Alyssa Milano embraces her body hair in stunning photo: 'Armpit hair, don’t care'
Alyssa Milano showed off her genuine beauty with a photo that revealed her unshaven armpits.
"Armpit hair, don't care," the 48-year-old actress wrote on Instagram Saturday, alongside several glamour shots in which she lifted her arm over her head. In turn, Milano's followers commented, "Free the armpit" and "gorgeous."
Body hair acceptance is natural for the mother of two, who tweeted in 2016, "#IveLearnedToAccept my hairy arms." Milano echoes other women in Hollywood who have decided they're not bound to cultural beauty standards, such as Madonna (and her daughter Lourdes Leon), Emily Ratajkowski, Rihanna, and Adele.
In 2016, when the "Hello" singer was asked by Vanity Fair whether her ex-partner Simon Konecki minded her hairy legs when she went one month without shaving, Adele responded, “He has no choice. I’ll have no man telling me to shave my fuckin’ legs. Shave yours."
However, women are usually subject to cruel harassment when they allow their body hair to grow — take professional pole dancer Leila Davis who in March, didn't shave her armpits before accepting a modeling job for Adidas and Stella McCartney.
After social media photos of her ad were flooded with both positive and hateful comments, Davis tweeted, "It is so misogynistic to attack women for having body hair. They wouldn't do it to a man, and the level of steam they have for me is definitely because of my Blackness. It makes them mad that this big brand gave me and my armpit hair a platform."
"Women are supposed to be smooth and clean shaven, in contrast to hairy, rugged men," Kristen Barber, an associate professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, told Yahoo Life at the time. "Consider the fact that naturally-hairless men may be teased as not masculine enough, or men who shave their bodies are considered feminine or gay. So, when women don't shave, the ideas of men and women as inherent opposites risks exposure as a social myth."
Keep at it, Alyssa!
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