For years, my skin felt less like a home and more like a battlefield. It was a canvas on which everyone else seemed to have the right to write their criticisms. I was the girl who was too hairy, too short, too skinny, everything about my skin and body was too much. Classmates joked, “Arey iski to mooche aati hay, ye to ladka hay” (Oh, she’s getting a mustache, she’s a boy), or an aunt suggested home remedies “to reduce the hair.” I began to believe them, so much so that I wanted to rip my skin off or completely change the way I looked.
I remember a sultry summer at a family wedding. All my cousins wore beautiful sleeveless lehengas, their arms and shoulders were bare. Even though I was wearing a long-sleeved blouse, the material was so thick that I spent the entire night burning in it. The music was loud, but I didn’t dance much. I sat in the corner, feeling my skin itch beneath the layers. I believed my normal body was dirty and wrong. My own skin felt like a costume I couldn’t take off.
Then the pressure increased. It wasn’t just people talking anymore, it was everywhere online – images of perfect hourglass figures, filtered skin and a single idea of what a woman should look like. It felt like the whole world was screaming that my normal, hairy, imperfect body was wrong, like I was failing a test I never signed up for. The knot in my chest that I had carried from the first taunts of my childhood tightened, because how do you belong in a world that thrives on convincing you that you don’t?
Everything changed when I entered my girls’ college
It was when I got admission in one Girls College and realized the feminist joy of being in my raw skin, without makeup, without drawn eyebrows or waxed upper lip. It wasn’t magic, just quiet acceptance. I walked into the classroom in a crop top and unshaven armpits. I waited for a comment, a giggle or a look, but no, nothing. It was as if nothing had happened. A friend of mine just pulled me aside and talked about the brooding professor we have this semester. There was no comment about my body here; It was just there, existing, and to be honest it felt incredible. This irrelevance was the fertile ground in which a new seed could finally sprout: my feminist joy.
The joy wasn’t a loud, performative celebration, but knowing that no woman here would even once hesitate to give me a sanitary pad even if she doesn’t know me, not even my name, and what makes this solidarity against measurement all the stronger is knowing how expensive sanitary products are, it was the freedom to dance wildly at an event, sweaty, loud and screaming lyrics, completely sure that no one was staring at your body, it was a conversation with a friend whose eyes stayed on mine and didn’t wander around checking my appearance.
My body stopped being a project to fail and became my home. The hairs on my skin were just hair. My form was simply my form. The perfect pictures online no longer mattered. But the real feminist joy wasn’t just in this one place. For me it was about taking with me the feeling of being comfortable in my body; It was about realizing that my skin was never the problem. The problem was and is the world that teaches us to see our skin as a problem.
The real joy came from choosing experiences over appearances. I chose to feel the sun on my legs instead of worrying about whether they were smooth enough. I chose to laugh until my stomach hurt instead of sucking it in and worrying about what others would think of me.
The old world is still there. The aunts worry about the size of my breasts and suggest the type of bra I should wear, the mutual friends casually make mean comments: “Tu to mooch wala bhai hai apna” (You are our brother with a moustache), but the difference is inside me now. I carry this college joy with me; It’s my little secret. It’s the peace of looking in the mirror and not seeing a problem that needs to be fixed. It’s the happiness of living in my own skin and on my own terms.
They told me for years to change my skin, to conform to a mold, but I decided to live in it instead. I decided to find my feminist joy in my raw skin, not in the perfect hairless, poreless hourglass body, but in my imperfect, natural, real self. My feminist joy is the peace I felt when I finally said no.
Gunn Bhargava (she/her) studies political science at Delhi University and is a feminist author specializing in gender, power and human rights. Her work explores feminist media, pop culture and political analysis, drawing on her experiences with platforms such as Feminism in India, Writing Women and The Women Story. She wants to contribute to transnational feminist conversations through progressive journalism.
