Can girls be beautiful if

Proper grooming makes the most of what you were born with.
Its that simple.

shave everything. thats how I roll.

Of *course* women can be beautiful with hair! And they don't necessarily stink either. And it doesn't make you dirtier, somehow. This site depresses me sometimes.

Anyway, go do your burlesque act! Have fun, be strong, and who cares about the hair!

just depends on the guy I guess! haha. Its personal preferrence.

Okay, first off I believe you were asking this question specifically as it relates to live performances. Yes, ultimately it is your decision and to each their own. However, (and I'm speaking as a former performance belly dancer here) if you go ahead with it, prepare yourself for some ridicule. Quite probably loud and obnoxius ridicule. Right or wrong, it's going to happen - it's what you do with it that ultimately matters. Now secondly, in response to everyone's question as to when this trend began (belly dancer by night, actual professional historian by career) here's your answer in the form of a longish but correct and detailed article by Cecil Adams:

"I knew if I procrastinated long enough on this often-asked question somebody would eventually do the legwork for me. Sure enough, Pete Cook of Chicago has sent me a 1982 article from the Journal of American Culture by Christine Hope bearing the grand title "Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture."

The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.)

The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair.

To be sure, women had been concerned about the appearance of their hair since time immemorial, but (sensibly) only the stuff you could see. Prior to World War I this meant scalp and, for an unlucky few, facial hair.

Around 1915, however, sleeveless dresses became popular, opening up a whole new field of female vulnerability for marketers to exploit.

According to Hope, the underarm campaign began in May, 1915, in Harper's Bazaar, a magazine aimed at the upper crust. The first ad "featured a waist-up photograph of a young woman who appears to be dressed in a slip with a toga-like outfit covering one shoulder. Her arms are arched over her head revealing perfectly clear armpits. The first part of the ad read `Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair.'"

Within three months, Cook tells us, the once-shocking term "underarm" was being used. A few ads mentioned hygiene as a motive for getting rid of hair but most appealed strictly to the ancient yearning to be hip. "The Woman of Fashion says the underarm must be as smooth as the face," read a typical pitch.

The budding obsession with underarm hair drifted down to the proles fairly slowly, roughly matching the widening popularity of sheer and sleeveless dresses. Antiarm hair ads began appearing in middlebrow McCall's in 1917. Women's razors and depilatories didn't show up in the Sears Roebuck catalog until 1922, the same year the company began offering dresses with sheer sleeves.

By then the underarm battle was largely won. Advertisers no longer felt compelled to explain the need for their products but could concentrate simply on distinguishing themselves from their competitors.

The anti-leg hair campaign was more fitful. The volume of leg ads never reached the proportions of the underarm campaign. Women were apparently more ambivalent about calling attention to the lower half of their anatomy, perhaps out of fear that doing so would give the male of the species ideas in a way that naked underarms did not.

Besides, there wasn't much practical need for shaved legs. After rising in the 1920s hemlines dropped in the 30s and many women were content to leave their leg hair alone.

Still, some advertisers as well as an increasing number of fashion and beauty writers harped on the idea that female leg hair was a curse.

Though Hope doesn't say so, what may have put the issue over the top was the famous WWII pinup of Betty Grable displaying her awesome gams. Showing off one's legs became a patriotic act. That plus shorter skirts and sheer stockings, which looked dorky with leg hair beneath, made the anti-hair pitch an easy sell.

Some argue that there's more to this than short skirts and sleeveless dresses. Cecil's colleague Marg Meikle (Dear Answer Lady, 1992) notes that Greek statues of women in antiquity had no pubic hair, suggesting that hairlessness was some sort of ideal of feminine beauty embedded in Western culture.

If so, a lot of Western culture never got the message. Greek women today (and Mediterranean women generally) do not shave their hair. The practice has been confined largely to English-speaking women of North America and Great Britain, although one hears that it's slowly spreading elsewhere.

So what's the deal with Anglo-Saxons? Some lingering vestige of Victorian prudery? Good question, but what with world unrest, the economic crisis, and the little researchers having missed their naps, not high on Cecil's priority list. Here's hoping some all-but-thesis Ph.D. candidate will pick up the trail."

Not for me......but to each's own...:)

I shave my pits, but I must admit in the winter my legs are ignored, maybe every 3/4 weeks. My hubby never complains, but in the summer I pay more attention.

I think yes they can. It's all up to the individual person what they find attractive on a woman or not.

If I'm being honest, I don't think that most of the population would find a woman with obvious leg / armpit hair attractive, specifically in a show such as burlesque (in the street, or around the house maybe they wouldn't care) but not for a show. That is just my opinion though, you may find others will differ.

I honestly wish I found every woman attractive no matter how they look or kept themselves. Why would I not? But for better or worse my perception of attractiveness was shaped largely by outside influencess, probably starting with my immediate family, then influences in movies and on TV, albeit usually ridiculous. As I've matured I have developed personal preference but honestly it hasn't moved the meter all that much.

So in terms of performance I think it would be awesome. In terms of identity it would also be very cool. But relative to attractiveness, that Julia Roberts photo was a turn-off, Sophia Loren, well, it was a bucket of cold water poured on the sun. In her case it didn't matter but not too many of us are white hot like that.

I shave when I'm dating someone, otherwise, who cares? I do it because I'm no fan of man hair, so I can deal with a guy who doesn't like furry legs and pits. But I'd be even happier if more men felt obligated to shave, too. Oddly enough, caterpillar eyebrows never bothered me on a guy, though, and I almost never bother with mine even if I am seeing someone. Which always horrified my sister.