Yeah yeah so I have a confession to make.
But before we begin, may I suggest that if you’re not a fan of being in receipt of too much information you click away right about now…
Still with me?
Ok. So I once went for a Brazilian wax. I know. What can I say? I was curious, a friend had shared a rather, um, compelling reason as to why it might be a very good idea, I was due a trip away with a new man, and I am no more immune to social pressures than anyone else, so to my eternal shame I indulged my inner lemming and booked an appointment at the local beauty salon.
Fucking hell. NEVER AGAIN.
Talking purely in terms of sheer unpleasantness it is right up there on a level with cervical smears and persistent thrush. For a start it is horribly undignified. One is required to remove their underwear in front of a total stranger (in my case a very brisk looking woman in her mid-fifties), don strange paper knickers that look as though they belong in a psychiatric institution, and lie down on what looks like a thin hospital bed while said total stranger moves said paper knickers this way and that in order that they might better access your most intimate parts and smear hot wax on them. Comfortable it is not. I shudder to my very depths just thinking about it. And not in a good way.
Then of course there is the pain. I had been advised to take two paracetamol an hour before my appointment. A bottle of whisky may, on reflection, have been a better option. It is a shocking sort of pain. A tearing. One that makes you gasp, breathless, your mouth gaping open to form a traumatised O. Pubic hair is not designed to be ripped out at the roots. In fact I’m rather surprised that imaginative dictators the world over have not co-opted the ‘intimate wax’ as a particularly nasty form of torture.
Lastly, we have the resultant look. Odd, like a plucked and strangely juvenile chicken. Like a mannequin. As though I were made of plastic, the normal boundaries and demarcations of my body had become blurred and the woman staring back from my mirror looked unreal. Like a sexless doll. A blank.
And in that moment, I felt suddenly ridiculous. Why had I done this to myself? Why did we do this to ourselves? I had spent what was hardly an insignificant amount of money, only to be embarrassed and physically hurt, and for what?
I never did go on my weekend away.
But the whole episode has made me think a little deeper about the trend for pubic hair removal. And I have come to wonder – if we are prepared to put ourselves through that – whether there is anything that women will not do for male approval. Do we really covet male desire to the extent that we will torture and degrade ourselves in a bid to elicit it? And if so, is it any wonder that a proportion of men view us so contemptuously? If the pornographic industry, and therefore men, decided on a whim that it was desirable and attractive for women to begin having enemas in public, would we all do that too?
I imagine interviews being conducted with famous actresses and models declaring how liberating they found having a public enema. How much cleaner and fresher they felt afterwards. How it made them feel sexy and empowered. Entire industries could spring up around the administering of such public colonic irrigations. Women would be filmed on the news queueing to get theirs done, giggling nervously in anticipation with their friends. Enema parties would become popular for hen nights. Nuts magazine would run articles stating that modern men were now refusing to date women who had not been recently flushed, and giving advice to their readers as to how they might go about “sensitively” persuading a reluctant girlfriend to give it a try. Marie Clare would run articles stating that truly free thinking, open minded women should guard against simply dismissing the idea of public flushing out of hand, especially if they expected to be able to hold their mans interest for any length of time.
You can call me ridiculous and say that it all boils down to personal choice. But it doesn’t. Because personal choices are not ever made in a vacuum. Context is everything. Do we imagine great swathes of women would “choose” to have their pubic hair painfully ripped out at the roots if bare vaginas had never featured in pornography, and men claimed to find them disgusting? No. Of course not. Are huge numbers of men to be found spending their hard earned cash on humiliating and painful procedures in the vain hope that we women might deign to give them a few crumbs of our attention? No! Men are far too busy pursuing their own goals to devalue themselves en masse in such a way.
The main point I’m trying to make is that we don’t have to do this. We can say no. Just no. No, we won’t have our pubic hair pulled out, because it is unpleasant and we’ve better things to spend our time and money on. No, we won’t be subservient to male ideas of how we should groom and decorate ourselves. No, we don’t care if you won’t sleep with us or marry us as a result – if you want a woman who looks as though she is made of plastic, go buy yourself a blow-up doll.
Women of the world, hear my call. When it comes to wax, just say no.
I can tell you that the last bikini wax I had was about 8 years ago and that was just a normal – if you can call it that – wax of the lady garden area. I’d be more likely to pull my own toenails out than have a brazilian or *shudders* hollywood wax. Why would anyone do that? Why?
I dunno *looks suitably embarrasssed*. It wasn’t one of my better ideas to be sure.
Like you, I did it once and never again! It was brutal, despite the two glasses of wine I had in advance, and humiliating. I’d take childbirth over waxing.
Why did we do it Charlotte? Why? *weeps*
You had me at “yeah”.
Ha! Yeah.
I’ve never gone the whole hog, and only done the waxing thing twice – bit of a tidy more than anything when I was in my 20′s. The whole brazilian thing always makes me think of plucked chickens and the re-growth must be a bitch!
Oh Liz, you cannot imagine. The closer you get to the… erm… front, the more painful it is. Madness it is. Madness.
an institution near me offers Hollywood, Brazilian and California – apparently, there are big differences.
I once spent a summer growing my arm pit hair, I thought I looked chic French. Men weren’t bothered but women positively recoiled from my hairy pits. For various reasons, mostly to smell less because I was going to travelling through India – I had my underarms waxed. It was grim. This was lesson in never taking waxing any further. That said, I do home wax “around the edge” in Summer for the simple reason otherwise anytime spent in a swimsuit involves me checking for stray hairs and readjusting the swim suit. So there is a time in a place but men’s preferences for the bald look aka child look – there is something very very wrong in that.
I’m almost too scared to ask what a ‘California’ wax is.
Me too. What’s a California wax Gemma? I’m involuntarily grimacing at the possibilities.
I had my legs waxed once. I was warning enough not to ever think about going any higher.
Sensible woman.
I dunno that I do it for male approval, I just don’t like having pubic beards when I wear a swimsuit. By that I mean I have never waxed, I am lucky my hair is fine enough to just shave it off and it is painless.
Oooh but doesn’t shaving give you a nasty itchy rash Emma? And (horror) stubble?
I’ve never had a problem with it, unless I shave more often than I should. But then, I’ve been removing my pubic hair for years because I preferred the increased sensitivity for myself. And now I do because there is little as uncomfortable as getting a hair wrapped around a piercing.
Having had a Hollywood once (or a Masochist’s Delight or whatever it’s called), I can confirm that a side effect is that it makes your thighs look fatter (something about no visual point of ‘difference’ at the top to break up the mass I guess).
Well, it’s one way to put women off.
Indeed. Pubic waxing makes you look lardy, ladies! Hmmm, empowering stuff
I wax (hot country: bikinis most weekends) but not everything. Mind you – it has sometimes gone too far. But that’s the problem when you don;t speak the same language as the waxist.
What upsets me more is the discovery of men who wax too. I’ve made that unpleasant discovery more than once. And it just looks hideous. Not to mention the regrowth. Stubbly balls anyone? Ugh.
Yeuch. I have never, in my entire life, encountered a man who waxed his genitals. Odd, and mildly disgusting.
Love the way you write, Gappy. Your inner lemming… Shuddering to your inner depths, “not in a good way”… “Comfortable it is not.” Love it all.
I have so much I want to say, but don’t quite know how, about the whole industry that’s sprung up around breast cancer. Having opted for a double mastectomy, I feel qualified to hold an opinion. The medical profession, and the world, seems to have decided it’s best to have reconstruction, and that women will feel more confident if they have plastic boobs under their skin (rather than in their bra). For their own self-esteem, of course. Oh, yes, it’s a painful surgery, several surgeries possibly, will take a year, etc etc, but yay! insurance will cover it. A friend of mine here told me about a support group she went to with her 70+ year old mother-in-law, where the women, all of a similar age, were showing each other their implants, which you could see through their thin, delicate, 70+ year old skin. Hello? Wake up world. Women are not just bodies. It’s so damn degrading.
What is WRONG with the world?
Oh… you’ve got me all stirred up now.
Gosh yes, because all of my self esteem is located in my breasts. Every last bit of it.
You and me both…
the final irony is—the harder we work for male desire the more it eludes us
Why would women do that to themselves? Because some women have genital conditions which make having pubic hair extremely painful in and of itself. The amount of ableism in this post is astonishing to me. Your privlege, it needs to be checked.
I hold my head in shame – I used to have Brazilians done regularly. Then I got pregnant. Now I hardly even shave my legs. My husband doesn’t seem to care. Or maybe he dare not say. I’d rather spend time reading novels than working on hair removal, to be honest.
I have oft pondered this. I can’t decide if the obsession with hairlessness is about making everyone look immature or just some invention of the hot-wax industry.
Sometimes I do a little topiary around the edges for cossie-wearing tidiness, but that’s so people don’t point and stare. Not really a valid reason, but I don’t like to be pointed and stared at while in my cossie.
Personally I think some level or grooming is fine and if you choose to remove all your hair for your own reasons that is fine (although if those reasons are aesthetics over hygiene you might want to ask yourself if the media/society is making you do it).
That being said I think we do have to question the fact that this trend for hairlessness has come from porn and indeed mimics the vulva of a prepubescent girl–neither of which is particularly empowering.
I’m a big believer of “your body, your choice” but I think this is one of those things we have to question and ask WHY are we doing this? Are you waxing for your own reasons or because society or a man are telling you to do so. The former I don’t mind but the latter I take issue with.
Totally with you on this one. For one thing, it looks blooming ridiculous. For another, it’s blooming painful. I’ve never had it done – and I never plan to. And I hope my daughter follows my example!
why do radfems think this came FROM the porn industry when in fact the porn industry were losing money waiting for pubic hair to grow back in the late 80s. they followed the trend, not started it. don’t believe me? go check it out. girls started turning up for shoots with no pubes after going on holidays to europe and mexico