Fascinating points about Arab culture, waxing and the Koran, and the things about North African women.
Interesting post from PlentyOfParsnips yesterday. Thought it would get a lot more discussion, because obviously, as she says, there is no one single reason for anything in culture:
"K, I'm going to give up on reading the last five pages. I've been following this thread for two days now and it's growing faster than I can read it.
I'm going to concentrate on the OP's question - where does this suddenly pervasive fashion come from? Throughout history, some women have probably always removed their pubes for a huge variety of reasons, but in the last couple of decades it's changed from being a fairly unusual thing to being the norm in this country. I think that's worth talking about without negating the individual reasons that individual women have for depilating their individual bodies.
Porn has become much more pervasive and has merged at the edges with mainstream popular culture but that's not the only change there's been in this area. In the olden days (70's - early 80's) I seem to remember most of the porn being European, whereas with the advent of the internet, most of it now seems to come from the US. Stylistically, it's quite different from the European stuff - it's much more smooth, shiny and plastic-y IYKWIM, and on the stuff I've seen, men and women are both hairless. I'm wondering how much mainstream American culture has influenced the porn industry there, as well as the other way round. Vaginal douches have been mentioned as a particularly American thing and I'm also thinking of circumcision - I've heard lots of Americans say it's more hygienic - if there are any Americans here, how long has pubic depilation been the norm in the States? ... could we be seeing a strand of old-fashioned American sexual puritanism, bizarrely mixed in with the porn aesthetic? It would make some sense of the hygiene reasons many people have given on this thread.
What I'm trying to say is that it's likely the current trend has no single cause. Certainly porn plays a large part but if this is a much more established practice in the States then porn may not be the only, or even the most important conduit. Mainstream popular culture (Sex & the City, magazines etc.) could have a lot to do with it as could cross-cultural influences from Islam and the far east. At some point, these ideas reach critical mass and start spreading fast, just through word-of-mouth and it becomes impossible to separate the strands of what has influenced what. So, yes, it's partly from porn, but to say it's just from porn is simplistic."