pubic hair as a feminist playground

August 13, 2018 Imogen Bristow

A heads up: in this article I don’t intend to shame women who chose to remove their pubic hair, or those who keep it. I don’t think that pubic hair grooming is an indication of a personal lapse in feminist values. Nor does it point towards a submission to the patriarchal standards upheld against bodies. However, I find the gendered ideology which determines how and why women’s bodies must be filtered for male consumption to be interesting.

I remember when the phenomenon of shaving our pubic hair hit our friendship group in our third year at high school, when the pressure from both female peers and scolding boys meant we must take to the razor blade to our bodies for a second time. Only this time, it wasn’t our legs or our underarms which were the problem (one which we had ‘corrected’ not long before). Now the systemic, ever-widening web of the beauty industry was demanding we rectify ourselves once again - with the patriarchy being it’s hungry spider.

Although this new pressure was a supposed push into the world of women’s sexuality, the shaving infection I gained at the age of 14 didn’t make me feel sexy. It made me feel incompetent in my new sexualised state. As, once girls hit each puberty ‘milestone’, they are plunged into the spotlight of the male-gaze and the absurd body standards which come with it, whether they like it or not. The sooner the hair came, the sooner it had to be wiped out of existence, in a bid of protection from the humiliation of anyone knowing we let it stick around. Meanwhile jibes from our male classmates, heads full of hair-less online porn, served as a continual reminder to correct, refine and control our ‘downstairs’ region.

A common belief is that the women’s body-hair removal industry took full force after the birth of mainstream pornography. Feminist teachings say that when pornstars bore their bald genitals, it produced a tunnel vision of what attractive, sexy women should look like, spreading like a pubic rash to everyday consumers. Another reason is business; the growth of women’s hair removal became lucrative for brands. The more they shamed us for our pubic hair and seduced us into a vision of hairlessness, the more we bought their razors, wax strips and hair removal cream.

Of course, feminist critiques of body-hair removal have been circling for decades. The most immediate one being that we reduce or remove any appearance of pubic hair to please heterosexual men. From browsing gossip pages relaying the ‘what men really think of your body’ rhetoric (even though we didn’t ask), the general theme of what I’m calling ‘pube fear’ congregates. A trend is to correlate hairlessness with good hygiene practices and overall cleanliness. This form of misogyny recurs in various cultures; generally applied to female reproductive health, particularly menstruation and menstrual blood which is treated as an unclean, even toxic product.

A second webpage covers the topic of straight men’s opinions on giving oral sex. Its answers repeatedly suggest participation in thorough grooming for women before oral sex can take place (Brendan says ‘DEFINITELY NEEDS TO BE SHAVED.’) and so, the pube fear lives on. This idea that women must earn sexual pleasure by partaking in beauty norms is a belief which denies women and other femme gender-identities the basic right to positive and fulfilling sexual experiences as humans.

Not only this, feminists have criticised the norm of women’s hairlessness for having a child-like effect on the adult body, and in turn glorifying infantile bodies as objects of sexual interest. As feminist writer Emma Trisolini perfectly summarises this point; ‘the presentation of the adult self as childlike in a sexual manner to men (or other women) promotes a culture of ephebophilia—sexual attraction to pre-pubescent bodies…’.

Nowadays, whatever we chose from the multitudinous catalogue of pubic hair styles, our decision boils down to personal choice, preference, what we’re comfortable with, and what empowers us down there. But of course, being mindful of the roots of our cosmetic routines is a vital step in understanding why we do what we do to our bodies and most importantly, who for?