i’m very hairy.
monkey girl with hair every where it doesn’t just grow in big curly locks on my head my legs do that too and my armpits and other places. it’s one of those things that has haunted me all my life like a bad memory that i’ve conjured some tragic meaning out of and kept repeating to myself but wished would go away. i lazered it all off in my early twenties, allegedly, because even after two and a half years of shocking dead every root of hair on my skin from the neck down, it all grew back. when that happened i was so angry that i went the whole other way and let it all grow out, like a proper feminist, because fuck the patriarchy. the patriarchy is what made me hate my hair so i will learn to love it out of spite.
today i’m somewhere between not caring, still not liking it very much, preferring it gone, but also not liking the process of keeping it gone this struggle against myself an illusion to be preserved. so you see my problem is still the narrative which is still bitter tragic jaded. why is it struggling against nature and not refining nature? because patriarchy because hegemony because america because i who grew up watching hollywood movies and american shows and reading american novels i think my story is their story that we have a shared story there is a singular story and i am a part of it because i forget as i travel freely around the world with my canadian accent that i am actually not part of that story actually that story was told to me so that i would forget that i had my own story and i fell for it. again do you hear how morose? i’m still clinging to something to blame. that doesn’t mean that what i’m saying is untrue. but it’s hard to admit that i like the feel of my skin when all that hair is out of the way regardless what the patriarchy thinks. this i once told myself was internalized misogyny but is in fact i think a preference that i’m ashamed to have because it happens to align with the apparent preferences of the amorphous enemy. which is silly considering you could say nannies and pedophiles both like kids but i don’t think nannies are afraid of their shame because of the fact. in ancient times around these parts people used to shave their bodies and heads for status and to protect from diseases. today it’s the same but a little heavier on the status. even men here fancy themselves pharaohs and are virtually hairless. you see, beautiful reader? you hear the contempt?
i think i am onto something here that i can’t yet really grasp the scope of.
the library of alexandria? the tigris river ran black with ink from all the books in the house of wisdom when hulagu khan and his forces captured the city of baghdad. he ordered the millions of books be thrown in the river so he could use them as a bridge to walk across.
a friend of ours came over while i was nigredo/albedoing to you about body hair and we got to talking about how much knowledge has been lost to genghis khan and christian armies and the ignorance of men throughout history that just wanted to conquer and destroy. what did the pharaohs know? where would we be if we knew what they knew? we didn’t rediscover the sun as our center until the 1500s. akhenaten worshipped the sun in 1500s BC.
our friend works in abu dhabi as a high-school biology teacher at a fancy private international school, and he was telling us about how the higher up you go in the grades, the fewer and fewer emirati students there are. because they don’t want to learn he said, why the fuck would they want to learn their families basically fund the school, they already have a house and healthcare and a piece of desert in their name and everything they need from the government. that’s all they do, they go out to the desert and they drift, they all have patrols and they do all the desert modifications, everything it’s crazy. and they’re the fucking worst because if you have twenty students and three or four of them are emiratis they ruin the whole class you’re screwed. they answer back they don’t do assignments they belittle you they’re rude and you can’t say anything because their parents don’t care.
i wonder if one could play to their apparent preferences and start a school of drifting, a hajwala school, i wonder if there are any hajwala schools. there are a couple, i googled it.
until tomorrow <3
Could it also be a hygiene thing? I feel like my deodorant sits better. And I like my soap hair-free, thanks -- GAH🙈 hahahaha
Think of the hair as an abundance of the body that insists on itself whatever your preference.
The need to be entirely hairless everywhere now seems to me a conspiracy of androids.