By Sharanya Gopinathan
I guess by now I should stop being surprised by what people notice and talk about on social media, but every once in a while something new happens that makes me go omg whatnow?
As soon as the trailer for the upcoming Wonder Woman movie released, people on social media have been talking about only one thing, and it’s the last thing anyone would’ve imaged: Wonder Woman’s armpits.
To be more specific, they’re talking about Israeli actor Gal Gadot’s bare underarms, and wondering about the noticeable lack of armpit hair. The trailer features Gadot hurling cars about, diving off cliffs and fighting smashing lampposts with her whip. It was the scene where she flings a car across the street that had people all up in underarms.
https://twitter.com/kwmurphy/status/844352967604101123
https://twitter.com/britaintodayuk/status/842372068939309056
https://twitter.com/lcbchefperry/status/842147369235976193
Slate‘s argument is fair, in so far as that it is pretty weird that people believe that armpits not only need to be hairless, but also bleached a kind of pearly white in order to be palatable to viewers. Slate also mentions that Priyanka’s Chopra’s pits were treated to the same effects on her July 2016 Maxim cover. All the discussion on social media is also a pretty refreshing departure from what we’ve come to see as normalcy though, and it’s kind of nice that so many people care about something like this, and wish that mainstream movies would stop treating women’s bodies as something to be airbrushed into the currently prevailing impossible standard of beauty.
That being said, you can’t help but laugh at some of the tweets from people who are stunned that this is really what people are talking about right now.
https://twitter.com/SonOfUhGunn/status/844172803251363841
By the way, the part I found most unbelievable about the Wonder Woman trailer wasn’t Wonder Woman’s lack of body hair, but the terribly misplaced accents people seem to have. Why is a dude from London speaking with a proper American accent?