'I Was Always the Girl with the Mustache’: Woman’s Response to Rude Date Goes Viral

Naina Kataria, whose poem about the upsetting war against women’s body hair has struck a major nerve. (Photo: Facebook)

A young woman’s poem about sexist beauty standards and the taming of body hair — which notes wistfully, “I was always the girl with a mustache” — has gone viral on Facebook, although the poet wishes it were for slightly different reasons.

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“What I observed was that it was women shared this poem everywhere. The idea was to notify men and grab their attention about what the process of hair removal is like,” Naina Kataria, 22, of Delhi, India, wrote on her Infinite Entropy Facebook page Thursday. That’s where she posted a story about her poem from Buzzfeed, in which she explained that she wrote the verse in response to a date. “We were watching this ad about razors for women when I remarked that celebrities shouldn’t endorse such products because it sends out a message that one HAS to buy them to look beautiful,” she said. “He replied by saying, ‘OMG you’re too much of a feminist.’”

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The poem, posted on May 3, reads in its entirety:

When a man tells me
I’m beautiful
I don’t believe him.
Instead, I relive my days in high school
When no matter how good I was
I was always the girl with a moustache
He doesn’t know what it’s like
to grow up in your maternal family
Where your body is the only one that
Proudly boasts of your father’s X
While your mother’s X sits back and pities
It’s unladylike-ness
He doesn’t know the teenager
Who filled her corners with
Empty consolations of
Being loved for who she was- someday.
He doesn’t know hypocrisy.
He doesn’t know of the world that
tells you to ‘be yourself’
and sells you a fair and lovely shade card
in the same fucking breath
He doesn’t know of the hot wax and the laser
whose only purpose is to
replace your innocent skin
with its own brand of womanhood
He doesn’t know of the veet and the bleach
That uproot your robust hair
in the name of hygiene
Hygiene, which when followed by men
makes them gay and unmanly
He doesn’t know how unruly eyebrows are tamed
and how uni-brows die a silent death
All to preserve beauty
And of the torturous miracles that happen
Inside the doors marked
“WOMEN ONLY”
So when a man calls me beautiful
I throw at him, a smile; a smile that remained
After everything the strip pulled away
And I dare him
To wait
Till my hair grows back.

The image Kataria posted along with her poem. (Photo: Facebook)

Kataria’s poem has been shared more than 8,700 times and has more than 36,000 reactions and 3,100 comments, many of which, as Kataria points out, are from women who empathize. “So true,” “powerful,” “amazing,” “beautiful and on point,” and “a perfect post explaining what girls go through” were just a few of the accolades, along with “this sums up what I used to feel when was teased by some in high school.”

Photo: Facebook

In her follow-up post, Kataria notes that she has received many compliments in her “fifteen minutes of fame” but that they don’t matter much to her.

“What matters more are the people who came forward and shared their stories,” she writes. “When I was writing this piece, I was just trying to let things out of my head so that if there was anybody anywhere who felt the same way, they would know that they’re not alone in this, because I know what that feels like. I never want anyone else to feel that way. So if you really wish to compliment me on what I wrote, stop getting grossed out by hairy women. That would be more than enough.”