Tag Archives: Hygiene

Love Hurts, Beauty Hurts: waxing, pain, and the pursuit of perfection

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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.

Can I Pop Your Zit? Reprinting an old post on relationships and grooming

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A reprint from February 2008, inspired by a comment in this post by Glenden Brown.

I’ve been married four times and lived with a couple of other women for extended periods. (I never did single well, evidently, from the time I was seventeen). And just about every last one of the women with whom I have lived in or out of wedlock has developed a fascination with grooming me. Whether it was searching my back for acne or patrolling my beard line looking for ingrown hairs, virtually everyone with whom I’ve been in a long-term relationship has had a strong desire to explore, poke, pluck, and pop various parts of my body. I have never once felt even the remotest desire to reciprocate.

Mind you, I like my wife’s grooming. Though it’s periodically painful to have tiny hairs torn out, zits punctured and so forth, I take it as evidence of affection. It’s obviously a behavior we humans share with a wide variety of our fellow animals; everyone from primates to penguins seems to delight in removing impurities from a loved one’s skin, fur, or feathers. Despite more than twenty years studying or teaching gender and sexuality, I’ve never given much thought to the cultural or psychological implications of this behavior in humans. In my experience, at least, this sort of grooming in heterosexual relationships is rarely reciprocal — it seems to be initiated mostly by the female partner, and is submitted to with varying degrees of willingness by the male. (In the animal kingdom, it does appear to be a gender-neutral behavior, and enthusiastically mutual.) Continue reading →

On liberals, conservatives, and the dangers of disgust

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I’m a big Nicholas Kristof fan, and very much enjoyed his piece in this morning’s grey lady: Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal . Kristof writes about the phenomenon of disgust, its evolutionary role in protecting us from harm, and its usefulness as a predictor of political views. An excerpt:

…conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

I’m not a neurologist or an evolutionary biologist (though my contempt for the usefulness of the latter profession as having much to contribute to the study of contemporary gender roles knows almost no bounds). I’m intrigued by the notion that disgust manifests differently in folks who lean right as opposed to those who lean left. And it occurs to me that one of the things that is essential to my own liberalism is a sense that disgust is, more often than not, a moral failing to be overcome rather than a righteous response to the genuinely contemptible. Continue reading →

Of boys and hand-washing

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One of my many early morning rituals is to log on to BBC News. And this was the first story I saw today: Millions Mark UN Hand-Washing Day. 2008 is, I learned, the International Year of Sanitation. I’m delighted to see this simple education campaign underway, and eager to see more governments and donor agencies get involved in improving sanitary conditions in poor countries. Since I no longer support Heifer Project and other aid programs that involve the mistreatment of animals, I’ve gotten very interested in Oxfam’s Build a Bog program. (I’m a fan of clean toilets; if anyone is wondering what to give me for Christmas or my birthday, trust that I already have more than I need. But buying someone a nice place to poop in my name would make me deliriously happy.)

Reading about “world hand-washing day” made me think about men, cleanliness, and self-care. I’ve become, in my old age, a very good and loyal hand-washer. It was not always so, and I confess it was a former girlfriend, Ali, who turned things around for me many years ago. We had just moved in together, and on one lazy afternoon, I got up to use the bathroom while my gal stayed on the couch. When I returned, Ali looked at me suspiciously: “I didn’t hear the sink”, she said. I must have flushed red, saying nothing. “Did you wash your hands?” I sheepishly admitted that I had not. This woman had a drug and alcohol addiction at least as well advanced as my own, but when sober, she had a tremendous commitment to good hygiene. “Well, Hugo, if you ever want to touch me again, you damn well better wash your hands with soap and hot water every time you ‘go’.” Indeed, even when we were both under the influence, headed for bed, Ali would drunkenly push me towards the bathroom, insisting that whatever else I did, I had to make sure my hands were scrubbed clean. The relationship came to a messy hand, but my post-toilet ablutions have remained relatively devoted ever since.

I use the faculty men’s restroom located right across the hall from my little office. My colleagues and I are often in there together. I’ve worked with most of these lads for many years, and I know well who the “good handwashers” are. Some use soap and hot water and rub their hands thoroughly. Others practice what I often did in my younger days, the “wetting the fingertips with cold water for a period of not more than five seconds” strategy. And some — I will name no names, no matter how hard I am pushed on the matter — emerge from stalls or step back from urinals and do not even glance at the sink before heading out to meet and mingle with their students. I never say anything. I already have a reputation for “policing” the sexist language of some of my male colleagues, and I’m not sure I’m ready to start parenting men in many cases considerably older than myself. (Sometimes, I do confess, I use a paper towel to open the restroom door on my way out.)

The larger problem, of course, is the cultural feminization of cleanliness. It’s axiomatic that we raise boys in our culture with expectations of dirt; it is equally axiomatic that most parents are much better at communicating lessons about cleanliness to their daughters. It’s not that many parents tell their sons not to wash their hands, of course — it’s that we have diminished expectations for what boys can remember. Popular theories, generally unanchored in anything approaching scientific research, suggest that girls “have a keener sense of smell, and thus are better about remembering to be clean” or that “boys are just naturally dirtier, and can’t be expected to wash all the time.” And of course, the old nursery rhyme about “sugar and spice” for girls and “snips and snails” for boys is rooted, not in immutable physiological truth, but in socially-constructed myths about childhood. Above all, we live in a culture that sees dirt on boys as evidence of healthy masculinity, and in which male fastidiousness is associated with queerness and effeminacy. Continue reading →