Just needed to rant for a minute because this coworker in particular just...every day it seems like finds a new way to demean women.

Tl;dr Ladies, embrace your hair - if you want to.

Yesterday a coworker approached me(27f) and another coworker (m) randomly to show us a picture of some girl he saw in an article on Facebook. She'd dyed her armpit hair and he wanted to joke about how weird that was.

Admittedly I've never felt an urge to dye my armpit hair and I didn't read the article to know what compelled her to do that so I just shrugged and went back to work. He went on to talk about how he didn't get the whole "not shaving your armpits thing" and how he "didn't always want to shave his face but life sucks."

I made a comment that he doesn't always shave his face, and tends to have stubble quite a lot. No one really says anything to him about it because to be honest no one really cares about it. 🤷‍♀️

He then went on some more to talk about how it was GROSS and UNFEMININE when women didn't shave their armpits/legs.

Do you know what my first response was? To feel SHAME. Because it had been a couple of days since I'd shaved my armpits and legs to be honest. It took me a few seconds to snap out of that because why the fuck should I feel disgusting for not shaving my armpits?!

At this point it wasn't really worth responding because we're at work and honestly this isn't really something I want to talk about at work, especially with someone that has a track record of being a sexist good ole boy.

I tell my friends stuff like this and they just assume I'm some kind of feminazi not shaving my legs or armpits because I'm trying to make some kind of state. They think the same about all women that do this. But honestly, I'm just lazy sometimes.

The point is that I shouldn't be made to feel like I'm not a woman because I don't always do it and neither should any other woman. I just don't feel like I should ever be questioned on my womanly qualities because of the same body hair that men have.

Okay thanks for letting me rant. He's a dick but this isn't even the most irritating thing he has said.

Edit: I wasn't really expecting this to really blow up so I wanted to just add this edit because it seems necessary I guess. The point of this rant was more that it's so weird for me that this man felt so comfortable just throwing out commentary about women's bodies like that. It's not even JUST this man, it's so many men.

To clarify I'm not part of team "men are trash" or whatever. I know a lot of really great men. It just blows my mind that this is still the norm that men so freely comment on what is or isn't acceptable for women. It just makes me feel so uncomfortable.