![\"3\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/12\/32.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThat’s\u00a0The Walking Dead<\/em>\u2019s Rosita Espinosa with newly shaven armpits.<\/p>\n This is also gender ideology at work: the privileging of an\u00a0idea<\/em>\u00a0of gender over real life or, in this case, realism.<\/p>\n The Walking Dead<\/em>\u2019s producers go to great lengths to portray what a\u00a0zombie apocalypse might be like. They are especially keen to show us the nasty bits: what it really looks like when dead people don’t die, what it looks like to kill the undead, and the evil it spawns in those left alive. It’s gruesome.\u00a0The show is a gore orgy. But armpit hair on women? Apparently\u00a0that’s just gross.<\/p>\n If gender ideology had lost\u00a0this battle with realism, we’d see armpit hair on the women in Gilligan’s Island<\/em>, Planet of the Apes<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>The Blue Lagoon<\/em>, Beauty and the Beast<\/em>,\u00a0Waterworld,<\/em>\u00a0Lost<\/em>, and\u00a0The Hunger Games\u00a0— <\/em>but we don’t. (Thanks to\u00a0Ariane Lange at Buzzfeed for the whole collection<\/a>\u00a0and to @uheartdanny<\/a> for the link.)<\/p>\n At least Rosita could conceivably have<\/em> a razor.\u00a0How do women supposedly\u00a0shave their armpits on deserted islands?\u00a0Did the Beast slip Belle a razor, you know, just as part of his controlling personality? And maybe some persnickety women would continue to shave even if they were lost in purgatory, but Riley in Alien?<\/em> Come on.<\/p>\n Our interest in realism only goes so far. Armpit hair on women is apparently one of its limits.<\/p>\n Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is what\u00a0gender ideology looks like: That’s\u00a0The Walking Dead\u2019s Rosita Espinosa with newly shaven armpits. This is also gender ideology at work: the privileging of an\u00a0idea\u00a0of gender over real life or, in this case, realism. The Walking Dead\u2019s producers go to great lengths to portray what a\u00a0zombie apocalypse might be like. They are especially keen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65345,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,251,55,2089,2103,2096,129,343,293],"class_list":["post-65344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-hair","tag-gender","tag-gender-beauty","tag-gender-bodies","tag-gender-femininity","tag-media","tag-tvmovies","tag-social-construction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/12\/1a.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65344"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65476,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65344\/revisions\/65476"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n