Bidisha article on pubic hair removal

[JessinAvalon]

Good Bidisha article on pubic hair removal:

m.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/11/womens-pubic-hair-removal-porn?cat=lifeandstyle&type=article

I never get the appeal of that, same with wearing thongs totally incomprehensible to me

She read my mind!!

'poonani-policing'

But how does she know it's the fault of pornography? In the 60s men's magazines actually pioneered the realistic depiction of pubic hair, which had previously been an artistic taboo:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pubic_Wars

An alternative theory is that pubic shaving has become fashionable for other reasons and modern porn is just reflecting that fashion.

And what would you say those other reasons are? From where I'm sitting there a big blinding one and not so many others I can see. Where else does such information get shared?

Very funny article and spot on.

Yes David, I'm intrigued as to what other theories there about why brazillians etc have become fashionable. I think Bidisha has hit the nail on the head.

But naked poonanies is hardly a new invention. It's been pretty common in the Middle East for centuries

Has it?

It's a relatively new phenonenon here though, no?

It may be so but there has to be means of communicating it. Maybe women went on holiday to the Middle East, went in a communal dressing room, saw it there and decided to do it here. En masse. Or maybe not.

Or maybe I can accept the fact that pubes between the teeth is unpleasant?

I don't think I want to use what women have been doing in the Middle East for centuries as my reference point for emancipated existence.

Yip - some Muslim authorities recommend removing pubic hair (men and women) as a hygiene thing.

I'm sure porn has played a role, or at least had an influence in the West on this hair-removal area, but it certainly did not invent it.

Look at any classical (female) statue, not a pubic hair in sight

David, my guess is pubic hair was previously taboo because they were coming out of an era of prudishness.
BUt this fashion was definitely led by the porn industry. Have you read Beauty and Misogyny? IT's all in there.

So what's the link? Was it making museums and art galleries free exposing more women to classical statues and women wanting to emulate them?

I get hair removal in the pubic region is not exclusive to he 21st century in the west. What about the popularity? That is what the article is about. Current popularity not origins.

put it this way, the porn industry influences fasion: it's a multi-million dollar industry.

Women certainly can't influence the porn industry

To be honest, her stream of cutesy names for the female crotch got on my nerves. Say "cunt", woman, and get it over with.

This topic was discussed here a few weeks ago, and there were a fair number of women who do shave their pubic hair and didn't like being compared with porn stars. What Bidisha didn't do, in fact of course she didn't do it, was address the huge number of non-porny people who are shaving (men too) and have made it part of their view of what a normal person should be like. Maybe that's the reality of "the mainstreaming of pornography", but once it's happened, it's dishonest to ignore it.

You might as well do the same with shaving legs and armpits, or wearing high heels or cosmetics. It becomes an issue of telling women what they ought to want in the name of feminism. The theory is simple, but real life is a lot more complicated.

What I want to know is why this is a feature of modern pornography when it wasn't so in the past. Some external factor must have influenced it.

Maybe porn is trying to increase its appeal to men who come from cultures where shaving is the norm? Thats just a wild guess but does anyone have a better theory?

But porn has changed massively from what it was in the past. Pubic hair is only one of those changes.

An increase in extremely violent porn is another.

You can only make sense of it by looking at it as part of a much larger picture.

It's a question of very personal preference.

I prefer to shave my pubes off, all of them. I did it when I was single for 2 years, and believe me, nobody saw my crotch or anywhere near it.

It makes periods much easier to deal with (I won't use tampons, I hate them) and stops me getting too hot in the summer. And, for the same reason I shave my armpits even if single and in winter, it reduces the amount of trapped sweat and lessens body odour, meaning I don't have to shower every 3 hours in a heat wave (I used to work in a hot hot hot nursing home and the residents wouldn't allow us to open the windows.)

The increase in violent porn frightens me. People acting in porn should at least look like they are enjoying it ... amateur couple porn is probably the closest to what you can get to real porn now.

The message from Coldtits says exactly what I meant. What would Bidisha say to her? The article simply doesn't address this viewpoint, and if she's going to be realistic (the author, I mean) she can't refuse to hear people who think shaving is normal. She's tackling the easy issue and not touching the complicated one.

As for modern versus vintage porn, I think pubic hair was considered so obscene a few decades ago that to be legal, images had to have it removed. Then it became possible to show it, so they did that. And then the porn producers found that for reasons of extra exposure, extra sadism, pedophilia or whatever, their customers preferred no hair. And now lots of people are doing it, to the consternation of many others.

I read this argument very differently. I don't see it as being about what individuals do and their relationship to porn. I believe that people do it for a myriad of reasons, such as pubes in the teeth. What is interesting is the trend and when looking at it, I think an overall trend can't be looked at as individual's actions. I'm not interested in why x person shaves their pubes, I'm interested in why lots of people shave their pubes, what has been the cultural shift that makes this make sense. Which is where pornification comes in. It's not to say that individuals who shave their pubes watch porn, nor that nobody did it before porn, nor that this is the driver for everyone. It's about the impact of porn on society and how this is enacted by people, and how it leads to cultural shifts of what is 'normal'.