Lola Kirke: Shedding Light on Body Image Stereotypes
The Golden Globes, which aired on Jan. 8, featured a great variety of outfits and spurred hundreds of “Best and Worst Dressed” articles from many news outlets. The Golden Globes were full of drama, from Meryl Streep eloquently bashing Donald Trump, to La La Land winning seven awards.
Among the wild events of the evening, Lola Kirke, star of Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle, attracted just as much attention from the media. However, it was not for the reason that one may think. Her dress was beautiful, like so many of the other outfits that night: a pink, Andrew Gn designed strapless dress embroidered with flowers. She also wore a “F**k Paul Ryan” pin which she had custom-made to match the colors she was wearing to support Planned Parenthood.
However, that wasn’t even what sparked the attention. She received heat for, wait for it, not shaving her armpits. Kirke commented on an Instagram photo she posted of her red carpet look, “Thanks to all you beautiful people who didn’t send me death threats on account of my #awesome #hairyarmpits! You rule.”
What is the big deal? Kirke has armpit hair. All women have armpit hair. It’s a basic fact of life that apparently people don’t like to deal with, even though it’s a basic part of our biology. And apparently, people think that it is enough of an excuse to write death threats to her. Because people who don’t shave should get death threats.
In movies, we always see movie stars with enviable bodies that are lasered to be hairless. Our culture finds body hair disgusting and animal-like. The werewolves on Teen Wolf are hairless, and the contestants on The Bachelorette don’t have a full chest of hair. Victoria Secret models, alongside other models, are completely hairless walking down the runway. For those of you who have watched The 40-Year-Old Virgin, you will of course remember the hilarious scene where Steve Carell gets his torso waxed. We all watched with awe and disgust when he squeaked and squealed as he became hairless. This was supposed to symbolize his metamorphosis from “hairy beast” to a gentleman.
What spurs this hate for body hair? It’s as natural as the hair that grows out of our heads and the nails that grow on our toes. Perhaps it has something to do with furthering us from our animal counterparts. We humans like to fool ourselves into thinking that we aren’t animals, that we’re above them just because we are self-aware and conscience of our intelligence. We like to think that we have our own little class in the animal kingdom. We like to think that we are like gods; powerful, all-knowing and beautiful. Perhaps the little bit of “fur” that pokes out of our skin reminds us of where we evolved from, and disrupts the idea of us being not one of them.
Whatever the basis for intolerance is, it is completely ridiculous. The sooner society realizes this, the sooner people will be more confident in themselves and their bodies. Hair is a natural thing that shouldn’t just be on our eyelashes, eyebrows and heads. We evolved from animals with hair covering their entire bodies; this is a fact whether people want to argue it or not. Biologically speaking, we are made to have hair.
With so many cultural aspects of society fighting over how we should tend to our bodies, we need to fight back against this ridiculous stigma and claim our body image back. Everyone is beautiful, body hair or not, and should never feel pressured to change how they look based on what society deems “beautiful.”