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Pink armpits and hijabs

Writer's picture: Maren EnkelmannMaren Enkelmann

Updated: May 13, 2018

Aren't we all tolerant, open and fair? Until, of course, someone does something we just wouldn't do...



I love my yoga studio. It's so laid-back and unpretentious. People come to sweat, to relax, to unwind. If there is time after class we chat about holidays, skin, food or our bones. It’s perfect at this empathic but non-intrusive level. After all, we’re there to do some good for ourselves, and that’s that. I feel alright in my 10-year-old Henny leggings and I’m confident nobody cares and if so, I wouldn’t. But there are limits to carefree, well certainly for me. I would, for instance, rather stay away than not be in perfectly smooth condition. I'm not aware that anyone has ever told me, and I’m pretty sure that this has never played a role in my upbringing but it is one those things that just is.


And then only recently, one of the girls in the changing room, sported some bright pink fluff under her arms. I thought at first there was some medical issue at play. It looked too much like the bright, stingy disinfecting skin tincture my granny used to use on scraped knees.

At second glance I knew this was a statement and what a statement it was!

We didn’t talk about it, as you wouldn’t, but these arm pits stayed with me the whole day. Not because of the audacity not to shave.


I'm embarrassed to admit but I couldn’t get over the fact that I experienced her boldness as so provocative.

Who cares? And why would I, fcs? But there was a storm in my head about female expression, generation gap, confidence, boundaries, art, conditionings, freedom, beauty, body image, tolerance and all of this at the same time. I knew it was bonkers but I couldn’t help it. It was a mess! This clearly hit one of those deeply rooted standards in me, that I didn't even know I had, yet somehow feels like it says something about me. What took me by surprise in my inner rant was how seriously we can take randomly made-up, adopted rules and conditionings without ever questioning them!? Isn't that crazy?


On reflection, it seemed to be the same discourse as hijabs in public or taking shoes off in a stranger’s house. It’s one thing for those who don’t and quite another for those who do. A few years back I was pushed off the pavement in Jordan’s capital Amman, where no woman walks around during the day. I didn’t understand the aggression back then and felt very uncomfortable and even scared. But now I think I looked as provocative to those men on a pavement in bright daylight, as these pink armpits looked to me (someone who had somehow internalised that public display of unwanted body hair is a gross neglect of personal hygiene and an affront to everyone who doesn’t want to know.* )


I’m not saying these men had a right to treat me like that. I just realised that maybe none of us is free of irrational responses, which are based on ideals, values or custom. And since we follow them completely unaware, we don’t realise they are not the same for everyone. We often don’t even know they exist or why we have taken them on.


If you can’t see the point of this story yet, bear with me. There is one and I’ll spell it out. The big learning for me was that we all seem to take on values and rules as if they were nature itself and true and set in stone. But they are not. They are as random as any of the weird customs and strange traditions we don’t understand and find hard to tolerate in others because there are not ours. Seeing this and realising how arbitrary these ‘standards’ are, turned my own little OCD-ness into a personal preference rather than a standard that says something about me. A choice I make, rather than something that stops me from going to my yoga class when I can’t find the time to sort it out.


It may well have been a joke or a bet or even a carefully thought-through awareness campaign, maybe it she was a burlesque dancer and surely, apart from me nobody cared or noticed. Or, who knows maybe she did have a medical condition, which required some disinfecting tincture.

But I realised that by seeing how made-up conditionings generally are, they magically turned into something else. You can argue about a personal preference and even get defensive, but you can’t get upset because someone else choses something else. It’s great to have values and to commit living by them, but recognising them as a choice rather than something that controls us and our emotions makes a huge difference. I could suddenly see that when people get all emotional and defensive, it is always about something that they feel, says a thing or two about them. How liberating to get rid of that.


We are not our thinking, let’s claim that power back.


*I bet I could make this sentence a lot longer :-)


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email: maren.enkelmann@me.com

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