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Feelin' Plucky

The pretty arch of my (untweezed) eyebrows.

Thea Lim 10 Mar 2006Shameless Magazine

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A few months ago, I had a shocking revelation. The last time I saw my eyebrows in their true form was six years ago, when I first started plucking them. Considering that hair grows at a rate of roughly 15 centimetres per year, I've exterminated over 90 generations of eyebrows - almost a metre of innocent hair that never saw the light of day. Slightly perturbed by my lack of familiarity with my own face, I decided to grow my eyebrows out.

No big deal, right?

Every time I approached a mirror and saw little seedlings of hair beginning to appear, my plucking hand would twitch. I snuck in a few plucks, wondering why it was so darn difficult to quit. Finally, I stopped the secret tweezing and just let my eyebrows flourish.

To my horror, I've found that what started as a funny experiment has turned into a body image crisis. I hate my scraggly natural eyebrows. To me, they change the entire way my face looks. I feel ugly, awful and unlovable. But I am even more distressed to find that I, an allegedly tough and fearless person who guffaws in the face of fascist beauty standards, feel tearful every time I look in the mirror.

I always thought I plucked my eyebrows simply because I liked the way it looked and that it had nothing to do with conforming to imposed standards of beauty. But if plucking is a solely aesthetic endeavour, then the end of plucking shouldn't bring me to tears - it should just mean that I no longer have shaped eyebrows. If it's a purely superficial pastime for me, it shouldn't resound so loudly in my heart and my sense of self-worth.

But it does.

This eyebrow debacle has forced me to take a long, hard look at my so-called liberated beauty ideals. My hairy eyebrows make me feel like yakking because I equate full eyebrows with manliness. What's so bad about looking like a man? Well, in my understanding of beauty, a woman who is manly is not attractive. And in my understanding of women, a woman who is not attractive is not a woman.

Deranged plucker

Where do I get these rubbish ideas from? Turn on the television, open a magazine (that isn't a grassroots feminist mag), look at subway ads or go to the video store. Try to find one image of a "real" woman who has full-on, unkempt, unruly, bushy eyebrows. Mary Louise Parker, the deranged housewife in Angels in America, has plucked eyebrows. Ariadna Gil, a nun in Libertarias, a film about women in the Spanish Civil War, has plucked eyebrows. United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has extremely plucked eyebrows.

It sounds bonkers, but in the cultural images that we digest every day, whether manufactured by Hollywood or publicized by newscasts, "woman" equals a human with eyebrows shaped like thin lines, hairless legs, perfectly arched fingernails, the list goes on. If I stop plucking my eyebrows and shaving my armpits and styling my hair - or any of the other things I have learned to equate with "woman" - then I begin to feel like I'm not a woman anymore.

We like to think of ourselves as beings with free will. But it's possible that culture shapes how we define reality - from what is good and bad to what defines men, women and anyone in between - so much that the smallest, silliest little actions can carry crushing weight and performing or not performing these actions in a culturally acceptable way can come with truckloads of angst. There is nothing wrong with plucking your eyebrows. But there is something wrong with being unable to stop plucking your eyebrows.

Take 'em back

The personal is political, what does this mean? It means that even the two-inch lines of hair above my eyes carry the often-twisted conceptions of my culture. It means that in my most banal and uninteresting daily activities, I'm manifesting and broadcasting cultural values that may be sexist and hurtful (for example, a person who doesn't have "perfect" eyebrows is not a real woman).

Some of this might sound totally bananas. If you're unconvinced that your eyebrows are powerful tools of social control, do an experiment. Grow your eyebrows out. Stop shaving your legs or armpits (in the summer, winter shaving sabbaticals don't count). Or don't wear makeup for a few days. Take a break from something you do regularly to maintain your appearance and see how it makes you feel. Maybe you'll start to think, like me, that it's time to take back our eyebrows.

Thea Lim was born in Toronto and grew up in Singapore. Her current pursuits include nonviolent baking and sewing felt to things.

This stories originally appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of Shameless.  [Tyee]

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