Goodbye, Mr Gillette

I have exciting news, folks: I have decided to stop shaving my legs. I haven’t necessarily made this choice out of some huge feminist epiphany; it’s more the fact that I just can’t be bothered doing it anymore. The awkward positions in the shower, the little head unclipping itself from the razor spontaneously, the getting cold because I turned the shower off to save water, which then leads to goosebumps on my legs, which then leads to a higher chance of accidentally cutting myself. Not to mention all the money I end up spending on those stupid pink taxxed women’s razors. Having smooth legs is nice, but it just doesn’t seem worth it to me.

With my legs being hairy again, I’m reminded of the first time I shaved. I was eleven or twelve and my mum told me that I should start off my leg-shaving journey right, and get them waxed. To this day, I have no idea why she thought that was a good idea. But I trusted her to make proper womanly decisions for me, so I said okay. I didn’t really see this as a big deal, but when I was telling my best friend about it, and my childhood crush walked past us and gave me a look, I realised: this was one of those woman things that you keep private.

For a while after that, I didn’t talk to boys about my legs. I kept them shaved (after that first traumatic waxing appointment) and pretended that I had just been born with hairless legs. I struggled to keep up with expectations, all while learning about feminism and the unfair expectations that were on me, but not on men. I choose to shave, I’d tell people. Feminism is all about choice, and I choose to shave. I like shaving! It’s so nice to be hairless, and that is my personal, unmanipulated choice. But I don’t know if this was really true. It’s easy to tell off the rude boy at school who commented on your day five legs; it’s also easy to go home at the end of that day and shave, and tell yourself you were planning on doing it today anyway. I’m not saying you can’t be a feminist with smooth legs. Of course you can. But before you make that choice, it’s best to think through why exactly you want to do that. Let's look at a bit of history. According to ModeratelyFoxy on Tumblr.com, shaving companies started selling to women because they needed to make money while the men were off at war. This is not true. Do not use Tumblr as a source. However, shaving companies did have a sneaky part in why women shave today, and I think it’s safe to say money was a motivator. The man making this money was King Camp Gillette. Women started shaving their armpits in 1915, just over 100 years ago. Before this, no one really cared about our body hair, because it was always hidden along with the rest of our body. Showing skin wasn’t really socially acceptable yet. But in the early 1900’s, women began to rid themselves of all the layers that they were expected to wear, and were now wearing sleeveless dresses that made the world aware of the fact that yes, women grew armpit hair. Women had freed themselves of one expectation, and Gillette was there to capitalise on that by creating a new expectation to replace it. One step forward and two steps back, am I right ladies? In 1915, Gillette introduced the Milady Décolleté razor, with advertisements

that claimed that ‘the underarm must be as smooth as the face’ and that to be without embarrassment, a lady must shave her pits. ‘It’s off because it’s out’! Leg shaving took a little longer to become popular, as women figured it was easier to just wear stockings. But eventually, because of war rationing, stockings became harder to get, and so Gillette got his way. According to the author of Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, Rebecca M. Herzig, ‘Gillette was very canny about increasing consumption of his products, and targeting women was one part of that strategy’.

I’m certainly not the first to break the trend. In Herzig’s book, she writes about ‘arm-pit feminists’ in the women’s lib movement, and an essay written in 1972 by Harriet Lyons and Rebecca Rosenblatt. Lyons and Rosenblatt wrote about an ‘emerging feminist consiousness’ that would counter these expectations that women shave their pits and legs. Herzig writes that hair removal was declared by Lyons and Rosenblatt to be ‘one more measure of the drudgery to which American women were unjustly subjected’. Straight facts, ladies. There is a possibility I will start shaving my legs again, but for now I’m happy being a hairy gal. I’m prepared for the comments and judgmental looks I’ll get; I’ll fight them off with pride. It’s super fun to stroke my fluffy legs whenever I get the chance, and I’m loving not having to deal with stupid strawberry legs every week. And I don’t feel any less attractive; in fact I’ve been dressing up and experimenting with makeup looks even more lately. Hairy gals can be gorgeous too (FlorenceGiven on Instagram ROCKS her fits AND her fuzzy pits). So yeah, I think I’ll be leaving my razor to rust from now on. Sorry, not sorry, Gillette!

Whakapapa Takatāpuitanga

Benjamin Doyle (He/They)

Ētita’s Note: This piece was provided to us by the incomparable Benjamin Doyle, on the premise that we make you, the reader, aware it’s the startings of an incredible thesis being written. With that in mind, it’s still unfinished and a work in progress. A huge thank you e mara.

akatāpuitanga, the lived experience and quality of being Takatāpui, has many layers. The two most obvious of these are a simultaneous identity as both Māori and LGBTQ+. A notion of intersections within Takatāpui identities is, in itself, complicated. For Māori, it is unnatural to separate out aspects of a person's self, as though they exist in isolation from one another. To view these aspects as intersecting suggests that they can come together at one time, and at another have no overlap or influence on the other. As in the epistemologies of many Indigenous Peoples, Māori believe that all things are inherently related (Kimmerer, 2013; Mika, 2021; Pierotti, 2010; Smith, 2021). We express this, for example, through pepeha which acknowledge our interconnectedness with the natural environment (such as our ancestral mountains and rivers), the waka, iwi, hapū and marae from which we descend, and the whānau to which we belong. These aspects of our identity are deeply related, and therefore exist in constant conversation with one another. For Takatāpui, this way of understanding the universe means that our sexuality and gender is also unable to be disentangled from our identity as Māori; our Māoritanga. It is for this reason that I visualise Takatāpuitanga as a layered whakapapa, rather than as intersectional. As, while Takatāpui is an intersectional identity in its theoretical sense, in reality, the strands of our identity do not simply intersect, they are woven in layers. In short, our identity as Māori wholly informs our queerness. Whakapapa is foundational to our entire world view as Māori (Pihama, 2017; Pitman, 2012). Conceptually, it is often associated with the English term genealogy. However, this is a limited translation, as in the English there is a primary emphasis on cis-heteronormative nuclear family values. In Te Ao Māori, the notion of whakapapa is expansive and fluid. Firstly, there is no criteria that dictates only human or genetic ancestry. This is seen most powerfully in the way we acknowledge Ngā Atua, especially Papatūānuku and Ranginui, as our tūpuna, and the taiao as our tuakana. Secondly, whakapapa holds a much more relational understanding of whānau than in the Pākehā equivalent. Within a Maori worldview, the concept of whānau includes people who might not necessarily be related through birth or union, but rather, by virtue of their importance in one's life. Thirdly, whakapapa has less interest in a linear transmission of time than genealogy. While there is certainly a generational progression in the lives of people, the concept of time and space is not concrete. One of our whakataukī describes the way we percieve

passing through time as moving backwards into the future - kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua. Because of this, there is little expectation for formal titles to denote the distance of a person to their relative. Second-cousin, great-aunt, step-sibling, and niecein-law are, therefore, superfluous terms from a Māori world view. These relationships will often simply be acknowledged and treated as whānau - be that cousin, aunty, sibling, or niece - and certainly with little interest in a prefix denoting distance or authenticity. For these reasons, whakapapa is understood as a guiding principle in Te Ao Māori that shapes our interactions with all things, living and inanimate, as we acknowledge that nothing exists in isolation, but is a product of its whakapapa. If we are to hold true that all things belong to a whakapapa, it follows then that there is a whakapapa of Takatāpui identities and narratives. The lived experiences “ In knowing something’s whakapapa, of this whakapapa reach back as far as our most ancient tūpuna. So far, in fact, that we find ourselves at the very begining, in Te Kore - the the layers that make it up, you can genderless, fluid, potential from come to know how it came to be, how which all things descend. Takatāpui it relates to the rest of existence, and belong to this narrative, we are how it will come to exist in the future woven stands of the whakapapa. In fact, through reclamation, ” (burgess, et al., 2021). restoration, and representation projects, members of our own community have extinguished any doubt of our perpetual existence (Aspin & Hutchings, 2007a, 2007b). Papahou, waka huia, pūrākau, mōteatea, and waiata all confirm this fact, displaying a memory of our Takatāpui narratives from a not-so-distant past. The transmission of these narratives, however, has been violently disrupted by a period of sustained colonisation since the arrival of Pākehā on the shores of Turanga-nui-a-Kiwa in 1769 (Aspin & Hutchings, 2007b; Kerekere, 2017; Mikaere, 2019; Smith, 2012). It is only in recent decades, since the 1980s, that work has been done to recentre Takatāpui as a real, active, and historical component of Te Ao Māori. The reemergence of this kaupapa marks the beginning of a contemporary whakapapa Takatāpuitanga. The first intensive effort since the beginning of colonisation on these lands. Like the generational flow of ancestry, passed through the relational bonds of whānau, hapū, and iwi, the germination of this new era of whakaaro has blossomed through a process of whakapapa kōrero. Unlike the pace of human genealogy, however, the generational layers of thought and discourse about Takatāpui have unfolded, and continue to do so, at such momentum that those who nurtured the seeds of dialogue in their early stages are still contributing to the conversation, now as tuakana and kaumātua, in its continued life and growth.

Libbie and their Umbrella Full of Queers

I love large umbrellas just as much as the next person, and by far the largest and best umbrella I know of is the word ‘queer’. While not everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community identifies as queer, it is by far my favourite way to refer to the group. The large acronym can be a mouthful and ‘rainbow’ doesn’t always sit right with me. Queer is the best umbrella.

For one month a year, the powerhouse that is capitalism brushes dust off of their rainbow icons to stand with the queers. I’ve written a quick song to encapsulate this time of the year. “Hey June”, a cover of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude”:

Hey June, Don’t let me down Take those rainbow icons And make them better!!!!!!!!

Like for real, please, make it better. Pride means so much more than chucking a rainbow on things and banner-waving while screaming “hey hey look at me and how I appreciate this wonderful rainbow community but please ignore the shitty communities of sweatshops we use”. Just like any day, week, or month of recognition, pride month is riddled with companies run by the straight and cis-gendered to show off how good of a person they are. Pride is so much more than that! Where is the showcase of actual queer people succeeding in this capitalist world? Show me those instead of Mark Zuckerburg doing his weird lizard thing in front of a pride flag.

Let me reiterate that boy, oh boy, queer is a very large umbrella and what is the use of such a large umbrella if everyone is gonna be the same? Correct, there is no use. So don’t even slightly think that the queer experience and pride is the same for each of us. While most of us can sympathise with the nerve-wracking feeling that comes with coming out, even this is not the same for everyone. Heck, I didn’t even really come out; I just left it for other people to figure out. It’s like girls on Instagram who soft release their boyfriends by casually dropping them into posts- yeah, that’s me with my whole identity. My point is, everyone is navigating this life differently. You can ask a handful of people what pride means to them and come out with different answers, fueled by different experiences. In fact, I did this to save you the time. Because the queer experience can be so drastically different, to be sure I was comfortable writing around such a broad umbrella topic, I did some inquiry into what pride is to the old Instagram followers.

Pride is confidence. It is love. It is being true to yourself. This encapsulates many of the responses I got, flooded with positivity and love and showcasing pride as, well, something to be proud of. And it is! It is literally in the name and one of the whole points of pride is to be unapologetically ourselves and to love ourselves. For way too long has the queer community had to live in the shadows and hide who they are. BITCH IT’S 2022 WE AIN'T GOT TIME FOR THAT SHIT NO MORE. It’s time to be gay, do crime, and yea be confident about who you are!

But also pride is about acknowledging that not everyone in the world is able to do this safely. Be gay, do crime, but in some places that is one in the same. Pride is about also loving our queer whānau who can’t come out or be who they would ideally love to be. For some people, it just isn’t safe and their circumstances, brought on by some sad thinking, doesn’t allow it. For all that love we feel for ourselves and fellow takatāpui, this love has got to be extended to those deep in a safety closet who aren’t getting the love they need.

Stop rainbow washing shit every June for a lil fun half-assed activism. Instead, educate yourselves on the intersectioanlity of being queer and go kiss who ever you want! I leave you with another song this time not poorly written by me but the queer queen Lady Gaga:

No matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgender life I’m on the right track, baby, I was born to survive. Rejoice and love yourself today Cause, baby, you were born this way.