My Thursday short column is up at Healthy is the New Skinny: Bare Down There: Waxing, Beauty, and Pain. It’s a brief look at teens and bikini waxing, and the growing popularity of the Brazilian wax among very young girls (including, as the article notes, among those who have not yet hit puberty and begun to grow pubic hair.)
Lots has been written about pubic hair and what its removal means. Count me among those troubled by what seems the almost pedophilic fetishization of hairless vulvas in pornography. (To put it simply, I find it sexually and aesthetically unappealing as well as politically problematic.)
But the larger point is that waxing, like so many other beauty rituals, hurts. (That’s true whatever’s being waxed, whether it’s the pubis or the lip or the space between the eyebrows.) As older sisters and mothers and the media instruct young women about how they should best pursue beauty, they teach girls that pain is not only a rite of passage into womanhood, but a necessary (and continuous) aspect of maintaining femininity.
Pain happens on a spectrum, from the merely itchy (pantyhose) to the permanently body-altering (major cosmetic surgery.) High heels, piercings, and hair dye all exact both a financial and a physical price. “Beauty hurts”, older women say to younger women. And it’s not just beauty, but love that hurts: think of what we expect girls to go through with first intercourse — or with childbirth.
For much of history — and in many other parts of the world — this pain has been and remains mandatory. Girls have their genitals mutilated against their will in Mali and suffer fistulas from giving birth too soon and too young in Afghanistan. There’s nothing quite comparable in America, where we at least claim to give girls and women a choice to avoid these agonies. We don’t cut off little girls’ clitorises, we generally don’t force 15 year-olds into marriages, and we certainly don’t mandate Brazilian waxes for high schoolers.
But as most women and some men know, the cost of saying “no” to pain is very high. If a teen girl wants to feel confident at the beach in her bikini, making sure she’s bare down there (or damn near) is a price she must pay. Young women are raised to fear ridicule and social exclusion far more than physical pain. Watch what most young women do when they trip and fall: they leap back up, more worried about what others have seen than about any injury they’ve sustained.
The law doesn’t mandate you wax your vulva or straighten your hair or put on hose and heels. The state doesn’t force you to give up carbs and dessert to fit into a bikini. But the fact that certain behaviors aren’t genuinely compulsory doesn’t mean that they can’t feel obligatory. And for so many women, the pain that comes with meeting those obligations is less than the social cost of refusing to pursue beauty.
Any solution to this problem of pain has to meet girls where they are. Parents can refuse to let their daughters get waxed or get their ears pierced, but in most cases that only delays the inevitable. The solution, whatever it is, depends on opening up a conversation with our sisters, our daughters, our mothers, our friends and lovers. And in that conversation, we need to look at the ways we consciously and unconsciously valorize physical and emotional pain as the price of beauty and true womanhood.
Hugo,
I am curious about this point:
“Count me among those troubled by what seems the almost pedophilic fetishization of hairless vulvas in pornography,”
While I understand the argument that a desire for hairless women suggests pedophilia, and I know you distrust evolutionary biology arguments in general, I cannot help by wonder…
Male hair removal (facial shaving especially) is rarely, if ever, argued to be a response to pedophilic desires in women. Instead, most evolutionary biologists argue that it likely has to do with displaying clear, clean skin, something that is universally found attractive (indeed, you post last week discusses how acne has not been prized at any age).
Does it not stand to reason that at least some female hair removal might come from a similar desire; Espcially as the physical appearance of the vulva is often a good indicator of many sexually transmitted diseases?
I’m not saying this is 100% certain, but there is also no way to claim with certainty that hairless vulvas reflect pedophilic desires, it just strikes me as odd that in the face of doubt there seems to be a strong urge to blame pedophilia rather than other possible explanations.
(Needless to say, there could be other explanations as well: male chest waxing became popular when muscle building became popular, could not similar arguments be made linking women’s leg hair removal and the transition from “skinny” to “toned” that you discussed in this column some weeks ago)
This ought to be on the front of every webpage in the world.
How can the same people [rightly] loathe torture in the political context, the things some governments (cough) do to prisoners, and then have no problem with it when it is “voluntarily” self-done by the young and impressionable? Or even involuntarily done to one’s dependents, as if feeding them gave you the right to hurt them.
Who could not scratch their head in disbelief at reading that “normal” things like childbirth are expected to hurt, when otherwise one has been taught that pain means something is WRONG? If in fact it was true, who could respect a god that would do that to innocent people? As for the first instance of certain kinds of sex–that can’t be what sex is about, it can’t be what love is about, and it sure can’t be what first times are about.
You can bet that someone is going to pop up and start talking about the painful things done to young men in various cultures, starting with the foreskin. I’m going to save them the trouble, because not only is that disgusting too, it fosters false comparisons. The boys who go thru this or that ordeal still emerge with a better status than their sisters (however some people try to glamorize women’s self-sacrifice.) And when they go into battle and risk death, they at least get to shoot back.
In the old days, women were expected to suffer to be beautiful for pleasing men (who might not have been that fussy) and for outdoing other women (if they are divided among themselves, they can’t stand together against oppressors); now they have to worry about pleasing potential employers as well. This is progress??
Good call on how just forbidding this or that isn’t enough, it will take undoing the whole culture of “you’re not okay the way you are”, which is a subset of “you aren’t sovereign, you are a lesser being that I get to judge (to ease the pain of others judging me)”. And, of course, “buy, buy, buy this stuff of ours, even if it is toxic chemicals or dangerous surgery”.
I was in a used bookstore and picked up a fictional account of a buck deer in the Calfornia wilds; at one point it said that bucks’ lives are inherently fraught with pain and discomfort and hardship, and I thought “now where have I read that before, why does it sound so familiar?”
That all this exists in the context of a religion that (sometimes) glorifies suffering is a whole nother can of worms. But that part of the onus that lands on women must not be neglected, and I am right glad that good voices are speaking out against it.
I agree that the obsession with the hairless vulva is troubling. I’ve pondered it a fair bit, over the years. That said, I do want to mention one positive thing about it.
I waxed for the first time 3 weeks ago, at age 37. I was open to doing this because my BF of 2 years finally admitted he’d like it. He’d never demanded it or made me feel bad or unattractive for having hair or anything like that, so I figured he’d shown respect for my choice about my body for two years, and why not give it a try?
After the brief waiting period where I was told to avoid contact with the area, what I discovered was that for me at least, it really intensified the pleasurable feelings associated with sex and sexual touching.
At this point, I will probably keep doing it, not because of his reaction (which was also positive) but because it honestly felt really good. Not the waxing part, obviously, but I am lucky in that the procedure itself wasn’t all that bad for me.
So, as with all of the many issues we women (and the men who care about us) face, it isn’t just that one thing is good and the other is bad. Sometimes I wish these issues were more clearly right vs. wrong.
Why wax when you can trim with an electric trimmer designed for that task?
But more importantly, why do anything to your body that you don’t want to do?
as an aside, most men in porn? Also waxed or VERY closely trimmed.
I have no doubt I started shaving my legs and all that because thats what women do in our society. I kept and continue to remove almost all body hair because to me if feels cooler and cleaner, esp in summer.
I can agree with a great deal of this critique but not all of it.
Pantihose really do not cause discomfort or pain, certainly no more than a tie or most other items of clothing.
I don’t like the implication that first intercourse is very painful, or that it’s something we are expected to “go through” for love. I did it because I wanted to, not because I was expected to, and out of desire and affection, not love. I can only speak for myself but while it hurt somewhat, it also felt very nice, and the pain was a kind of sexy-somehow-also-good pain.
I think it’s crappy that hairlessness is so ubiquitous in porn, but hairlessness per se is just an aesthetic preference. I am not sold on the look of it, myself, but I like the feel. I then weigh that up against the bother and/or pain of hair removal and make a decision for myself. As a young woman trying to make my way in the world and do a little bit of good for others, my pubic hair and what I do with it ranks pretty damn low on the list of concerns and injustices.
Really interesting article Hugo!
Not sure where my thoughts are upon this. Completely agree that the felt need for young girls to act in this way is totally uncalled for and weird but at the same time, I enjoy the feeling of smoothness on my own body and on the bodies of my lovers. On that note, I do believe it’s personal choice and I won’t reject a lover if they don’t fit in with my thoughts for body hair, which I think is the ticket.
Nevertheless, I do enjoy your writing and a very interesting point!
If I ever decide to remove hair from any part, I will go for a permanent and anesthetized solution.
What one does to one’s own body may indeed seem trivial, but it can result from non-trivial pressures, and abet the perpetuation of same, which is what Hugo seemed to be emphasizing. I often feel that there’s no trivia, that it is all interconnected. So I am glad to see that at least some of those opting to do this or that to themselves, have put some real thought into their choices.
A sexy-somehow-also-good pain? My imagination just shorted out. But I guess that’s why some folks are into bdsm.
The state doesn’t force you to give up carbs and dessert to fit into a bikini.
____________________________
I love desserts, and i’m a girl. Each time i choose to take a small dinner and a huge dessert, i get comments like “You shouldn’t eat that !”, “It explains why you took weight” and other stuff.
It’s hard because everytime i eat something, even alone, i hear those little voices.
As, in fact, i’m really really thin with fat only on my belly (and little, moreover)
=(
I know why girls wax themselves. It’s certainly not for them.
Can we give the pedophile argument a rest already? The reason for hairlessness in porn has everything to do with the camera, not because they wish they were really shooting child porn. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that consumers of pornography, where the actors are hairless, find themselves on a slippery slope to child pornography or pedophilia.
Men are routinely expected to be clean shaven, whether by their spouses or their employers (my first minimum wage job at a pizza delivery chain had this as a requirement). Some men also feel expected to shave their chests and backs. Women are routinely expected to shave their armpits and legs. Just as shaving elsewhere doesn’t make an adult look prepubescent, nor does depilating the pubic area.
As JGirl mentions, sex can feel different if you’re both hairless, and some people prefer that feeling. We also shouldn’t assume that pubic hair removal is a recent invention, as it has been practiced for centuries (for various reasons). It’s true that many people feel an expectation to be hairless based on the prevalence of hairless actors in pornography. Our charge is to educate young men and women about grooming styles being a personal choice, not to stigmatize one of those choices with the specter of pedophilia.
To put it simply, I find it sexually and aesthetically unappealing Body policing, on an ostensibly feminist blog?
If it actually were ubiquitous, it would certainly be socially problematic. (Politically, if you prefer.) But aesthetically? That’s straight (PUN!) body policing. And sexually? What does that even mean? (At the very least, it’s my experience that performing oral on someone with less/no public hair is somewhat easier, though not enough to worry about. What else could sexually even mean here?)
Beyond that, I have a hard time wrapping my ahead around the implicit message in context where women are now acting in stereotypically masculine ways in both acting and perception. (The tripping anecdote, for instance, or “Young women are raised to fear ridicule and social exclusion far more than physical pain.” In general, it’s just applying the “No Pain, No Gain” principle to women.) Weird to think about.
Uh, I think I’m allowed to express my own aesthetic taste, no? Yes, I personally find the removal of pubic hair to be, well, a huge turn-off. That’s not policing, that’s a highly personal preference.
Look, it’s not as if people were having awful sex for eons and then wham, around 1990 discovered that if they waxed all the hair off a woman’s genitals, suddenly her orgasms were so much better. (Women with pubic hair had orgasms, back in the day!) People can argue for it as their own preference, but like so many other things, it’s a preference that is heavily culturally conditioned. It’s not as if guys in the Sixties were begging their girlfriends to go “bare down there.”
And I admit this may be generational. My first sexual experiences in the early ’80s were with women who were, uh, luxuriantly endowed with body hair. So pubic hair on a woman was, for me, connected to maturity and sexual awakening while hairlessness was connected to pre-pubescence. Everyone’s mileage can vary, which is why I personalize rather than universalize it.
(And even when I was at my fittest and ripped, I would never have dreamt of removing my chest hair, with which I am rather well provided.)
The real issue is pain, not hair. And let’s not kid ourselves and imagine that every woman who gets a Brazilian does it because it makes sex oh so much better for her. It may — but to ignore that there’s an element of cultural coercion seems a bit of a stretch.
Oh, Brazilian’s freakin’ HURT, no question. Waxing any part of a body can be somewhat painful, but sensitive bits? Yeah, that shit hurts no question. None. At all. But I still get Brazilians because, hell, sexual aspect aside, it is 100 degrees and humid as hell where I live in the summer- and there are parts of my body I sure as heck do not like having razor burn on- and well, I find no hair COOLER- as in temperature wise. And I am a huge fan of minimal body hair on PEOPLE, in general…men and women.
WRT to porn thou, as mentioned above, part of the reason it IS popular is because well, viewers wanna SEE what is going on, up close and, er, right there…hair on the men and women makes it harder to see this…and frankly, in or out of porn- um- personally myself, if I am gonna perform oral on someone? I really dont wanna feel like I am flossing my teeth down there and end up with a mouthful of body hair- it is, to me, gross. I find it disgusting personally- so yeah, I prefer if not waxed, trimmed down real low…. so the pedo thing? Pfft, I am not buying it- at all- and I never have. Body Hair or NO, most women in porn LOOK like adult women- not children- they have adult bodies: breasts, curves, so on, and are not build wise child like at all for the most part. I mean, I seriously doubt anyone is ever going to mistake Tera Patrick or Brianna Banks for a 12 year old.
As for pain in beauty practices- it absolutely exists for women. Waxing pain, high heel wearing pain, folk who get scalp burns from hair processing, and yeah, even surgery pain. It’s a very real thing, and culture does pressure women to “look their best” by whatever means…can they refuse to comply? Yes. Are there consequences for doing so? Yes (and in some circles, feminist ones even, consequences if you DO, actually)
Yet, there is a growing trend and pressure on men to also do this: Hours in a gym can and does cause pain, men are actually getting waxed themselves in record numbers, and Pec Implants are one of the fastest growing cosmetic procedures and well, dudes get botox and such as well, in growing numbers.
And well, over all, i think a lot of Americans, women and men alike, for MANY reasons are vain…
Heck, I get that way-I like to look my best, and if a little pain is necessary- so be it. From waxing to tattoos- I LIKE the way such things look, and if it hurts- so be it.
Ren, why do you think porn didn’t adopt the bare look earlier? Did it simply not occur to people in the 1970s and ’80s? Or is it a bit like the facial, an innovation that appears and then seems as if it’s the most obvious way to do things?
I agree that life is often painful. But “looking our best” is subjective, and it is conditioned, and most troublingly, it is taught to girls so young. We need to break the “to be a woman, you must inevitably suffer” trope. There is constructive suffering (as any endurance athlete or BDSM sub will tell you. There is also destructive, soul-scarring suffering. And when we tell girls that pain is the admission price to beauty, we set them up for the latter more often than the former.
Hugo- well, I think the actual developments in film tech and filming style had much to do with it- older porn does not have nearly as much “close up” foootage in it really. A
nd in truth, people are quick to blame porn for everything. If folk wanna really take aim at something that has led to a huge pressure re: young women and waxing? How about the dang fashion industry. Do swimsuit models have body hair? NOPE, are they EVERYWHERE young women look, even more than porn? Yep. Heck, I watched some episode of America’s Next Top Model where Tyra and crew were ALL OVER some prospective model for having “bikini line stubble”…I think she was 18? Well, Porn, like many less conventional forms of entertainment WILL take cues from OTHER media…bikini models, music video girls, so on- ALL waxed as well, just not porn gals, and they truly ARE everywhere.
And I agree fully there is FAR too much pressure on young women to be hot and fit in and all sorts of things- FAR too much, and I agree adults have an obligation to lessen this and allow kids to be kids and not paranoid about looks and beauty and beauty ritual- 100% with this notion.
Hugo, I don’t think waxing is as prevalent or culturally mandated as you might think it is. I don’t doubt that it’s big in So. Cal., but here in Minnesota, for example, where people’s bodies are buried in multiple layers for 3/4 of the year, not so much. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever actually seen a waxed woman in the showers at my gym. I do agree, however, that we need to take a hard look at pressure to wax, if and where it does exist, and pressure to perform any other painful “beauty treatments.”
Hugo, obviously you’re entitled to express whatever opinion you like, but as someone who both sets himself up as a bit of a moral authority, and what with your RateMyProf award, it’s pretty antifeminist to declare that you think a grooming choice/body style/whatnot is unattractive in a public forum. (In fairness, I read the fairly understated word choice as deadpan, which makes it seem exceedingly harsh. But perhaps not everyone does.)
Gigi, I suspect this may indeed be a coastal, urban thing (at least among the young), but it’s not unheard of elsewhere.
Ren, I agree, porn gets blamed for a lot that may not be its fault. But of course, it’s only in porn that we see the full effects of the full brazilian (as opposed to something neatly trimmed around the bikini line itself). And we share the same concern for young people, you and I.
Brian, I highly doubt anyone reading this is going to take grooming cues for their nether regions from me, a middle-aged married and monogamous dude who comes into physical contact with exactly one female crotch on a regular basis. What RatemyProf has to do with that, I haven’t the foggiest.
Well, I’d like to go on record, as a man, saying that I really couldn’t give a damn. I’m far more interested in facial beauty and overall shapeliness than the minutiae of body hair distribution.
There again, I’m also from across the Atlantic, and I hear that you fixate on it a lot more that side of the pond.
The greater point, about needless suffering in the name of beauty, I understand and applaud, though.
What makes you think that female genital mutilation is NOT happening in the U.S.? Of course it is happening here, and male doctors in hospitals are performing it. I’ve talked to many women nationwide who’ve told me about this happening in immigrant communities, and it’s a growing problem. That’s on the extreme scale of patriarchy, while the milder scale is the high heel industry, the fashion industry… all billion dollar empires controled by men, and work to keep women short of cash and short of self-esteem. As a lesbian, I have never understood why any woman would buy that junk, or what was possibly attractive about throwing out your back as a party of “beauty’ rituals. Just recently, a friend said she had to have scalp treatment, because her hair was falling out in clumps. It was due to astringent hair treatment at beauty parlours over decades. Make-up as carcinogen, lack of retirement funds wasting money on this stuff. Feminists for over 40 years have been after all of this, and still that billion dollar brain washing industry just keeps raking in the profits at women’s expense, and it continue to make men who run those companies rich.
Sheila, what kind of FGM in America are you talking about? Maybe in Muslim immigrant communities from Northern Africa, but in hospitals? Can you cite your sources?
I wear heels. I wax to a “landing strip”. I like make-up,and I like dying my hair. I am not a victim or an idiot, and I resent someone who considers herself a feminist telling me I’m brainwashed and throwing my money away.
@Brian: what’s the prob with Hugo telling us he prefers a woman to have body hair? That’s between him and his wife, and he’s allowed to have opinions on what’s personally sexy to him. It doesn’t make me second-guess my waxing decision to know a man I admire prefers women to be a”u naturale.” It’s not like Hugo’s going to see my cooter anyway, you know?
Google FGM in America, and follow the path. And individual choice does not mean you aren’t a part of the patriarchal pawn game Alexa… lots of women go along to get along, but that isn’t feminism, that is just going along to get along. FGM in immigrant communities in the U.S., France and England is a growing problem. This subject came up in a muslim and non-muslim women’s group in California recently. One woman had to take her daughter to a shelter because male relatives wanted a doctor to perform this “operation” here. Body modification has nothing to do with feminism, but fashion (fascism) is about profits, it is about the porn industry, it is about porn values coming right on into the malestream. We warned about this decades ago, but now it is everywhere you go, and women now claim it is feminist. Wow, the sheer cluelessness boggles the mind. Yes, you are brainwashed Alexa, as are most women who go along with this.
@Sheila, you don’t get to define feminism for everyone else, which is a good thing too. Hugo once said something about how some feminists love women as a group but loathe individual women. (Hugo, help me out, didn’t you say that here on the blog? Or was that in class??) Wherever, it describes you, Sheila. Perfectly. You don’t like most women. I don’t know much, but if you don’t respect women’s choices, you aren’t a feminist.
How dare you dismiss the vast majority of women as unthinking pawns? That’s not feminism, that’s smug misanthropy and destined to be totally irrelevant. I’ll take Hugo’s brand of feminism, Jessica Valenti’s brand, and the SlutWalkers’ style of being feminists any day over your mean, cynical and patronizing version.
Hugo, my friend, why the frick do you engage with these ridonkulous people who like telling women that they don’t feel what they think they feel?
A person might well be feeling what they claim to feel…but they may have been manipulated into it by someone else, and they might discover different feelings after learning to think in new ways. The cosmetic/fashion industry, run and abetted not only by men but perhaps by some women who have found a way to police other women, seems to be good at such manipulation. But they don’t do it alone, their customers keep each other in line, like crabs in a barrel that pull potential escapees back.
Mary Daly wrote about women who had been brainwashed to act as “token torturers” to keep other women in line for the patriarchy. Aside from how this holds some of them less responsible than they must be, it’s a good description of both slut-shaming and beauty pressure.
When I walk past a beauty parlor, the stench makes my nose sting. I support the right of people to modify the bodies nature has trapped them in, but I wish they were making more informed choices than they often seem to be–how much do we really have to sell out, how far do we really have to “go along to get along”–and also that science would make it not @#$%^&! hurt. I have said that I won’t judge any individual’s decision to cave or rebel, but I never can help wondering how well do they really know all the options? I made some choices I regret, and suspect I am not alone.
I think this culture I live in–which I have never felt at home in–is just plain morbid. Besides the religious currents I mentioned before, there is the influence of the Romantic period which had a dark/cruel/spooky strain running through it–I think, I’m not sure–but it sounds like this culture isn’t the only seriously messed-up one, and I am glad someone is putting some light on the FGM problem.
@ Angie & Alexa:
I think (not sure, but it reads that way to me) that Alexa is suggesting that feminists ala SheliaG are trying to do the exact same sort of policing of women that Mary Daly suggested- using patronizaton and superior sounding language towards women who do not agree with them on various matters. It’s not as overt or prevelant because these folk do not hold the sway the fashion industry does- but it is there. Rather than “you’ll look fat if you don’t”, they are saying “you don’t really make choices and are blind if you don’t”. One is an attack on the physical, the other is an attack on the intellecutual and sense of self. Neither is particularly savory.
And true enough people do not make choices in a vaccum, but I do think women make educated choices on just how much or how little they are going to comply with Beauty Standard and do give thought to the reprocussions of doing or not doing so. Some women HAVE to wear makeup and get their hair done and wear heels- even skirts- in order to Earn A Living (flight attendants come to mind). COuld they choose NOT to be flight attendants? Yes, but in truth: it’s a good paying job with insurance and security and benefits that are hard to overlook- and does not require a college degree. Hard to pass a job like that up if one needs and can do it- and if they say make up and hair done- well, then make up and hair done is the trade off for the job. Heck, MANY workplaces expect women to wear make up at least- fair or not- that is the reality of it and if women want to work? Well, then they wear make up.
Women also choose to not play the game entirely, or only aspects of it, and actually go against the grain- from the full blown “screw this” woman who does not wear make up, or shave, or engage in ANY of it, to the woman who, oh, might dress up somtimes but otherwise- meh, to the woman who wears lipstick constantly but has also put up with a lot of pain to alter her body to her OWN liking- with things like piercings and tattoos (lots of em) which is NOT seen as culturally standard and very outside the mainstream beuaty ideal.
And any and all of these women- the fligh attendant, the woman who rejects it wholly, the woman who sometimes does and sometimes doesnt, the woman who does insome ways and totally does not in others- I am pretty sure they have ALL given in thought and considered the negative consequences to their actions….
It’s not so much a matter of selling our or not, thinking or not, but a matter of personal comfort level and ability to live and earn a living in the world we all happen to be in at the moment- and heck, its my humble opinion No One should be judged for that….
But making concessions to make a living is not the same as making a free choice. It is some modicum of agency, but it is not full freedom. It is not the “end point” most feminists would like to see us arrive at – where choices are neutral enough that individuals can choose their own preference without pressure or manipulation.
I think Hugo’s point is – how many of these people would honestly choose the painful choice if the value of the choices were neutral. How many people truly do it for themselves, rather than for others? In addition, our preferences are shaped by media and culture and peers. High heels may make you feel confident and sexy, but that’s likely because our culture teaches that high heels are attractive/sexy for women.
I don’t condemn women for making those choices. Everyone has to make their own accomodations based on the consequences they are willing to live with and the enjoyment they get out of various activities. But it’s not a totally free choice. And pretending it is doesn’t help get to a day when everyone can actually make free choices and people don’t face the same negative repercussions for making different or non-mainstream approved choices.
Emily: I MOSTLY agree with you, and why yes, I do think the world would be a far better place if pressures were not placed upon people to look/dress a certain way or live up to media driven ideals, I 100% agree with that, and if we ever got to that point and women still waced or whatever out of personal preference, then YAY and so be it.
But, I think sometimes people get stuck in a rut of looking at women who do (or don’t) engage in the practices to varying degrees and being patronizing to them or calling ‘em out or whatever rather than looking more at WHY various things are considered the ideal and challenging that.
I’m also in the find-another-argument camp when it comes to the pedophilia ploy. Because, seriously, it resonates roughly as well as a hypothetical argument that people like bacon because of their sadistic attachment to burning animals alive. It’s not that there aren’t perfectly fine arguments against hair removal, and when it comes to the equation of pain and beauty you’ve barely touched the surface. If nothing else, waiving the pedophilia flag is a substitute for and, more importantly, a distraction from legitimate criticism.
Anyway, if you really want to change the conversation about shaving or waxing my preferred approach is to remind people that while 20th Century Anglo/American culture didn’t remember it, in almost all the rest of the world both men and women have traditionally removed their body and pubic hair not for erotic or esthetic appeal but to avoid lice, rashes, and other byproducts of not having lots of hot running water to bathe and do laundry in and of not having new clothes to change into every morning. (This, I discovered while doing research for a combined gender-studies and sex-ed program, is one of the reasons for merkins, which were essentially pubic wigs! People would shave to avoid lice and then wear merkins to pretend they were too upper-class or too healthy to need to. Weird I know.) In a number of cultures removing all body hair below the neck (and failing to keep all hair above it) is a universal religious obligation that has nothing at all to do with sex and, again, everything to do with gender (bearded men vs. hairless women from the neck up) and hygiene (below the neck.)
Anyway, if you really wanted to pour cold water on pubic grooming you could just start asking “Oh, you’d like me to shave? Was that a church thing in your family or did you have to worry about lice growing up?” Sure, at least if you’re a middle-class westerner it’s as absurd a question as the pedophilia argument, but thanks to most westerner’s class connotations if you want to pull the shaming card then implications of poor hygiene or family obligations are likely to be a lot more effective.
Finally, I think it’s extremely important to listen to the people who say they have heightened sensitivity when they have bare skin. That’s been true for me every time I’ve ever shaved my beard or moustache (kissing before and after is like night and day) and it’s been true for me below the neck on the several occasions I’ve removed my pubic hair as I did for my first vasectomy, for my vasectomy reversal, for my second vasectomy after children, and as an experiment to blog about five years ago. (Five years ago it was still almost unheard of for straight men to shave their pubic hair and so I felt really, really self-conscious about it in locker rooms and at the rural nude beaches my family sometimes winds up visiting in British Columbia. So I stopped shaving down there. Kind of weird, I know, but I let social anxiety get in the way of heightened sensation.)
So… are there issues with people feeling obliged to shave? Yeah, my partner grouses at me any time I go more than two days without shaving my face, and she mocked me roundly the times I shaved my pubic hair. And in each case I resume shaving my face and stopped shaving my pubic hair. It wasn’t traumatizing, for either of us, but it really was still me caving to her preference. It’s therefore easy to imagine both women and men doing likewise. But that’s the thing! If it’s pressure either way — to remove or not to remove — it’s still pressure. I’d much rather address the pressure to bend to please others rather than the (ever-shifting) particulars.
One last way to put it. Let’s say some rock star or porn star shows up next year and makes pubic hair as absolutely de rigueur as it was in the era illustrated in the old Joy of Sex. By your reasoning all the faddish pressure and knee-jerk conformity would be a good thing, even on people who prefer to trim or shave themselves, because in your opinion anyway it wouldn’t look “pre-pubescent.” I’d say it was still coercive fashion and will remain roughly as grumpy about that as I am about the current fashion obligation to remove it.
figleaf
Indeed, Figleaf, and thanks for the reminder about body hair and lice (something I talk about in my Beauty and the Body class). It’s my hangup, my aesthetic distaste that combines with what is the very real fascination in some sectors of pornography with extreme youth, “barely legal” young women. It still seems likely to me that the popularity of hairlessness in porn is at least partly linked to the tremendous appetite some men (not all, thank God) have for very young women — or, to put it slightly differently, a distaste for the realities of adult women’s bodies. (And yes, I know there’s a market for porn that does celebrate the hirsute. I’ll avoid attributing a moral superiority to that type of visual erotica!)
And waxing and pain is a theme in the sphere this week: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jun/19/eva-wiseman-waxing-showgirl-hair
People who claim that their actions are all guided by free choice (and that any doubt of this is tantamount to an accusation of brainwashing) aren’t a whole lot of help to those who aren’t fortunate enough to have those choices. How does one get there from here?
In the workplace, check to see if the official rules mandate makeup for one gender but not the other. If so, you might have a discrimination suit ready to happen.
I am not so sure about how to defy the unofficial pressures. Perhaps you could then point to the rulebook. I do suspect that when enough people work up the guts to do it, it will get easier for the rest. A couple of you have made the good point that it’s better to address the whole issue of pressure and fairness rather than the details of what is “in” this year.
I’m old enough to remember when males just didn’t have long hair and females had to wear a dress to school, and when everyone in each gender looked a lot more alike than now. The increase in diversity since then can only be a good thing. It seems to me that if we acted really clever and really brave together, we could push it a lot farther, and make things fair for all. All right, we may never fully succeed at making looks as irrelevent as they actually are, but we can sure try.
Hugo, I suspect that the ‘porn bare’ look is less about pedophilia and more about showing it all for the camera, so to speak.
“almost pedophilic fetishization”
Oh please. Pedophilia is a sexual attraction to individuals who have not yet developed secondary sexual characteristics. And it’s incurable.
An ephemeral preference for your partner to trim, shave certain areas of there body is not even remotely the same.
Thanks for playing the sex police moral panic, game!
An esthetic distaste, and/or a misgiving about the effects of a fad, is not quite the same as a moral panic. I agree that the craze for a hairless this or that is in most cases probably not due to pedophilia, and does not support the dealings of pedophiles, who would not want anything to do with an adult, however hairless.
The thing I want to panic about is the pressure–from all directions–put on people too young, uninformed, or otherwise powerless to make a fully informed choice.
Pingback: You’re So Perfect…Except for Your Boobs | Adios Barbie
Pingback: You’re So Perfect…Except for Your Boobs. | elephant journal