Life

Feelin' Plucky

The pretty arch of my (untweezed) eyebrows.

By Thea Lim, 10 Mar 2006, Shameless 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]

15 Comments:

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  • speedo

    6 years ago

    Comments on "Feelin' Plucky"

    I'm with Bill Maher who claims, "Ladies, leave your eyebrows alone. Here's how much men care about your eyebrows: do you have two of them? Okay, we're done." Women, you're grooming to appease other women, not men.

  • jsinger

    6 years ago

    I've been thinking about hair in general lately, and about how it relates to freedom. It has led me to think that we need a major hair rebellion like back in the '60's when a lot of women stopped shaving their legs and armpits and men grew their hair long. (I was never able to fully join that rebellion by the way, for the same reasons the writer expressed re: not feeling like a woman, so I guess it's hypocritical of me to be suggesting it). The standards for appropriate hairiness have increased enormously since those days, and I feel sorry for the young women of today who have to constantly attend not only to their legs and armpits but now, apparently, to the pubic area and, of course, the eyebrows. The beauty industry, which has long profitted from women's hair removal needs, is now seriously targetting men, who are shaving and waxing their entire bodies in ever greater numbers. We are being manipulated. What more perfect moneymaking scheme could anyone come up with than hair removal products? We're animals, goddammit, and we're hairy (some unlucky ones hairier than others). I listened to a program on CBC recently where the topic was hair removal for men. The premise was that women prefer hairless men, but when the women in the audience were asked to confirm this premise they didn't seem to really care that much, except from the point of view that men deserve some of the suffering that has been imposed on us via the need for hairlessness. How I long for a new hippy type movement, on many different levels. Rise up youngsters, come on and show your power by getting hairy.

  • Rhea

    6 years ago

    Eyebrow plucking always struck me as a refined form of torture. I'd never even heard of anyone doing it until I was in my 20's. Ouch!

  • allan

    6 years ago

    This reminds me of my constant battle to stop my barber from finishing off my hair cut and beard trim with a few snips above my eyes.

    She always gets to within an inch or two of shearing me before I politely, but firmly say no thank you.

    I guess the good thing is she has no intent of charging me extra should I ever accept to be sheared.

    Sure beats having to go out and find a grease pencil, or what ever they use to put the proper curve into by eyebrows.

    Besides you can convey so much more meaning when you raise a thick eyebrow in response to a statement or a question than one of those wimpy paint ons.

  • mhoule

    6 years ago

    I just had my eyebrows waxed for the first time (OUCH!) and I'm 38. Guess what? No one noticed. Not one bit. My friend who waxes poetic about waxing (haha), didn't even notice. My husband didn't notice. Not one person did. I finally realized I was spending too much time looking too closely in the mirror whilst plucking the hairy lip (damn, another confession!). I've had hairy armpits now and then and have been given grief by the said same friend and my husband ... to hell with them all, I say. Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow.

  • Shasta

    6 years ago

    Well.. this story almost makes me pee my pants……..

    Mhoule – you’re a hoot!

    I have NEVER had my eyebrows waxed. I have waxed my legs, my ‘beyond bikini line’, my upper lip… but I NEVER thought to pluck my eyebrow… OH YES… I have also waxed & plucked my armpits….

    I now shave my armpits once or twice a year… pluck the ‘strays’ on my chin (YEESH!!!!! WTF with that one!) and shave my legs every 2 – 3 months…. Even my husband doesn’t notice OR care….. he said to me the other day: “as long as you don’t stink…. I don’t care”…..

    Why the pain of it all? Why the time spent? Mhoule.. you’re right: NO ONE NOTICES

  • Fii

    6 years ago

    I prefer hairless men... and I have a couple of friends who do too; one lives in Beijing...

  • allan

    6 years ago

    Fii, is Beijing a hot spot for hairless men or something?

    Hey, nice to see you around.

  • Avicenna

    6 years ago

    It may be of small consolation, but the "regrowth" of your natural eyebrows after being plucked, shaven or otherwise manipulated is unlikely its "natural" appearance. You may or may not notice that hair that was previously shaven grows back with a vengenance - coarser and thicker than what it had started out as being. Thus, the hairy bandana you now sport in all its glory was likely tamer long ago.
    Having said that, I confess to being an eyebrow person - not mine per se (though I'm rather pleased with the arch that they were endowed with) but those that frame the eyes of any face. The worst look are faces that don't have eyebrows - I find the loss of expressiveness disconcerting, - and the most endearing are those fine arches that have the skill to be raised one at a time in a non-verbal query (a la brosnan and connery).
    Congrats on writing a significant piece of work solely on the trials and tribulations of the pointed (or not, as the case may be) eyebrows.

  • allan

    6 years ago

    Avicenna, speaking of big eyebrows, (no, not yours), I must pass on congrats to those of you from Vancouver-Kingsway who managed to get down to False Creek yesterday to greet your rather publicity shy (some call it retiring) MP.

    I see Mr. Emerson has once again changed his tune and no longer agrees to even consider actions that the ethics commissioner may call for.

    Oh, and according to today's Globe&Mail, which has a couple of pics of the former Liberal hiding from local Liberals locked out of the media event, there is hope Emerson will speak to local constituents.

    Well, it's not as direct as that, but if you purchase a membership in the Vancouver Board of Trade and attend their weekly rubber chicken fests chances are you'll run into the old Eyebrow himself.

    Apparently he showed up and spoke to some 400 VBT members this week. All hush-hush though, I'm told.

    I'm going to be generous and suggest that this really popular politican was just a bit confused given that so many people want to offer him some advice that he actually thought he was talking to his real constituents rather than his financial backers.

  • Avicenna

    6 years ago

    Aye, allan - that is one perplexed brow that is looking askance. We are a righteous bunch, aren't we? But the one who has me more red (and not necessarily wearing the Liberal hue) is Harper and his self-imagined rule of the land as a deity. Once he had settled himself on the throne - the heck with conventions of our "second-class socialist state" he imagines the dotty people of Canada cling to. He can sanction floor crossing without there being a floor, he can appoint "temporary" seats in the senate so he can knight an unelected into the Cabinet, he can change us "Peace Keepers" into combat soldiers, he can dismantle health-care, trash Kyoto and the promise for child care services the gov't had already made to the provinces - and spit on the ethics commissioner to boot - and the man who lacks the ability to emote - is "loathe" to cooperate with the rest of the country. Surely we aren't as assinine as the folks in other countries who re-elect former CRAP - but who still smell just as sweet...?

  • G West

    6 years ago

    The PM was at his casual, boot-dragging, dust-kissed open-collared best in Kandahar today, didn't you think? I'm surprised he wasn't decked out in desert camo gear with a kevlar helmet on his pointy little head.
    That performance was pretty eyebrow-archingly bad...God help the Afghanis!

  • allan

    6 years ago

    I simply couldn't control my eyebrows this morning when I saw ol' Stephen decked out in flack jacket and all, his glazed over eyes pearing back at me on the front page of the Globe&Mail

    Strange though, that all those real military types brought in to act as props (better than being fodder, I guess), behind our new war hero seemed less than troubled by the danger as they stood about in unprotected shirtsleeves.

    I also nboticed a slight departure from the Globe front-page picture on Monday that showed our PM encircled by smiling (not forced, I hope) faces. The props looked a bit put out in todays' group-n-grin.

  • Mkitty

    6 years ago

    Oh good lord people..does everything have to turn political. Grooming is not a sin. I have a husband who, if he does not trim his eyebrows, looks like a caveman. The hairs on his eyebrows can get up to almost 1/2 inch long..and no, I am not kidding. I occassionally pluck my eyebrows, but I repeat, there is nothing wrong with grooming. You all make it sound like grooming is some kind of evil torture. Men shave their faces, some women pluck their eyebrows...it's all grooming. Get over yourselves...

  • Yammer

    6 years ago

    Reading pieces like this one makes me feel guilty or stupid for about five minutes, because I spend a lot of time, cash and effort eating right, working out, and shaving myself. Am I filling the coffers of the beauty industry? Am I stumping for the tyranny of the youth-obsessed fashion meme?

    Well, yeah.

    But the thing is, looking good is not just about vanity. Vanity is the carrot, the stick is aging. Plucking stray hairs means very little, but it could be part of a suite of useful (if vainglorious) behaviours. If I could live a bit longer and keep my wife interested in me to boot, that sounds like a useful activity.

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