Gender Role Reversal Essay

After my gender role reversal, I was sure of one thing: people definitely react when women don’t adhere to the practice of shaving, plucking, and tweezing. However, I was left with so many questions and, quite honestly, I knew little about why I continue to shave week in and week out even though removing my body hair has no real purpose. I was extremely excited to immerse myself in the research and learn more about this strange habit. What I did know even before starting my project was that even though body hair is biologically inevitable and typically universal among all people, the human population seems to have reservations about letting their body hair grow out in naturally occurring ways. As I researched the topic, I found that most …show more content…
This led her to conduct another study to see if criticism about female body hair actually had to do with underlying feelings of resentment toward feminists. While an interesting and logical hypothesis, Basow showed that no matter whether one explained lack of body hair removal due to feminist reasons or a medical difficulty, onlookers continued to associate females with body hair as less feminine and having more domineering attributes than females that were clean shaven. For instance, participants viewed females with body hair as, “less friendly, moral, and relaxed…more aggressive, unsociable, strong, nonconformist, dominant, assertive, independent, and in better physical condition” (Basow & Willis, 2001). Basow and Willis’s study demonstrated that having exposed body hair as a female can actually impact how bystanders perceive the women’s personality as they form negative assumptions of her based on her shaving habits. Studies conducted by other researchers show that body hair can provoke other negative feelings within people as well. More specifically, findings showed that unfavorable beliefs about female body hair were related to feelings of repulsion (Tiggemann & Lewis,