PERCEPTION OF FEMALE BODY HAIR: AN EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSIS
Attractiveness, Hair Removal, Choice of partners, Personality, Sociosexuality
Depilation, removal or reduction practices by the body have been present in our history since the times of the Ancient Age, in different human cultures, inside and outside Western industrial societies. Despite being behaviors performed by men and women, hair reduction and removal is still, in terms of frequency, more practiced by women and signified differently between the sexes, whether within gender constructs or in social and sexual contexts. In this sense, evolutionary hypotheses have been launched in order to understand the role of the removal of body hair, as well as the intersexual difference: what makes the 'hairless' ideal an especially feminine attractiveness norm and that, in adaptive terms, preference and display of a hairless body could mean within sexual selection in humans. The aim of this study was to investigate the perception of individual characteristics of women in conditions with and without body hair and as possible within a context of attractiveness and choice of partners. Photos of female models with and without hair on the legs and armpits were used and, through online questionnaires, participants provided their first impressions of the age, personality traits (Big 5) and sociosexuality of the women observed. As a result, we found that men and women regarded as furry models as being more extroverted and more open than as furless models. Only female participants perceived models with body hair as being more emotionally stable. Only male participants perceived hairless models as more amiable and as models with body hair as being more sociosexually unrestrained. No difference was found for age and consciousness between the groups with and without body hair for both sexes. The present work aimed to expand the scientific knowledge about the subject, as well as to deepen the discussion of subjects with high social interest. It is hoped that the results of this study allow us to bring important contributions to the feminist debate and provoke reflections on the construction of gender and attractiveness norms.