After enough years, thinking up new dyke opinion pieces to write becomes a little more challenging.  Address the stereotypes, lament the hatred, joke about dyke drama ... blah blah blah.  One of my three readers said (and I quote), "Oi feminist, write about hair - I want to throw the razor away."  My personal opinion of leg, armpit and pube shaving and waxing and electrolysis and so on is, if you want to do it, do; if not, don't.

Most queer women I talk to these days say they're fans of shaving it all off.  Myself, I am a lazy so and so and tend to shave some things and trim others as the mood and motivation takes me.  I will come right out and say (probably for the zillionth time) that I am most certainly not a fan of the bald, pre-pubescent pubic area.  It makes me go eeuw - perhaps because I was a sexually abused kid and don't like the paedophilia connotations ... or perhaps because I'm right.  I jest, I jest - do whatever you want, but don't tell me that stripping the foliage is more hygienic, because we have hair, not only to keep us warm, but to filter out horrible little thingies that are attempting to march inexorably into our crevices.

As for armpits, most people I know shave them and one lesbian I "met" trimmed hers and some, like me, shave for the most part except when they just can't be bothered or it's winter or something.  Years ago, I went out with a woman who never shaved hers at all; she told me it made you sweat less and since she was born and bred in Durban, I considered the idea worthy of experimentation.  I let mine grow and a week or so into a humid KZN summer, thought, "Oh No!" and promptly shaved it off again.  Then again, to put it politely, I do sweat very freely indeed.

Legs ... I started shaving fine, blonde hairs from my legs in my early teens and now of course, significant leg hair growth means a fine, healthy crop of masculine wavy brown, which waves in the breeze.  There I go through phases too - sometimes I want the feel of clean, shaved skin and a good suntan and then winter arrives, the air outside the bathwater's icy and then I let it grow for a few months.  I asked a friend of mine why shaved legs are better and why we do it and she said, "Because society expects us to."  That was a little odd coming from a lesbian considering we live in a society that expects us to fuck men.  I met a lesbian once who bleached her wiry black leg hairs - that just looked plain and platinum weird.

But fair enough, it really is all about personal choice - for men and for women - about whether you do or you don't, or to what extent, or whatever.  Throwing the razor away is perhaps a little wasteful, there's probably an emo recycling charity it could be donated to.