I started shaving my body hair when I was about 13 years old. I went to a private Christian school almost exclusively with white blonde kids, and gym class was an embarrassing time for me, being that I am half Indian and out of all the girls in my class, only I had thick dark body hair. The girls in my class didn't understand why I wasn't more shamed of my body hair and they would regularly compare their thin blonde body hair to my thick dark hair and ask me why I didn't shave. I wasn't allowed a lot of TV so I didn't catch the body shaming ads from there, but it didn't matter because my peers certainly transferred the body shaming to me on their own. I didn't know why I should be ashamed of my body hair- just that it was yet another reason for the girls in my class to bully me. When I went home and asked to shart shaving, my mother was horrified and wouldn't let me anywhere near a razor, claiming I was too young and would cut myself. I begged and begged and finally when we went to India that summer, my mother let me wax, which she considered more appropriate for a 13 yr old than shaving (idk I guess it's a cultural thing). My cousins around my same age in India were pretty obsessed with removing their body hair too. So that summer I borrowed razors from my female cousins and kept up with the shaving (mostly just my legs at that point). Insisting upon shaving was an important aspect of my rebellion and coming of age as I hit puberty and started to transition into a young woman. I didn't know why it was important- but the girls I went to school with made sure I KNEW I would never look "normal" like them unless I did shave.
Since I associated a shaved body with "true" womanhood, as I grew older I would always shave when I was pursuing casual sex with men. I got to the point in my mid-late teens where I knew that there was nothing wrong with my natural body hair, but shaving still seemed necessary in a world where young women are constantly bombarded with messages about how hairy women are disgusting. At the very least, I figured that the men I was flirting with would feel that way even if I didn't personally have a problem with my own body hair. But most of the reinforcement of this idea came from the girls I grew up around. Back then I was pretty much shaving if I expected to get laid and not shaving if I wasn't expecting to get laid- more a practical matter than anything else. One time just for fun I rebelled against the shaved standards of beauty just for the heck of it- I stopped shaving my legs and everything else for a couple months and since we were required to wear skirts that meant everyone could see it! Everyone made fun of me until they got bored of it. One of the boys thought it was funny to mimic me in an opposite sort of way by shaving his body all over. I don't think he appreciated the itchiness that ensued. I personally found that I was taking back my power around my body and had no problem with the way my body felt with hair. But chasing boys and getting laid was more important to me, so after a couple months of that I focused my attention on getting laid and would shave before I went to bars to pick up older men...
Fast forward to a few years later- I'm living in the woods with hippies. I'd already become a sex worker and made the same assumption that I'd made in high school- that men prefer shaved women, especially in the mainstream. Obviously the hippie guys and girls loved body hair and kept all of theirs, but let's face it, hippies are usually broke and weren't paying my bills. By this point, it wasn't peer pressure that kept me shaving but rather my false perception that over 95% of men would only be attracted to hairless women. This was most definitely a media-driven perception. There are no hairy women in mainstream modeling, advertising, etc. Not to mention when I was first becoming a sex worker I researched to high hell and back and didn't see any successful escorts who kept their body hair. So I just figured... If I wanted to be successful, I had to shave. And that was that. Being a hippie woodsy girl at the time, I didn't need much money so I would let me hair grow wild for 3-4 months until I ran out of money, then shave it all off, spend a few weekends in Baltimore working on Backpage and then head back to the woods once I'd amassed a few grand that I could live off of until the next round. My hippie girlfriends were all so curious about what it was like to be an escort. I used to tell them that te worst part was the shaving. After all, sex with older men was my preference so that part was no big deal. It was only the shaving that I hated. We would all go skinny dipping in the woods and all my girlfriends would enjoy showing off their body hair. I was the only one who was shaved- and it seemed almost tragic because I knew my body hair was the thickest and darkest of all if only I didn't have to shave it all off every few months for work. I was torn between my love of escorting and my love of my body hair for several years, thinking they were incompatible enjoyments.
Although I was a bit afraid of being labeled a freakshow, when I finally left the woods and moved to NYC, I started thinking about how much I enjoyed escorting and how I wanted to make it more sustainable for me. And the truth is, the shaving WAS the worst part. I didn't like looking down at my pubic region and feeling like a little girl after becoming friends with so many women who openly kept their gorgeous body hair. And I really felt like my body hair was the most gorgeous of all! I wondered if escorting with body hair would mean that I would only appeal to extreme niche fetish clients. I knew blonde girls who escorted with body hair but you couldn't even really notice it in photos or from a distance. I knew from life experience that my body hair would certainly be more controversial than a blonde girl's body hair, particularly because it's so much thicker and more noticeable. But I figured if there was any place to experiment with trying something new, it was NYC. So I did.
Would I go back to shaving? Not for anything less than $200,000, as I've jokingly responded to silly inquiries from what I can only imagine are incredulous gentlemen. If anything I'd like to see a mainstream fashion magazine featuring hairy women alongside shaved ones- because the media could honestly use a little diversification in how it represents women's bodies. My success with my career and my bottom line are hard evidence that tons of men enjoy women with body hair. Why our media doesn't reflect that, I still don't understand. But it certainly has been eye opening to make my living as an underground icon for hairy women. I'm always encouraging more women to try going all-natural: after all, I can barely keep up with the demand for my own company, and I prefer gentlemen who book me for my personality or specialized skills rather than exclusively for my body hair. To the point where if I can tell that's the only reason a gentleman is interested, I'll probably turn him down or refer him to another girlfriend with body hair.
It does take a certain type of woman with a lot of confidence in her own beauty to go against the mainstream and keep her natural body hair these days. In my personal life, I do fuck women, and pretty much all of them have body hair.