An Indian woman’s poem about removing and dealing with body hair as a woman has gone viral, getting over 35,000 likes and 8,500 shares on Facebook in a few days.
Naina Kataria’s poem was inspired when she went out for a movie with a guy. "We were watching this ad or razors for women when I remarked that celebrities shouldn't endorse such products because it sends out a message that one has to buy them to look beautiful. He replied by saying "OMG you're too much of a feminist."
His comment made Kataria think about the unrealistic standards of beauty set for women and to what extent these have to be hidden from women.
“So when I thread my eyebrows and wax almost every part of my body raw, I ought to not believe a man who says that I'm beautiful, because he's clearly not complimenting me, he's complimenting all the torturous efforts that I have gone through to match an unsaid yet mandatory standard,” Kataria says. “I am pretty sure he wouldn't appreciate me the same with bushy eyebrows and hairy legs, which is why his appreciation for my looks is a delusion.”
Kataria adds that while it is women everywhere who have shared the poem, the idea was “to notify men and grab their attention” about what hair removal is like. Here is the poem in its entirety.
When a man tells me
I’m beautiful
I don’t believe him.
Instead, I relive my days in high school
When no matter how good I was
I was always the girl with a moustache
He doesn’t know what it’s like
to grow up in your maternal family
Where your body is the only one that
Proudly boasts of your father’s X
While your mother’s X sits back and pities
It’s unladylike-ness
He doesn’t know the teenager
Who filled her corners with
Empty consolations of
Being loved for who she was- someday.
He doesn’t know hypocrisy.
He doesn’t know of the world that
tells you to ‘be yourself’
and sells you a fair and lovely shade card
in the same fucking breath
He doesn’t know of the hot wax and the laser
whose only purpose is to
replace your innocent skin
with its own brand of womanhood
He doesn’t know of the veet and the bleach
That uproot your robust hair
in the name of hygiene
Hygiene, which when followed by men
makes them gay and unmanly
He doesn’t know how unruly eyebrows are tamed
and how uni brows die a silent death
All to preserve beauty
And of the torturous miracles that happen
Inside the doors marked
"WOMEN ONLY"
So when a man calls me beautiful
I throw at him, a smile; a smile that remained
After everything the strip pulled away
And I dare him
To wait
Till my hair grows back.