Stretching my legs out into the aisle of the bus I heard a voice a several rows behind me ascend a few octaves.

"Hairy legs are really so revolting!" it shrilled.

"Why?" someone asked.

"It's just so unfeminine," was the reply.

I glanced down at my legs and horror of horrors. . .I realized it had been a full three days since my legs had seen the sharp side of a razorblade, and it showed. It must have been my legs that had sparked this outburst!

Amusing as this exchange was, it may surprise you to note that it was a female voice lecturing on the evil of my stubbly legs. It was a male who seemed quite unsure of what the fuss was about.

In Europe women don't shave. They consider that what is natural on the male body is equally natural and beautiful on the female form. Perhaps not so oddly, they laugh at the "plucked chicken" look of women who shave every part of their body.

Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex that the term "woman" is a cultural category, just as beauty is a social construct -- perhaps even as Naomi Wolf argues, a myth.

The end result is that what one society accepts as natural is considered unnatural and ugly in another society.

You must work at beauty. Beauty is certainly not something which society will give you easily. First of all, you must pay for it. Society pressures you into wearing artificial cosmetics and suffering unnatural implants to "correct" the shortcomings of your natural body.

Any woman who is happy in her body and comfortable with herself will be downgraded and belittled until she loses her security.

Society will label you a feminist; a man-hater; a spiky-haired, hairy-legged, leftie radical until you conform and agree to fit into its terms of beauty.

In the '80s a new term entered the arena of feminist discourse. "Backlash" was used to describe the phenomenon that saw women grow ashamed of admitting that they deserve the gains they fought for in the '60s and '70s. Women became ashamed of being labeled feminists. To be a feminist was no longer something to be proud of.

Kaz Cooke, an Australian journalist, cartoonist and writer, once wrote something along the lines of: Any woman who says she is not a feminist but refuses to be treated like "a speck of seagull shit on the beach of life" has just got her terminology wrong.

While it is essential to strive for equality on a personal level, a lot of feminists believe that women have become complacent with the gains that have been achieved. Great time and effort have gone into erasing sexist language such as the use of terms like "mankind" but people seem to forget what is happening at the personal level.

Take television advertising as an example. Male voices preach to women what rights they can and cannot have over their bodies. And do advertising magnates really believe that women will be attracted rather than repulsed by a deodorant sold using a slogan like "Protects you like a man, treats you like a woman?" Perhaps even more scary. . .are women really attracted to it?

I am not saying that the personal realm is the only ground on which equal rights should be fought. In the more complex sphere of politics, gun control legislation is continually defeated because of the National Rifle Association's insistence that the right to bear arms is guaranteed in the Contitution's Second Amendment. This same Constitution does not guarantee equal rights for women.

The simple amendment guaranteeing that the "equality of rights shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex" failed to be ratified. Some argue that this issue is irrelevent, that such rights are already embedded in the system. It is hard to understand how a society that is so proud of its Constitution and believes in the need to set out all of its citizens' rights in writing fails to see the importance of sexual equality being spelled out as well.

In Australia, the Victorian state government tried to place a luxury tax on items such as tampons and sanitary napkins. Although this proposal never actually came into effect, I think the very idea that such items constitute a luxury rather than a necessity points to a desperate need for a female perspective in such male-dominated echelons of power.

In this "Year of the Woman," the prospects for women's equality are portrayed as rosy. A record 165 women are running for Congress in this year's elections. Six states already have women lieutenant governors, 14 states have women treasurers and three states have female governors.

In the past 15 years, the number of women in local elected office has tripled. Women make up more than half of the United States' enrolled voters yet they aren't represented politically.

Estimates differ, but most reports find that women earn on average only 60 percent to 70 percent of male earnings in this country.

Issues such as these obviously far outweigh whether a woman shaves her legs or not. What is important is that women are allowed to earn their own self-respect so that their lives need not be dictated by a society aimed at binding them into its own categories to suit its own purposes. This change will only continue as women increasingly refuse to be treated as specks of bird droppings, and again become proud of that strength.