February 10, 2008
A Cut Above - Meditations on being Shaved


Our current culture puts a tremendous amount of emphasis on the women’s bush—how it should be kept, ways to maintain its topiary forms, manners for dressing it up. It is such a commonplace that women should be trimmed at the very least that waxing or shaving bare is almost the default setting for female pubic hair, and those women who do like their hair “down there” wild as the outback seem either defiant or apologetic about it.

(I should note that this hirsute demand is not for women only. Men have been feeling an increasing pressure to manscape. Perhaps this trend was most hilariously captured by a recent web advert for the Phillips Bodygroom that features a smug, milquetoast man wearing a white terry-cloth robe, judiciously bleeped-out words, and well-timed images of fruit.)

There’s a lot to argue in favor of a more topiary bush. Being waxed or shaved has health benefits such as a lowered chance of urinary tract infections and other issues—in fact, epidemiologists have argued recent lower rates of pubic lice, aka crabs, stems from more people having less pubic hair; lice have nothing to nest in when you’re bare. Additionally, naked labia are more sensitive, and some people—myself included—just think it feels better to be licked or fucked when hairless. Finally, many people find it more pleasant to lick a hair-free or hair-reduced pussy.

But these benefits aren’t in and of themselves enough to argue for the trend of hairless genitals. Most women aren’t sitting down and making a checklist of pubic hair pros and cons before they make their appointment with their waxer or get into the shower with a new blade and copious shaving cream. Most women, we would argue facilely, choose to wax or shave their nethers because culturally we are pressured to do so, and that pressure has come from the media.

On its naked surface, we can look to two sources for the bare pudendum: porn and Sex in the City. Porn, one would assume, opts for the bare bush because optically it is just a better shot. You can, in short, see more. When labia have hair, it obscures all the pink-wet glory that is the female genitals, and heterosexual porn is all about female genitalia. We can expect that the visuals in porn have created an audience that wants to replicate what it can easily replicate, and all you need to reproduce the most visually shocking/titillating porn marker is a good razor and a steady hand.

If the viewers of porn want to replicate that medium’s signature visual, then the consumers of Sex and the City want to emulate their heroines’ actions. In the season three episode of SitC called “Sex in Another City,” Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw, gets an unasked-for Brazilian wax, a procedure Samantha finds “refreshing,” and one that had been available to Manhattan women since 1987 when the infamous J Sisters opened their salon in midtown. Because of this episode the Brazilian—a waxing procedure that removes all the hair from the tip of the slit to the crack of the ass—became like the giant flower pin or the casual display of the expensive bra: another fashion trend served up by HBO courtesy of Sex in the City.

But both of these explanations, however valid, are a bit short-sighted. The thing is that hair has always been a profound erotic signifier of feminine sexual availability, and the recent trend to the female full monty is hardly anything new. It’s just the latest.

It’s difficult to give a thumbnail history of female hair—genital and otherwise. Suffice to say that in Chaucer’s day, female hair was considered so sexually charged that women wore caps to cover theirs. By the eighteenth century, when Alexander Pope wrote his Rape of the Lock, a poem wherein the violent snipping of a desired tendril stands in for a physical rape, and wherein the beleaguered heroine Belinda wishes the lock-stealing Baron had “been content to seize/ Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!”, women could show their hair freely—in fact hairdos ballooned in proportion to Pamela Anderson’s breasts; hair was big, puffed up, and often fake, and it testified in its whipped-cream mounded glory to its owner’s sexual attractiveness.

The Victorians were, not unsurprisingly, as ready to fetishize women’s hair as they were quick to call table legs “limbs.” The idea being, I suppose, to redirect sexual energy to a safe object. One would be less likely to ponder the hair one couldn’t see if one were directed to gaze rapturously on the hair one could (a line of thinking that Michel Foucault upended in his critique The History of Sexuality, part 1). The safety of hair was put into question even by the time period’s own writers, as when, for example, Robert Browning’s unnamed speaker strangles his lover with her own hair in “Porphyria’s Lover” in order to curtail Porphyria’s possibly errant sexual activity and make her his own.

Visual texts give no less fraught a history of female hair. Erotica of the French and English seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show women with and without pubic hair equally. Looking at images from the time period, one can’t see a discernable favoring over the shorn from hairy. Similarly, the so-called “French postcard,” the photographic replacement for erotic etchings and prints, shows women both with discernable armpit and genital hair and without, but mostly those images posed women in ways that sidestep the shaving question: you just can’t tell whether they have hair “down there” or not.

The most telling female hair debacle might be the short-lived solo exhibition of Amedeo Modigliani’s nudes in December 1917 at the Berthe Weill Gallery in Paris that was closed down by the Chief of Police after just three hours. Modigliani’s nudes posed defiantly at the viewer, undraped and challengingly hirsute, visually threatening and unapologetically erotic. These images illustrate the power of the pubic hair, a power that we later-day Delilahs have shorn and turned on its follicular end.

The surface history of women’s shaving has as much to do with fashion and media as does the recent history of hairless genitals. Shaving became a way of Western life in pretty much a one-two punch made by short-sleeved shifts and movies. In 1915, between ads for sleeveless summer dresses and the filmic epics of D.W. Griffiths, who hated the way that armpit hair looked on film, American women were bombarded with exhortations to take razors in hand and take the razors to their armpits. The urge to take them to their legs didn’t happen until the 1940s when pin-ups like Betty Grable made smooth legs the norm.

The children of the sixties, aided by the women’s rights movement, questioned their parents’ adherence to the razor, and both women and men claimed their right to let it go, let it flow, let it blossom and let it grow. I still have to remind my former hippie-goddess mother to take a razor to her bikini line before she goes to the beach, and I still have to repress a shudder when she forgets. I suppose that often hair becomes a generational thing: we define ourselves by what our parents were not. My mother’s cootch had never met a razor until she was in her fifties; mine was intimately acquainted with one by the time I was 25.

Which still doesn’t do a lot to explain away your hair or mine. Aside from media impulse, the quickest explanation for genital bareness stems from psychoanalytic roots. However, it seems too easy to me to suggest that hairlessness is akin to prepubescence and our shaving speaks to both our desire to be young and men’s desire to fuck the young. Maybe the idea is just so inherently creepsome that I don’t want to wrap my head around it, but it also seems just a bit too simple. I think hair is more twisty than that linear reasoning allows.

Pubic hair has a wild, woolliness about it. In its natural state, it looks feral, hungry even. It looks like the pelt of an animal who might, actually, bite the hand that feeds it. Trimming, shaving, and waxing look like ways to tame the beast. Nothing domesticates a poodle as fast as a haircut. Shearing our beavers makes them house pets, if only visually. Nothing can hide in the underbrush, ready to pounce, if there is no brush in the bush. I think, and I may be stretching here, that the naked pussy is a comforting pussy. Less because it echoes the prepubescent in its pubic lack, and more because what you see is what you get.

The naked bush speaks to our own creeping horror at our bodies. The things that lurk, the things we mistrust, the fear we have at our own smells and excretions: when we shave or wax, these things have the semblance of being eradicated with the hair, washed down the drain or peeled off in the hygienic strip. The naked bush too seems to suggest not merely the bush’s owner’s sexual availableness—to follicularly ape a stripper or a porn star is to embody her, at least until the hair grows back—but it seems to make that availability somehow safe. There aren’t any teeth in a naked vagina.

It’s no hasty generalization to suggest that today more women are more adventurous in bed—and out of it. I can’t help but wonder how this whole complicated depilated mess comes down to a way to making us women look safe both to men and to ourselves. I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t this paradoxical move to both be more like the sexy porn/stripper/model siren by removing hair, and in removing the hair, enacting a kind of “nothing up my sleeves” show of innocence. Don’t fear the beaver, we seem to be saying. It’s shaved.


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