Let's Talk About Body Hair

You don't have to consider shaving to be the most important feminist issue of our time in order to recognize that our culture has some fairly messed up ideas about body hair. Artist Julia Squire, however, is looking to push back against those ideals with her new photography series Saturated Blossoms, which features pictures of women with their body hair dyed bright colors. And as an added bonus, there's also a video with 16 people discussing their views on body hair to go along with the project, and the results are pretty fascinating.

Everyone in the video has their own take on body hair, but most agree that mainstream culture plays a big part in influencing their attitudes. After all, magazines, movies, TV shows, and pretty much all other forms of media overwhelmingly portray hairless bodies as the ultimate ideal. And that impacts how people feel about real bodies in the real world, both their own and other people's, which kind of sucks.

In an ideal world, deciding whether or not to remove your body hair would be based on nothing but what you personally liked, rather than having so much societal pressure influencing the decision instead. Unfortunately, we really don't live in that world, but as long as we keep having conversations about it, maybe we'll get there at some point.

You can check out the video below, and some of Squire's (slightly NSFW) photographs on her website here.

Image: kropekk_pl/pixabay