“I heard you waxed your legs…” he said to me while giggling as he nervously scurried out of the gymnasium. It was the end of the school year, and my mom had just waxed my legs for my elementary school graduation. Since we used sikkar, or sugar wax, the sugar had gotten stuck to my skin and caused bruising on my thigh. Visible bruising.
“It’s probably a cultural thing..” two strangers across from me said to each other on the train as they loudly have a conversation about how they see body hair on women. I was coming home from work on a packed train, and my legs were crossed which showed a sliver of skin and hair in between the top of my shoes and the ends of my pants. I didn’t quite get the beginning of the conversation, but I remember loud laughing before I started paying attention to the words coming out of their mouths.
“You know what Baba told me this morning? He asked me to say something to you about the hair on your legs.” It was May of 2020, and the world was on lockdown due to the Coronavirus. I had just started embracing growing out my hair, and even started seeing someone that only loved it the more it grew. I was staying with the family at the time, and felt uneasy. One, because it’s my body and hair is natural. And two, because I had already planned to wax (by my own decision and on my own time), and didn’t want it to seem like I was waxing because someone told me to. Because my dad (via my mom) told me to.
Hair has been a constant part of my Arab-American life, and the bigger half of it was more negative than anything. So much money, time, patience, and pain has been spent on hair removal all across the family. We would lock ourselves in the bathroom to bleach the thick and dark hair on our backs, get wax burns on our upper lip from trying too hard, and get nauseous from the notorious stench of Nair. Frankly, I got tired of it.
I like to think that the female experience in an Arab household has shifted drastically in the last decade. Along with freedom in career paths, relationships, and style, body hair has taken a front seat at my table of ways to take back control. It’s the freedom to choose; the freedom to choose what I want to keep wild and growing or smooth and hairless. I am navigating my new-found comfort with leaving my body hair alone, and I still struggle in certain situations where I feel like I shouldn’t. Unnecessary comments. Obvious stares. Not-so-funny jokes. Last time I visited Lebanon, I waxed before arriving. Often times I don’t have the energy or patience to deal with comments that I know are coming. I rarely get to visit now because of work, time, and money. I wax and shave not because I feel that I need to, but because I don’t want to spend those two short weeks that I have trying to embarrassingly cover up, or defend my choices to family members.
I’m not sure when I’ll be visiting Lebanon again, but I know that I’ll be growing more confident in myself and my hair in the time between then and now. I will channel those comments and stares and turn them into doors that broaden the image of what an Arab woman looks like. Because she doesn’t look like one thing or another. She is herself. And within that, I want to dismantle the idea that an Arab woman is for you. Because she is not. She is for herself.