Finding a Fursona
By Julia Bychowski
April 3, 2026
Graphic by Dylan Camille
The moment when girls begin to deem themselves women widely varies in form. Was it the first time you smushed on that garishly pink, frosted lipstick from your mother’s vanity, or when you bruised your knees trying on six inch stilettos from DSW at your local strip mall? For me, it took the form of a men’s razor, taken to my arm hair in the dingy hotel shower where my family and I were staying for Christmas. Watching the shorn hair glide off my limbs and into the drain felt like a transition – a statement of my maturity and my dedication to beauty. Yet as I felt the stubble grow back over the weeks, I grew to despise the prickly, itching feeling under my sleeves.
Eleven-year-old me wasn’t yet privy to how that razor, and my innate desire for hairlessness, represented another win for an eternal beauty standard.
Hairless hegemony began at the turn of the 20th century, as female beauty standards and modesty softened during the fabric rationing of the World Wars. Traditionally conservative western attire previously cloaked female body hair, but as hems rose and sleeves shortened new areas became exposed.
Unsurprisingly, public perception of body hair being unfeminine stemmed from a desire for corporate profit. In 1915, the razor company Gillette launched an advertisement campaign for “Milady Décolleté”, the first women’s razor, establishing visible body hair on women as a sort of ‘freak abnormality’. Since that fateful campaign, the public hatred for hair has only been exacerbated. New and obscure forms of hair removal seem to hit the market every year – lasering, epilating and waxing being among the more painful methods. Every one sends the same message:
Female body hair is innately wrong, and elimination is expected.
But why? Despite its apparent universal immortality, the very existence of hairlessness as a beauty standard makes no objective sense. Though the sexualization of young girls persists, most other long lasting beauty ideals tend to focus on signs of female maturity – like bigger breasts and wider hips. But the growth of thicker hair is also a sign of biological maturity, meaning that there’s no natural reality in which bald skin would be paired with a more curvaceous figure.
It’s well established that beauty standards don’t particularly care about biological feasibility, the combination of young and mature traits make the reasoning behind the hairless standard perplexing. Ultimately, the only explanation I can conjure is that society likes to make women fit into an uncomfortable, money-making mold. Although we may not replace our razor heads as often as we should, we’ll still drop thousands of dollars on hair removal throughout our lifetime. Whilst we Band-Aid our shaving nicks, or wipe the tears from ripping off wax strips, we endure to feel a little closer to what society views as beautiful.
Engraved into womanhood, the expectation of hairless bodies has warped into some natural instinct. Take my haphazard shaving job. I don’t remember how I knew my arm hair was ‘wrong’, but I grabbed my dad’s razor and shaved it anyway. Nowadays, the scrape of stubble doesn’t just irritate me, it’s an alarm system, blaring the need for another shave. Visible hair is almost a reflection of our worth as women – every stubble a sign that you’re letting yourself go. Instead of visual armpit hair being a simple non-action, it’s seen as a rebellion. But this isn’t just about hair, it’s about distorting natural features into something charged with negativity. Our bodies shouldn’t be something we need to attack with blades and wax, but instead appreciate and embrace. Now I’m not going to sit here and suggest you braid your armpit hair, or go full unibrow, although I completely support both. Change doesn’t have to be all or nothing, it could be as small as choosing to not pluck that stray brow hair, or letting your arm hair grow past the prickly stubble. Even if it's strand by strand, we can reshape what body hair means to us, and find peace with our fur. 1
1 Lígia Azevedo, Male Stigmatization of Female Body Hair, (Brandeis University, 2021)■
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