Paris Jackson, whether she’s taking a public stand against white supremacy or talking fearlessly about her love of being nude, is such an inspiration sometimes.
You might follow her on social media for her endearing New Age spirituality and her memes (and for when she combines the two, which is often), but the 19-year-old has some wisdom to share. Even when it’s controversial.
This time? Paris is casually showing off her body hair on Instagram. And kind of encouraging others to follow her example.
So, Paris Jackson shows off her legs in an Instagram photo of herself in the sweltering August heat.
(At least, it’s still pretty sweltering in a lot of places, though it’s just "warm" in others now that August is dying out for the year)
In it, if you look closely, you can see that she has (gasp!) some hairs growing out of her legs, which is what happens to humans.
Sharing that photo, as a celebrity, is a great way to help normalize body hair in a very casual, conversational manner.
We do wish that she weren’t smoking in the photo, even though she’s outdoors and not bothering people. A lot of smokers aren’t nearly so courteous as Paris Jackson.
First of all, she looks great.
Second of all, she captioned this:
"If you’re not competing with your brother over who can grow longer leg hair wyed."
("Wyed" means "What are you even doing?")
We love this girl’s sense of humor, but also her sense of casually promoting personal body autonomy.
If you’re wondering what sort of hateful comments she received, know that Paris tends to keep commenting disabled on her Instagram because … well, you can imagine the sorts of vile things that people must write to her.
Paris also recently tweeted a hypothetical (or perhaps not-so-hypothetical) exchange of dialogue.
The question was: "Why don’t you shave?"
Her reply was an old-format meme — the one of Ned Stark from Game of Thrones where that huge obnoxious font says "Winter Is Coming."
Which is super funny — it’s no secret that many women are less likely to shave in some places or at all in the winter, especially if they’re not planning to have any sexual encounters.
If you’re wearing long pants, nobody will notice if you don’t shave your legs. If you’re wearing sleeves at all, no one will notice that you didn’t shave your underarms. If you’re wearing a bikini, nobody will notice that you’re sporting pubes.
This actually isn’t the first time that this has come up.
In the past, Paris has addressed her body hair on her Instagram stories.
"I didn’t realize that people were going to get so upset over my armpit hair. I didn’t realize that was such an issue. It is so funny."
In this particular instance, we don’t think that Paris is a victim of the celebrity bubble cutting her off from how society sadly operates.
Instead, we think that she was just doing that thing where you laugh off something that’s serious in order to make people who are wrong reconsider, or question why something is such a big deal to them.
Basically, you pretend that you’ve never heard that people are against whatever (in this case, women having body hair) and you might even ask something like: "Why is that a big deal?" as if you’re genuinely curious.
Then you watch someone struggle to explain.
It’s not difficult to explain a personal aesthetic preference or cultural expectations.
It’s a lot tougher to explain why any of that should impact someone else.
"If you don’t shave then I won’t want to bone you" is going to sound, to most women, like a two birds one stone situation.
To be clear, no one should be pressured to shave their legs (or genitals or underarms or whatever) or to not shave, regardless of time of year or wardrobe or gender or whatever society expects.
It’s just hair and it’s not a big deal. It’s your business and your business only.
You might have sexual partners (or romantic partners) who have an opinion, and you can take that into account — or not — just as you might when you get a haircut.
Despite her "wyed" that would indicate that Paris is challenging others to do the same as she is, we think that Paris was just finding a casual way to help normalize body hair on women.
As opposed to demanding that other women follow her example. She’s just making sure that her fans, many of whom are young women, know that it’s a totally viable option for them.
She’s so good.
