Like most people, I have armpits. And, like many but not all people, I have armpit hair. It is thick, dark, and undeniably copious. It is also long and soft and very, very strokeable. I do not shave, wax, or laser it off, but I do trim it occasionally. The same goes for my pubic hair.

The rest of my body hair, of which there is a lot, is less lucky. I pluck my eyebrows and the fine but dark rogue hairs that dot my chest, neck, and under and along my jawline; wax my top lip and stomach; and shave my legs and bikini line whenever they’re going to be visible to others. This is the reality of what I do to myself in order to be unremarkable.

Even though I now have frankly rather bushy armpits, I still feel the pressure to conform to a smooth, plasticised ideal of beauty. Despite enjoying the smoothness of my freshly shaven legs, I know from my deeply felt reluctance to go barelegged in public if I haven't shaved that my choice is not free. I fear being judged by other people, but especially by men. According to a 2014 survey of UK consumers by Mintel, a marketing intelligence agency, I am not alone in feeling like this. In the year preceding the survey only 8% of women had not removed any of their body hair. 82% of women stated that they removed hair from their legs, 78% from their underarms, and 57% from their pubic area.

Although often portrayed as a pressure felt only by women, the same survey revealed that men are increasingly buying into the hair removal industry. Only 30% of men had not removed any hair from their body in the last year, with 55% reporting that they’d removed hair from their head, 29% from their pubic area, and 13% from their chest. While these statistics in themselves reveal very little, it is more telling that 58% of men aged 16 to 24 felt expected to remove or groom body hair.

Inevitably in discussions of body hair, the origins of these expectations are picked over, time and again. “But the ancient Egyptians did it!” people bleat, desperately looking for a way to not have to think critically about their own actions. This is irrelevant. Regardless of its origins and regardless of how it came to be a social norm, whether through consumption of pornography or the influence of celebrities, the removal of body hair is an arbitrary standard with no objective benefits. The fact that some people (including myself) prefer the feeling of having smooth legs does not negate the way in which hairlessness, especially for women, is constructed as the norm; while the actual norm, some level of hirsuteness, is regarded as obviously and naturally deviant.

This intensifying expectation of (relative) hairlessness is, and I refuse to qualify this statement, damaging. At best, it is a chore that validates your sense of yourself as a conforming, and thus attractive, individual; at worst, it is a constant, expensive struggle that reminds you at every turn of your bodily inadequacy compared to the imagined but seemingly achievable ideal. Unless you pay for laser hair removal, your body will always beat you - the hair will grow back, seemingly taunting you and your puny razorblade. You will never be smooth enough, attractive enough, and the cause will be your own body. You will be locked in a never-ending battle with your self.

If this sounds melodramatic for such a petty issue, then you’re on the right lines. Body hair is hardly a problem. If you choose never to remove so much as a single hair from your body the world will not come screeching to a halt. You will not (I hope) be thrown in a pit and kept there for being a disgrace to society, occasionally thrown scraps from the banquets the beautiful people are having without you. But for such a minor matter, removing body hair takes up a lot of our time and our money. Beauty brand Escentual found that women spend a total of 72 days shaving their legs over the course of their lifetime and 30 days plucking their eyebrows. If, at a rough estimate, you use a can of shaving cream (£2.85 Superdrug own brand) and four disposable razors (£2.79 Superdrug own brand) a month, you will spend £67.68 on shaving in a single year. That could buy you a bottle of Moët champagne or 335 Sainsbury’s cookies, and I know what I’d rather have.

The truth is that hair removal is a business as well as a norm, a process that produces smooth, glossy bodies that hide the choices that led to their production. A naturally hairless body looks the same as an artificially hairless one. The observer cannot tell whether you have chosen to wax your legs because you want to, or because you feel that you must. The expectation of removed or groomed body hair cannot be dismantled through freely made choices that look the same as choices made under the duress of societal expectations, expectations that you may not even truly want to conform to. Maybe, as I did, you could try leaving some, not necessarily all, of your body hair alone for a month. You might hate it. You might love it. And you might even discover that, in the end, it’s really nothing more than hair.