HuffPo Feminist Quits Shaving to Protest for Abortion Rights, Cries About Getting Criticized

Ben Bartee | 4:42 PM on February 28, 2023

*(Mark Hertzberg/The Journal Times via AP, File)*

A HuffPo feminist shares her well-informed belief that societal expectations of shaving her leg hair are a “microcosm” of “other, more dire injustices” fashionable on the Social Justice™ left.

Via NBC Think:

In the harsh bathroom light, looking at my fluffy legs, I felt like I was missing a critical piece of information about my body. In the two decades since I’d hit puberty, I hadn’t let my leg hair grow out once, not even during the pandemic.

It was time to change that…

I wondered how the idea of needing permission to change my shaving practices relates to other patriarchal issues. No one is dying over leg hair, but there are racist beauty standards to contend with, not to mention the wage gap, a lack of queer and trans rights and a dearth of abortion access, all of which minimize different groups and limit their authority over their bodies and lives.

Not shaving your legs is not a brave act or #Resistance against the Patriarchy™ or whatever version of that this dingbat thinks it is.

But, in her own quixotic way, she was evidently very proud of her fight against the imaginary Patriarchy™ windmill.

She further applauded herself for her stunning bravery in a self-indulgent thinkpiece, this one via HuffPost:

I got my first hate mail ever over not shaving my legs. Or, more precisely, over having the audacity to write about it for NBC News Think. Within an hour, I had a dozen emails. By the next morning there were two dozen more ― plus more than 100 Twitter notifications.

I’d written about the double standards surrounding leg hair, which I’d discovered through a no-shaving experiment. Though some people thanked me for sharing my experience, the overwhelming response to my piece was anger. Readers told me I was overreacting. They called me narcissistic and stupid.

This is the internet. People hurl way worse invective at their peers than “narcissistic” and “stupid.” Not everyone writes columns about it. No one, presumably, puts a gun to her head to force her to read comments. She gets almost universal praise, assuredly, ensconced within her warm “progressive” social bubble.

To hear her tell it, even the mildest criticism is tantamount to hate speech.