Ethicist Heather Widdows wrote an interesting piece for TIME magazine about the ethics of hair removal:
Visible body hair is rarely seen. It is so rare that underarm hair on a celebrity becomes a news story. For the rest of us, showing it in public — even at the beach, when wearing very little — is almost a political statement in itself. Increasingly, women remove all visible body hair. Including pubic hair. Men too have been getting in on the act, hence the long-rising popularity of the “back, sack and crack” waxing technique. The hairy chests and Playboy bushes of the 1970s are gone. Quite simply, body hair is no longer a feature of the ideal body.
Check out Widdows’ book Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal for more on this topic:
