The D for Dalrymple Questionhair (part one): Gender, Age, Geography

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Christina Kenny

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about body hair and hair removal. At the end of the post I included a link to a short survey I’d designed around the subject of hair and hair removal. I called this survey the ‘Questionhair’, because it was funny. You’re welcome.

Welcome to the first installment of the Questionhair analysis. This week’s post looks at the responses to the first part of last month’s survey: Gender, Age, Geography.

Question one: Are you a woman?

The Questionhair was completed by 630 people. Of these, 597 identified predominantly as female, and 33 identified predominantly as male.

You’d have thought that this question would be easy to answer, but I fucked it all up by trying to be funny. Basically, I was trying to find out whether respondents aimed to present mostly as a woman or as a man, and how their body hair choices fitted into that presentation. In other words, I wasn’t so much interested in the precise contents of your pants as whether or not they were hairy.

I recognise that this was a very one-size-all fits approach and am extremely grateful for the patience and magnanimity of people who quite rightly pointed out that the question was discriminatory. You guys get a special prize for being so nice about it.

Please note that as the Questionhair was ostensibly ‘designed’ (ha!) to examine women’s experience, from here on in I’ve filtered out the responses of people who identified as predominantly male. Your time will come, boys.

Question two: How old are you?

Nearly 50% of female respondents to the Questionhair belonged to my own age demographic of 26-35. The next most common age was 18-25 (34%), followed by 36-45 (9%). Only three to four percent of female respondents were aged 46-55 or 56-65, and a mere four people told me that they were aged either 12-17 or over the age of 66.

No-one under the age of 12 or over the age of 75 completed the Questionhair. This made me sad until I remembered that D For Dalrymple is hardly recommended reading for the under-12s, and the over 75s are presumably far too busy wearing purple and extracting every last drop of pleasure from their disgraceful dotages to bother with the Questionhair.

The age information will, I think, be quite interesting to look at in relation to the rest of the survey, so we’ll leave it here for now and move swiftly on to

Question three: How would you describe your ethnicity?

For some reason, asking people about their ethnic background felt invasive in a way that asking how they remove hair from their crevices did not. At first I was strangely reluctant to include this question at all – however, my many body hair-related conversations with friends in the lead-up to this exercise (sorry, friends) convinced me that ethnic identity is widely perceived to be an important factor in the appearance, volume, texture, and thread count of women’s body hair.

DISCLAIMER: Before you all write in to say that I should also have taken into account cultural identity, sexuality, gender, class, disability, etc. (all of which I’m sure have a profound impact on our body hair behaviours), I’d ask you to bear in mind that at the time of survey I had a) no idea that I would get such a good response b) considerably less ambition and c) limited funds to pay those thieving bastards at SurveyMonkey the costs that asking more than 10 questions would have entailed. Also, I’m not the fucking European Commission. I’m a light-hearted, foul-mouthed and essentially quite insecure feminist blogger with a body-hair fixation.

So I included the ethnicity question and worded it to allow women to share as much information as they personally felt was related to their hair. I also made the question non-mandatory, so that respondents could skip it if they felt uncomfortable. But in the end, only 12 out of 597 women declined to answer the question or left an unhelpful (though for the most part amusing) comment. In fact, only ONE woman took exception to the ethnicity question, icily remarking –

From planet earth. I dont feel this is relevant.

– which made me feel worse than Hitler, until I read the 500+ responses from women who very clearly felt that ethnicity WAS relevant to a survey on body hair:

White British – some Italian in me. Hence the hairy arms & side burns.

White, British with a bit of French, but not the hairy bit.

White, mostly German but with some Italian Jewish ancestry and attendant dark, moderately thick body hair.

German, Polish, Welsh, Russian, Scots-Irish. We have a lot of dark body hair.

Half Greek, half English.  The Greek part is most important for the purposes of the survey!

English/Polish. I don’t know if the Poles are specially hirsute. It gets pretty damn cold over there, so maybe being more hairy would constitute an evolutionary advantage.

The next hurdle. I’d asked you to answer this question using free text rather than ticking one of a selection of options, which proved to be an extremely poor decision – even by D for Dalrymple’s usual low standards. This meant that I was compelled to spend a good few hours of writing time dicking about with spreadsheets and pivot tables in a manner that uncomfortably resembled my actual day job. Eventually I resorted to grouping responses in accordance with the ethnic classifications from the 2011 UK census.

Fortunately for my social life, most of you seemed pretty well-versed in these classifications already, so matching your answers to these categories wasn’t too much of a headache. However, I did uncover some hitherto unknown ethnic identities:

White as fuck

Pasty as fuck

Possibly bred from Casper the ghost

Norf Landan

White as fuck (2)

Brummie factory worker/burglar

The vast majority of participants (375 of you to be precise – or just over 60%) more helpfully identified as ‘White British’. Then, constituting nearly a quarter of all responses, ‘White (others)’ shouted their hair woes at me from pretty much every conceivable corner of Europe and Her Majesty’s former colonies. Mixed race women were the next most populous group (3.7%), with White Irish and Indian women close runners up at around 3% of respondents each. 14 women of Black, Chinese, Other Asian or simply ‘Other’ origin made up just 2.3% of responses.

So far, so unrepresentative.  It’s a shame the sample is so rubbish, because it means I couldn’t even try to answer any of the BIG questions around ethnicity and hair (DO Polish women really have an evolutionary advantage over the rest of us? It pains me that I cannot tell you). Still, the sample was still pretty interesting in that it confirmed that a lot of you subscribe to the same basic prejudices about ethnicity and body hair as I did before running the survey.

This prejudice (which may or may not be true, you understand – I just can’t demonstrate it conclusively here) is summarised perfectly by Jeffrey Eugenides in his 2002 novel Middlesex. Here’s an extract from the scene in which the Greek-American protagonist, Cal,  is taken by her mother to get her face waxed for the first time:

Like the Sun Belt or the Bible Belt, there exists, on this multifarious earth of ours, a Hair Belt. It begins in southern Spain, congruent with Moorish influence. It extends over the dark-eyed regions of Italy, almost all of Greece, and absolutely all of Turkey. It dips south to include Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt. Continuing on (and darkening in color as maps do to indicate ocean depth) it blankets Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan, before lightening gradually in India. After that, except for a single dot representing the Ainu in Japan, the Hair Belt ends.

… The pains they took to make themselves smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all! The enemy, hair, was invincible. It was life itself. I told my mother to make an appointment for me at Sophie Sassoon’s beauty parlor at the Eastland Mall.

At this point in the novel we think that Cal’s facial hair is the result of her Greek heritage, but in a while we’re going to find out that’s it’s actually because she’s intersex and going through male puberty. It says quite a lot about the Hair Belt that a girl can have this much testosterone pumping through her system and still not raise any eyebrows in her community.

When I first read Middlesex I felt like Eugenides was totally on the money with his description of the Hair Belt, but inexplicably, he seemed to have forgotten to mention the Watford/Glasgow outpost. My most exotic relatives are from Motherwell – all this geography did nothing to explain MY problems of a deathly white complexion teamed with dark brown hair.

I remember being asked at the age of 15 by a blonde friend why on earth I bothered with shaving my legs instead of just bleaching the hair like she did. My answer – that a more realistic solution would be to perform extensive skin grafts from an area less prone to hair growth, such as a table – met with incredulous, fair-haired disbelief.

But I’m not alone!

White British. Scottish, in fact, with ‘good Celtic colouring’. Which means ghostly skin and dark hair you can spot unshaven a mile off.

White British – Scots – dark hair on PALE skin

White British, but the kind with dark hair and pale skin.

I’m very dark haired so it shows up more than on a blonde woman.

I have dark hair and fair skin so it shows up quite easily.

Dark hair and pale skin make for high visibility.

It doesn’t help I have very pale skin and very dark hair which makes everything more noticeable.

I can’t TELL you the relief of reading that so many of you share the pain and anxiety of hair so dark that you can see the hair UNDER the skin as well as on top. Thanks, The Internet!

Several respondents reiterated the received wisdom that women of Celtic or Scandinavian origin (fair hair, blue eyes etc.) have less body hair than their darker sisters:

Pasty pale – but not in a blonde, light-body-hair convenient way.

Interestingly, one person who was ACTUALLY of Scandinavian origin reported:

White Norwegian, but as far as body hair is concerned, I feel more closely related to Southern Europeans.

This links perfectly with the other major trend that emerged from this section of the Questionhair: the tendency on the part of quite a few women to link the presence of hair on their bodies with perceived rather than actual ethnic origin.

Before the Questionhair, I’d kind of assumed that mine was the only family to have evolved a legend to explain the presence of a dark-eyed, dark-haired, hairy changeling in an otherwise fair family – but it turns out you’re all at it! Well, at least 50 of you, anyway.

Many of the White British, Australasian and North American women who responded to the Questionhair simply refused to believe that their body hair could be the product of purely Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Quite a few women offered geographical explanations – some researched, others more imaginative – for their hair:

White German with maybe a drop of very distinct Jewish ancestry.

White Serbian – though probably some Turkish in there as well?

White British – I think there might be a bit of Romany gypsy blood in me somewhere.

White British with parents from Scotland and Dorset. Although my dad does look like there’s Wookie in his genealogy somewhere..

Maybe we need to re-map the Hair Belt.

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The D for Dalrymple Questionhair results: preamble and defence

Posted on May 19, 2012 by Christina Kenny

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about body hair and hair removal. As regular readers and friends know, this is a subject I could talk about pretty much forever (sorry, readers – sorry, friends) and which, for me, is very closely linked with my identity as a feminist. Sadly, as my post revealed, it appears that it’s also quite closely linked with my identity as a deeply insecure person. This wasn’t so much a call to arms as a cry for help.

At the end of the post I included a link to a short survey I’d designed around the subject of hair and hair removal. I was interested to hear what my readers – especially my female readers – thought about these issues, and whether their experiences might be in any way comparable to my own. I called this survey the ‘Questionhair’, because it was funny. You’re welcome.

Aided by reposts on the super-cool and not always SFW Awesome Women Of Twitter and Raw Women blogs and by the noble social media efforts of friends and followers – all of whom, incidentally, I LOVE – I started to receive some very interesting feedback.

But then something strange started happening . The Internet seemed to go a bit hair-crazy. I can’t be sure whether it was in writing the post that I became naturally more attuned to hair-related stories in the media, or if my survey actually started something (unlikely), but after posting on the subject it seemed that EVERYONE was going on about women and hair.

First off, Caitlin Moran was very nearly the cause of a fatal aneurysm on the Piccadilly line when she said in her Times Magazine column that body hair isn’t something that feminists need concern themselves with*. Then quite a few other columnists and bloggers wrote pieces on hair and hair removal. Seriously. My Google alert for ‘female body hair’, were it a housepet, would have appeared glossy and well-fed. Since Armpitgate, however, it’s just kind of lain around my inbox, looking distended and slightly glassy-eyed. Armpitgate, of course, refers to the talented, witty and proudly-bewhiskered Emer O’Toole, who popped up first in the Vagenda, then the Guardian, and then, hirsutely and unexpectedly, on ITV’s This Morning**.

In the weeks after I launched the Questionhair, nine separate people forwarded me links to Emer’s article. I met two new people at a party and, on being introduced, both of them exclaimed ‘Oh! Are you the hairy woman?’. Then one day I logged into SurveyMonkey and found that 630 people had completed the Questionhair. I did some brief calculations –

630 responses = 630 x 10 questions = 6300 individual response fields + multiple responses + quite a lot of poorly-conceived free text options = approx.  one kajillion fuck-offs of information

– then panicked and closed the survey.

So. Much. Data. How to get through it all? Well, that part has actually been a blast. You lot are seriously intelligent, eloquent and most of all, flipping HILARIOUS. Reading through your responses has been amazing. I’ve cried with laughter, sniffled with pathos, and, best of all, gasped in solidarity.

It became obvious very early on that I wouldn’t be able to summarise my findings in one post. Ignoring my mother (whose incessant demands for RESULTS, NOW mean that she is in serious danger of inexplicably unsubscribing herself), I propose to post my findings as I make them, in sections.  The first section will be posted a bit later on, when I have written it.

DISCLAIMER: The Questionhair should in no way be viewed as a serious scientific study. My educational background is in eighteenth-century pornography and I had to call my dad earlier to check how to work out percentages.

DISCLAIMER: The Questionhair has actually created a greater number of questions than it set out to answer.

DISCLAIMER: I was drunk when I wrote this.***

—

*I can’t give a quote because I don’t pay for the Times online and because I can’t find the relevant Saturday Times magazine that the column was in – possibly because I burned it in a frenzy of rage and betrayal – but I swear to God she said something like feminists don’t need to worry about whether or not they shave their legs because women who do are just ‘mucking about’ with a ‘look’. This is ridiculous. Much as I’d love to write off my entire history of hair removal as a carefree fashion exercise, I suspect that precisely NO-ONE starts scraping hair and the top few layers of epidermis from their shins aged 13 to ‘experiment’ with ‘different’ ‘looks’. You do it so that your classmates won’t laugh at you, or call you a hairy virgin. You do it to look JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. Why would you say that, Caitlin, why? WHY?†

† sorry <cries>

** a programme whose regular audience is noted neither for its worldly liberality or employability

*** actually not true. I just think that people might judge me less harshly if they thought I was totally off my face

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D for Dalrymple meets Eddie Izzard

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Christina Kenny

Stepping from the escalator, I hear an approaching train and race to the westbound platform, overtaking a familar face.

Eddie Izzard. As I jog past, he is extricating himself graciously from a conversation with a lanky European guy, rushing to join the same carriage as me and – beep beep beep! – the doors close, and here we are.

Here we are.

I never see celebrities. It’s a running joke at my workplace, where we maintain a collaborative celebrity-spotting spreadsheet on Google Docs. Everyone in my office, even the temp, has spotted Clare Balding, who lives nearby, multiple times – and yet still I, the only bona-fide Clare Balding fan in the business, lag behind. It’s still not clear whether I just don’t notice the famous people in passing or if I actually repel the famous people, but the fact remains: I do not see the famous people.

Yet here I am, in a sparsely-populated tube carriage, standing opposite a man whom I quite literally idolize. I have loved Eddie Izzard’s comedy since I was 18. I have wept hot tears of mirth over all of his DVDs and, by my own admission only last night to a new friend, nearly vomited with laughter when I saw his live show ‘Stripped’ last year. My cousin Bryony yesterday confirmed our purchase of tickets to his live show in June 2013.

Now, I’m paralysed – only too conscious of the fact that celebrities must go through their lives being constantly “noticed” by people, being “said hi to” by people, and that I am just another bloody “people” to be noticed by and and said hi to by – but still, surely, I just can’t let this opportunity go. This man has had a formative influence on my ENTIRE SENSE OF HUMOUR, for goodness’ sake.

I’m a massive knob. I go for it. I lurch towards a bearded, trousered Eddie Izzard in the artificial light of the tube train and say Hi. I won’t take up any of your time, but I just want to say: I think you’re fantastic. I want to say, JAZZ CHICKEN, BWOODLE-DI-DOO-DI-DOO! but I don’t.

Duty done, and life mission (after the Caitlin Moran one) fulfilled, I fall back against the bum rest. And Eddie Izzard, the gentleman that he is, takes a fucking interest. At least, he feigns a fucking interest. He thanks me politely, does his funny Eddie Izzard face and asks me, what do I do?

I tell him that I have an office job of which I am deeply ashamed. This is only partly true – I do have an office job, but it’s by no means the bane of my life (coming in extremely handy when it comes to bill-paying and the like) – but I want Eddie Izzard to know that I’m a WRITER and I am FUNNY and that he is a BIG PART OF THAT. But I don’t. I tell him, shyly, that I write a blog in my spare time.

He says Great! What’s it about?

I say It’s about feminism, but more broadly, about what a loser I am.

He says, Bridget Jones?

I say, Bridget Jones-lite.

Neither of us know what to do with this.

I decide to tell Eddie Izzard about a recent D for Dalrymple post – the hairy one. I tell him about my longstanding fascination with the subject of body hair removal and about the response I got from my Questionhair. I divulge some extremely sensitive information that has yet to be published on this blog, or indeed, anywhere else.

Eddie Izzard absorbs the information that I have given him, and to his credit, seems more bemused than disinterested. He offers the opinion that fashions in body hair come and go, but essentially people’s perception of beauty remains unchanged. I ask whether the Mona Lisa would still be beautiful with a lustrous pelt of hair. He apologises for not being an ‘art’ person but says he doesn’t find the Mona Lisa beautiful anyway.

Eddie Izzard and I discuss apes, and whether having a pink bum still means anything in human terms. We decide that apes probably have different criteria when it comes to body hair and bums. There is an awkward silence.

I curse myself for not being able to think of something witty with which to break the awkward silence, but charitably remind myself that I am, in essence, an introvert, and come up with my best material when not under pressure to perform. This, I reflect, is what makes me a writer, and Eddie Izzard a stand-up comedian. Not quite so charitably, I inwardly note that Eddie Izzard is nearly dead on his feet and remarkably lacking in the lols department.

Eddie Izzard explains that he has been out canvassing for Ken Livingstone all day, and shows me his rosette. He will be running for Mayor of London in eight years’ time. In what I hope is a casual, humorous kind of way, I tell him about the lady at Turnham Green who tried to secure my vote for Boris. I realise halfway through my story that nothing really very funny happened in this encounter, and I don’t really have anywhere to go. Again, we lapse into silence.

Eddie Izzard’s fingernails are beautifully laquered in a slatey brown shade. I am suddenly very conscious of my own peeling silver and ragged cuticles. I examine the tube map, and Eddie Izzard drifts off. He opens an eye when some boys further down the carriage take pictures and their camera-phones make the fake shutter noise. Our train is delayed.

Eddie Izzard says So, what will your novel be about? I repeat my tired, old joke about how most people have a novel inside of them, but I seem to be the exception to the rule, Ha ha ha! He fixes me with a baleful stare and comments that it takes determination to succeed. He mentions a conversation that he has had with John Malkovich in which the latter said that some people have ambition without determination. I say that I understand how John Malkovich feels exactly, exactly. Eddie Izzard says that he still thinks you need determination. We are silent again.

I remember I have spent my week singing. Perhaps this is something Eddie Izzard and I can talk about.

It is not.

The train stops for a spell at Leicester Square. There is a problem at Hyde Park Corner. The train driver doesn’t know how long we will stay here. Eddie Izzard and I examine our watches.

After three minutes, he stands up, asks me if I’ll chance staying on. I nod. We exchange tired smiles. He wishes me good luck, murmurs something about the importance of determination and sticking power, shakes my hand warmly and disembarks.

Three seconds later, the driver announces that we will be on our way. The doors whizz shut and the train speeds west, leaving Eddie Izzard standing on the platform*.

—

* He’s loaded. He’ll have got a cab.

EDITED at 0835 on Friday 4 May for grammar and lols

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