, very differently if we want it to for sure.
Effy
Yeah, I find the status quo, the challenge status quo, it barely takes a couple of questions. It's a lot simpler. It really just takes a couple of questions. And then it crumbles in your in your hand in front of your eyes. And then you can see what's done the other side.
Rebecca Herzig
Ah, that's a beautiful way to say I couldn't agree more. And I see that nowhere so much as a teacher. It's remarkable in a classroom, how quickly people just fall into a habit or a norm. So you can change things just by going in and moving the desks. Or by asking people to stand up, you know, instead of sitting down or by inviting them to tell a joke in the classroom, you already sort of puncture what everybody is expecting. And then all kinds of new things become possible. I love the idea. It does. It can crumble with remarkable speed if you can get a chance.
Effy
Yeah, yeah, sure. Last, but definitely not least, we are a curious bunch. And we are curious, what are you curious about lately,
Rebecca Herzig
I remain really curious about how small things are tied to big things, how even the most seemingly vast systems or processes are actually made up of a lot of little tiny actions, habits, statements, practices, whatever and how those two things fit together. I tried to get at that in the book, how we hold up these big, big transnational systems with these little tiny decisions that we don't think about when we're in the shower or at the same. And that's the part that fascinates me. I think that I remain curious about all over the place, how the small things I'm doing, get tied to bigger things, how the big things I'm interested in, or inequity, whatever they are, are tied to the small things I'm doing.
Effy
Totally. Rebecca, thank you so much for your time. And your thoughts. This has been a super interesting conversation, as always, we can we can carry on this conversation for at least another hour easily. And we'd love to have you back and talk about all the other amazing things that you're you're writing about and you're thinking about, we really appreciate your time. Thank you.
Rebecca Herzig
You're welcome. And thank you both for inviting me to be here. It's been a complete pleasure.
Jacqueline
And thank you to everyone listening to read the book that inspired this conversation plucked a history of hair removal. And if you want to take a small step that has a big impact, purchase the book from a local woman-owned POC-owned queer-owned bookstore. And while you're there, check out Professor Rebecca Hurd, six other books, the nature of difference science of race the United States, from Jefferson to genomics and suffering for science Reason and sacrifice in the modern America. To share your thoughts on this conversation or your stories about the first time that you removed your hair, Head to facebook and join our Facebook group. We have a lot of stories coming up in the next few weeks from conscious uncoupling to insights on dating a sex worker to how to structure a thriving monogamous relationship and to keep up on the upcoming episodes and to share your curiosities on the topic first, follow or like this podcast so that we can continue to arrive on your phone each week. And then follow us on Instagram where we share sneak peeks of coming episodes. And of course, we have a very special place in our hearts for our Patreon members. deep appreciation for your continued support of this podcast. We can do this because of you. If you want to get behind the scenes footage, mini episodes, and over 50 videos from educator led workshops, then go to Patreon. At we are curious foxes. And then let us know that you're listening by sharing comment a story or question by emailing us or sending us a voice memo at listening at we're curious foxes.com Or you can record a question for the show by calling 201-870-0063
Effy
This episode is produced and edited by Nina Pollack, who we could never remove from our lives. Our intro music is composed by dev Saha we are so grateful for that work, and we're grateful to you for listening. As always, stay curious friends.
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