An Indian woman's poem about the unrealistic expectations placed on women and their body hair
"When a man tells me I'm beautiful, I don't believe him," Naina Kataria writes.
"Instead, I relive my days in high school, When no matter how good I was, I was always the girl with a moustache."
The poem, titled "When A Man Tells Me I'm Beautiful", has been shared more than 9,000 times and has over 37,000 likes.
The 22-year-old Delhi-based blogger told Buzzfeed the idea for the poem came from when she went to a film with a man and saw an ad about razors for women.
When she said celebrities shouldn't endorse such products because they sound out the message that you have to buy the product to look beautiful, her friend told her she was "too much of a feminist".
She said the exchange made her wonder about unrealistic beauty standards and how women go through "excruciating amounts of pain to look merely presentable and men don't even have an idea of what it's like".
The poem in full:
When a man tells me
I’m beautiful
I don’t believe him.
Instead, I relive my days in high school
When no matter how good I was
I was always the girl with a moustache
He doesn’t know what it’s like
to grow up in your maternal family
Where your body is the only one that
Proudly boasts of your father’s X
While your mother’s X sits back and pities
It’s unladylike-ness
He doesn’t know the teenager
Who filled her corners with
Empty consolations of
Being loved for who she was- someday.
He doesn’t know hypocrisy.
He doesn’t know of the world that
tells you to ‘be yourself’
and sells you a fair and lovely shade card
in the same fucking breath
He doesn’t know of the hot wax and the laser
whose only purpose is to
replace your innocent skin
with its own brand of womanhood
He doesn’t know of the veet and the bleach
That uproot your robust hair
in the name of hygiene
Hygiene, which when followed by men
makes them gay and unmanly
He doesn’t know how unruly eyebrows are tamed
and how uni brows die a silent death
All to preserve beauty
And of the torturous miracles that happen
Inside the doors marked
"WOMEN ONLY"
So when a man calls me beautiful
I throw at him, a smile; a smile that remained
After everything the strip pulled away
And I dare him
To wait
Till my hair grows back.
Commenting on her poem's success, Ms Kataria wrote on Facebook: "What I observed was that it was women shared this poem everywhere. The idea was to notify men and grab their attention about what the process of hair removal is like."
She added: "So if you really wish to compliment me on what I wrote, stop getting grossed out by hairy women."
