The disappearance of pubic hair on young women tells
us a lot about contemporary female sexuality.
A new generation of college girls who want to take in
the casual carnality of the hook-up scene need to be
be ready for sex, to be hip, and cool and in the know.
They’ve seen the super models who are freshly waxed
before putting on the expensive bathing suits and lingerie.
Young women want to believe they’re a little bit like that.
It’s just like a designer bag. Every girl wants to have
Louis Vuitton or designer sunglasses or that one designer purse.
Today, if young women have a casual, un-waxed sexual encounter, they’re afraid it might ruin their reputation.
Hair does a lot of symbolic work. In science fiction
movies, alien creatures are the hairless ones.
Hairlessness marks the post-human. Yet it is
also marks the divide between human and animal.
The hairy ones are closer to nature, to animality.
No wonder a lot of girls find the first appearance
of pubic hair unnerving, ugly, even nauseating.
A lot of women who wax say they “hate” that hair.
Save the Beaver!
A quote from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (written in the 1930s):
The other night I took her on–out of pity–and what do you think the crazy bitch had done to herself? She had shaved it clean … not a speck of hair on it. Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat? It’s repulsive ain’t it? And it’s funny, too. Sort of mad-like.
It doesn’t look like a twat anymore: it’s like a dead clam or something. He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it.
You should have seen me … it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously. You’d imagine I’d never seen one before.
And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious.
Pubic hair has an evolutionary function. It conduct plumes of sex pheromones into the atmosphere that signal a female’s readiness to reproduce and critical information about male and female genetic qualities.
Ovulating strippers get twice the tips as those who are having their periods. Life-making and mate selection are a smelling affair.
Shearing genital hair cleans up the zone. It displays free-standing sex organs, separated from reproductive sense, staging a physical encounter between erect boys and open girls in a magical garden where one can live forever.
American women are, in fact, striking a pornographic pose, one that first appeared in the hard-core porn films that have increasingly shaped the sexual imagination of legions of young men.
The eye of the hard-core porn camera hovers over female body parts; it’s a visual excess of physical acts with a minimum of sentiment. It is not a love story.
Porn displays pubeless bodies to emphasize the female genital slit and the erect male shaft. It defines the standard of erotic desirability.
As pubic hair disappeared on screen guys increasingly wanted sex with girls who looked like the porn stars they’d fantasized about. They asked and women struck the pose.
