Don't we all have bigger concerns at the moment?
Women’s reproductive rights are under attack, there’s a shitshow presidential election on the horizon, and war is wreaking havoc in the Middle East. But somehow, in the Year of Our Lord 2024, an actor’s armpit hair is the most recent topic to send internet users into a misogynistic panic.
Emma Corrin set the internet ablaze on May 22 by appearing on the June/July 2024 cover of Harper’s Bazaar. The My Policeman star looked effortless in the issue, wearing nothing but a cream-colored, underwear-inspired set by Miu Miu and gold jewelry. But their pose—an arm extended above the head to expose dark brown armpit hair, channeling a 1999 Julia Roberts at the Notting Hill premiere—was what set social media users off.
In the Instagram comments of the magazine's cover post, a few users defended their unwarranted disgust of Corrin's visible armpit hair and claimed their disdain had absolutely nothing to do with misogyny—just a simple lack of "hygiene." One user commented, "Shave please…it’s not about human’s rights…it’s about self hygiene," while another had ventured as far as (wrongly) suggesting that non-hairy pits = general health: "The unhealthy look is back?"
Perhaps one of the most disappointing comments came in the form of an unfortunate Mean Girls reference, with a user writing, “I’m sorry, but the hairy underarm trend is like ‘fetch’ from Mean Girls….stop trying to make it happen…it’s never gonna happen.” Except…armpit hair has quite literally always happened, as long as the human species has existed—a.k.a, 8 to 6 million years ago, according to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
Sadly, the critique isn't exactly unexpected. In Corrin's corresponding interview with Harper's Bazaar, they noted, “People follow me because they’ve watched something I’m in. They think I’m one kind of person, and then they’ll see who I actually am and how I present and … I will never understand why. Who are you hurting by being yourself? Why am I controversial?”
The explanation for the hatred, in Corrin's own words, is painfully simple: “I think it’s fear. Absolute fear.”