Clean Porn: The Aesthetics of Hygiene, Hot Sex, and Hair Removal
Cleanliness is next to godliness in porn stars’ crotches. Here’s how that relates to religion.
First published in Pop(Porn): The Proliferation of Pornography in Popular Culture.
“Our culture particularizes and aggressively markets hygiene, and these days, one of the ways for a woman, traditionally considered the ‘impure’ sex, to show she’s clean is to remove her private hair.”
Citation: Susann Cokal, “Clean Porn: The Visual Aesthetics of Hygiene, Hot Sex, and Hair Removal.” In Mardia Bishop and Ann Hall, eds. Pop(Porn): The Proliferation of Pornography in Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood Publishers, 2007. 137–154.
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Clean Porn: The Visual Aesthetics of Hygiene, Hot Sex, and Hair Removal
What was once commonly called a woman’s pudendum, a term rooted in the Latin word for “shame,” has shed its embarrassment and come out of hiding: In what is sometimes called today’s “raunch culture,” the ideal of female sexual attractiveness is a firm body with large breasts, flat stomach, and — surprise — a hairless vulva.
While big breasts and small waists have been valued for much of white Western aesthetic history, the entirely or partially hairless mound is a relatively new asset: Only over the past ten years or so has it become fashionable to spend hours and dollars removing hair from the pubic bone to the anus. Perhaps the most popular of these styles, the Brazilian, leaves a narrow stripe leading to the vulva’s slit; other options include the “landing strip,” a somewhat wider swatch; a stencil that will shape the patch into a tulip, arrow, heart, or other coy design; or complete baldness, a choice that Cosmopolitan magazine recently reported is growing in popularity.[i]
We live in a culture of exposed vulvas, naked to the world, hairless as the day they were born, and paraded endlessly in front of our faces. Or so it might seem to viewers of pornography and readers of popular advice-giving magazines.
For several years now, the pubic coiffure has been a hot topic for discussion in venues such as Cosmopolitan, the Village Voice, and the online magazine Salon.com. In fact, there is a wealth of internet discussion; typing in “shaving pubic hair” to Google on September 2, 2006, resulted in 4,694 hits; on July 11, 2018, it returned “about 30,000,000 results” (yes, that’s millions). These discussions usually lead to talk of porn. In August of 2006, a woman wrote in to Cary Tennis’s advice column on Salon.com: “I know that nowadays, the style for women is to shave their pubic hair, maybe leaving a tiny strip, à la Brazilian wax. […] So now I am curious. Do most women do this today? Are there guys who don’t mind pubic hair au naturel?”[ii]
Tennis admitted he was nonplussed, saying only that the “shaved look” could mean “the infantilizing of the female genitalia, etc.” and that pornography “has transformed the pussy into a legitimate object of style, like legs or lips; it’s so widely represented that it has become public — though it is still viewed largely in private. He asked readers for their insights and, in less than a month, received 342 letters in response, 27 of which appeared online as the “editors’ choice.”
Tennis makes the two obvious connections: shaving pubic hair returns the vulva to a more adolescent appearance (though the swelling of the labia in puberty guarantees that a grown woman will never look like a little girl Down There again), and the fashion is the direct result of pornography’s influence on popular culture.
Most people, in fact, will offer the same observations. In Cosmopolitan, journalist Sara Bodnar speculated that “The proliferation of porn could be one reason for the bushwhacking bonanza”; she quoted a Ph.D. psychologist who says, “Women sometimes assume men want them to look like porn stars, who are often completely bare.”[iii] We might disagree only with the psychologist’s tempered phrasing, and it is perhaps unnecessary to belabor the connection.
As a visual medium and a culturally produced text, pornography can be considered a form of art, though the relationship between high art and porn is a tricky one. As long as there have been people working with visual media, they have represented female genitalia, but very few have offered a full bush to public view. As John Berger wrote in 1972, this hair has traditionally been “associated with sexual power, with passion,” and “woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion.”[iv]
The elision of sexuality created a popular aesthetic. Even some of the most sophisticated male spectators have been horrified at the sight of what’s normally there. Meanwhile, counter to the standard of high art, some pornographers and their clients were comfortable with the sight of that hair, particularly as the camera, not the paintbrush, began capturing images. But, as recent videos and magazines show, we’ve swung back around to the bare aesthetic for pornography as for popular culture. This time the key is a notion of cleanliness: Our culture particularizes and aggressively markets hygiene, and these days, one of the ways for a woman, traditionally considered the “impure” sex, to show she’s clean is to remove her private hair.
Thus, in the current culture, pornography, female shaving, and the American ideal of cleanliness being next to godliness all converge between a woman’s legs. The shaved pubis fuses current conservative prudery and American squeamishness about the body with a pornographic culture that considers this particular type of hygiene to be sexy. What we might call “clean porn” is our current ideology, and the shaved or waxed vulva is sexy, hip, and modern. In this one regard, then, the two culturally opposing views of women, the completely clean Victorian angel in the house and the porn star who is considered practically a prostitute, now become one.
“The Spectacle Was All the More Striking”: Gazing over the Abyss
Often criticized for being at best uncomfortable and at worst objectifying, pubic coiffures are driven by the interests of visual culture. We like to look, and removing the pubic hair gives us both more and less to see.
By page 161 of Pauline Réage’s Story of O, for example, the eponymous and willing sex slave has seen and experienced more than most adventuresses can imagine: a chateau where the libertines torture and ravish each other’s mistresses; a lover who consigns her first to those libertines and then to his half-brother; a cruel Englishman who loves against his will and whips what he loves; and various adventures both sapphic and sublime. But she is actually surprised by what she sees when observing “the torture of little Yvonne”:
Her thighs, like her breasts crisscrossed with a green network of veins, spread to reveal a pink flesh which was pierced by the thick iron ring, which had finally been inserted, and the spectacle was all the more striking because Yvonne was completely shaved.
“But why?” O wanted to know […]
“He says I’m more naked when I’m shaved. The ring, I think the ring is to fasten me with.”[v]
This literary-pornographic classic, first published in France in 1954, offers the one supreme reason for shaving a mons veneris: Shaving yields up the vulva’s secrets to the male gaze, makes the woman more naked, the spectacle — for the female body is always a spectacle — more striking.
Thus the shaved mound has entered pop culture, and it does so as a new means of expressiveness. Whether they shave or wax, use a stencil, leave a “landing strip,” or go all-bare, women who remove their pubic hair are catering to a particular version of sexiness that is focused on the viewer (one might even say “the consumer”) and his expectations. These are the women poring over advice in more popular sources such as Cosmo and Salon.com; relishing story lines about nether do’s on Sex and the City and, like the characters on that show, chatting about pubic hair with their friends. At the very least, they go online and post their own theories and feelings about the fashion.
Many — if not most — women and men connect this ideal to the porn models and actresses who make their living displaying every bump and crease of their bodies for the devouring gaze of a mostly male audience. That “mostly male” is important: While the generalization would be difficult to prove, shaved pubic areas seem to be a largely heterosexual phenomenon.[vi]
Men, in fact, tend to assume that the pubic coiffure or shave has been performed for their sake — which is one reason why it’s sexy (“the fact that it’s partly on my behalf is very exciting”[vii]). As Berger argued in Ways of Seeing, the real subject of the nude painting — one of the staples of Western art and the precursor to porn — is not the female on the canvas but the “spectator in front of the picture,” who “is presumed to be a man. […] It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity.”[viii] Striking as O might find little Yvonne’s shaved pubis, it is not O’s gaze that matters.[ix] The visual exists for the male.
What was unusual in the 1950s is becoming common practice now, thanks in part to the ideology that spawned Story of O and its less literary cousins. In 1997, Slavoj Zizek was perhaps the first to theorize that ideology and the nuances of various pubic hairstyles::
Wildly grown, unkempt pubic hair indexes the hippie attitude of natural spontaneity; yuppies prefer the disciplinary procedure of a French garden (one shaves the hair on both sides close to the legs, so that all that remains is a narrow band in the middle with a clear-cut shave line); in the punk attitude, the vagina is wholly shaven and furnished with rings (usually attached to a perforated clitoris). Is this not yet another version of the Lévi-Straussian semiotic triangle of “raw” wild hair, well-kept “baked” hair and shaved “boiled” hair?[x]
Convincing as his triangle may be, the ideology has changed somewhat in the last decade. Pubic coiffing has become so popular that by now most of the styles are “baked,” including the naked mons. Even the bald treatments that have become fashionable in recent years belong not to punkers but to professional women, college girls, and housewives. In the new visual culture, the shaved mound is an everyday aesthetic standard.
In our pop-culture moment, with its interest in self-empowerment and self-help, there’s also an apparently narcissistic aspect to the pubic coiffure; magazines push it not only as a way of appealing to men but also as a way of pampering the self. A nether do requires a lot of attention and upkeep, and it gives a woman an excuse, perhaps even a command, to pay attention to herself.
The authors of the e-book Hot Pink: The Girls’ Guide to Primping, Passion, and Pubic Fashion declare their intent is “to give women a resource for feeling great about themselves, whatever their personal style.”[xi] Even the men surveyed by Cosmo said that they like that the woman who shaves or waxes has decided to “lavish so much attention on herself” and is “looking after herself”[xii]: that kind of attention to the self is sexy. It would appear that it is all right, and even arousing, to be self-involved if the part of the self that attracts one’s attention is one’s vulva — and the activity in question is readying the body for the gaze of the other.
L’Origine de la Coiffure: Aesthetic History and Statistics
The visual arts, in which we might include pornography, thrive on a certain deceptiveness. Previous visual culture tended to obscure what was actually going on around the genitals. Michael Castleman noted those murky origins and art’s ability to mislead on Salon.com: “It’s not easy to track the history of pubic presentation. Ancient Chinese, Greek and Roman erotic art generally depict genitals — both male and female — without pubic hair. Did the ancients remove it? Or did the artists simply not include it? Art historians are silent on the subject.”
In fact, Castleman’s rule doesn’t quite hold; flipping through a book on Chinese or Indian erotic art, for example, will yield as many pictures with pubic hair as without.[xiii] The hair is mostly sparse, a mere shadow around the monsor penis, but it is there. Most of this art came miniaturized, on vases and scrolls for private viewing; perhaps the scale of the work itself may have had something to do with how much hair was represented.
Other writers claim to possess more hard facts. Sketching a history is, of course, a way of normalizing and establishing a practice, very much in line with the goals of authors who gain readership by urging women to reinvent their looks and their selves. On their website (in 2018 apparently defunct), Deborah Driggs and Karen Risch, authors of Hot Pink, assure potential buyers that nether coiffures have a long and varied history. They, too, cite the ancient Greeks and Asians, saying they “actually plucked their pubic hair to shape it into an aesthetic ideal”; they also declare that “aristocratic women in the sixteenth century grew their curlies as long as possible so they could pomade and decorate them with bows.”
Cosmopolitan reporters seem to have performed most of the historical research (or speculation) done on the nether coiffure. In 1999, Cosmo’s “Irma Kurtz’s Agony” column again mentioned the example of ancient Greece.[xiv] In 2004, Paula Szuchman described ancient Egyptian and contemporary Middle Eastern methods of removing hair with honey or sugar and strips of fabric.[xv] She also noted that the Sears catalogue advertised razors and depilatory creams in 1922, and that reduced availability of cloth for swimsuits during World War II meant scantier styles and increased potential for stray hairs; women used razors or even sandpaper, and sometimes burned the hairs away.[xvi]
This determination to remove hair at any cost shows again that the hair was considered scandalous and intolerable; to let a stray curl peek through would have been to demonstrate an execrable lack of self-control and a louche, dirty sexuality. Worst, it would have been ugly.
In any event, the removal of body hair, particularly through salon procedures such as waxing, has clearly become more popular in recent years, fed by media that recognize and perpetuate it. To explain the popularity of waxing, Cosmopolitan claimed in 2004 that “the number of people employed by salons has jumped 24 percent since 1999, while, according to the market research firm ACNielsen, razor sales for men and women have dropped 18 percent in the last two years.”[xvii] In an area in which statistics are hard to come by — even Cosmo can’t say how many women are shaving, or how much they take off — the magazine has made a valiant effort to put the new fad into a context of scientific and historical data. By doing so, the writers make readers more comfortable with the practice and even create a certain amount of pressure to participate in it.
“Quite Different to What He Saw”: High Art and Cloudy Expectation
No matter what actual women were doing Down There, visual culture and artistic aesthetics have long been creating discomfort with the hairy female pubis. Before the twentieth century, representing any pubic hair at all (or, for that matter, the slit over which it grows) was out of the question for high art, and consequently some naïve persons were led to false expectations.
The case of John Ruskin, for example, is well documented. The Victorian art critic and essayist married Euphemia Gray on April 10, 1848, but never managed to consummate the marriage. As Euphemia would write to her father when seeking an annulment some years later, Ruskin offered a variety of excuses before he “told me his true reason (and this to me is as villainous as all the rest), that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April.”[xviii]
In fact, Ruskin had never had sex before, and his experience of the unclothed female body was limited to artistic representations. He had not, in short, expected pubic hair, and he found it revolting. He fled the room and thereafter treated Effie with a distant kindness.[xix]
The arts had led Ruskin to expect a sort of blank area between a woman’s legs, based on versions of the female nude that had been a popular subject since the Renaissance. Often in the service of some abstract allegory about virtue and purity, these pictures satisfied both prurient and moral interests.
Representations of Susannah and the Elders, for example, were particularly well loved in Germany. Viewers got to see young Susannah’s white flesh exposed to the gaze of the two lecherous old men — and, lest the painting’s viewers become overstimulated, a number of pictures also showed the elders being punished not just for looking at Susannah or for attempting to seduce her, but for telling others that she had tried to seduce them.
Nowhere, even in a full-frontal depiction, did Susannah’s pubic hair come into play. While women had to have legs and bellies, and the sight of those things could certainly arouse, the woman’s private hair was too private, too animal, for anyone to view.
As we will see below, this high art is not exactly comparable to today’s pornography.[xx] First, the artistic bare pudendum is completely featureless; there is no slit, no clitoris, no vagina — none of the elements so aggressively on display in pornography. High art manifests an aesthetic of elision rather than of revelation.
In their day, these female nudes were usually considered instructive and uplifting, because of their beauty alone if not some added moral message. Even ladies could examine paintings and sculptures of naked women, even though most of the models were assumed to be prostitutes, but they would never look at a picture that featured a hairy mound. Such pictures were available as engravings and, in the nineteenth century, photographs, sold clandestinely to men who used them for the same purposes men use Penthouse and Hustler today.[xxi] Writing of the Gilded Age, M. H. Dunlop mentions “bulky peepshow books with the words Gems and Masterpieces in their titles”[xxii] — essentially, pornography masquerading, however feebly, as art. Even then, there seem to have been relatively few representations involving pubic hair; it just wasn’t something that people wanted to see.
There is one notable exception in nineteenth-century art. Perhaps the earliest modern artistic representation of female pubic hair, Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), was painted in 1866 for the Turkish diplomat Khalil Bey. Starting mid-thigh, the painting offers a view between a woman’s legs, showing sparse black hairs near the vaginal opening, increasing in thickness and curliness as they move up the mound of Venus. The view ends at the breasts, with a sheet draped just above nipple height.
In the era of the gently clouded mons veneris, this painting was never displayed publicly and became the stuff of legend. After Bey’s bankruptcy, the painting was sold — but still considered so incendiary that it had to be hidden beneath an outer panel. In the twentieth century, L’Origine was lost for a while, then resurfaced in the 1920s; it belonged briefly to Jacques Lacan before ending up at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay in 1995.[xxiii] It still draws giggling crowds today. The fact that only the erogenous zones are displayed, coupled with the inclusion of both hair and a subtle clitoris, makes L’Origine shocking even now, particularly when it’s surrounded by the more sedate works of Courbet and his contemporaries.
Still, the bush displayed in L’Origine does not appear entirely au naturel. No hairs stray down into what we now call the bikini line, the creases by the thighs, and the growth thins dramatically below the clitoris — as if it’s just too appalling to think of hairs growing abundantly down and around the vagina itself. We seem to have an early version of the landing strip, or in any case a somewhat manicured mound: The world may have originated between this woman’s legs, but she cleaned herself up a bit first.
“I Like What You Have Going on Down There”: Intimacies of the Small Screen
With its single, uncomplicated sexual message, porn is one of our most visually driven cultural products, even more so than the high art that tends to deliver a more philosophical message. Porn’s ubiquity is widely acknowledged; Pamela Paul writes that it is “so seamlessly integrated into popular culture that embarrassment or surreptitiousness is no longer part of the equation”[xxiv] and cites a 2004 poll that found 75 percent of men and 41 percent of women[xxv] had “used” (in common parlance, people use porn rather than merely see it) pornographic films from the internet alone.
In her theoretical classic Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” Linda Williams takes a phrase from Jean-Louis Comolli to dub “the visual, hard-core knowledge-pleasure produced by the scientia sexualis [Freud’s sexual science] a ‘frenzy of the visible.’”[xxvi] Despite the “extreme” phrasing, she writes, “this frenzy is neither an aberration nor an excess; rather, it is a logical outcome of a variety of discourses of sexuality that converge in, and help further to produce, technologies of the visible.”[xxvii]
We might consider pubic coiffure fashions to be one such “technology of the visible” — part of a culture increasingly oriented toward the use of mass-produced images destined exclusively to arouse.
From the days of silent stag films, visual stimulation has always been paramount; no one rents or downloads porn to listen to the dialogue, the moaning, or the “bow-ch-ch-bow-bow” music in the background. Williams writes that the “principle of maximum visibility” has evolved over the history of hard core, with the intent, among other activities, “to privilege close-ups of body parts over other shots; to overlight easily obscured genitals; to select sexual positions that show the most of bodies and organs.”[xxviii]
Pornography’s interest in strong visuals of the genitals is indisputable. But the visual stimuli have not always included hairless mons; in fact, the stars of 1920s stag movies and soft- or hard-core 1970s hits such as Emmanuelle in America, Deep Throat, and Behind the Green Door had full bushes that spoke to a different kind of femininity. Retired porn model and actress Kelly Nichols says that when she started out in the early 1980s, “I posed with a full bush. No one in adult entertainment shaved back then. Now everyone does.”[xxix] So how, then, did the fashion change in porn — and thus in our popular culture?
The answer may lie in the shift from big movie screens to the much smaller screens of television and computer. Peep shows and porn shops always featured loops, short films run in private booths, but the fanciest porn — long-running and (often sketchily) plotted — played in theaters. Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, for example, made their mark on big screens in packed houses.
But in the early 1980s, the industry made the change to VHS. A smaller screen makes for decreased visibility, and camerawork had to change in order to display those hard-to-find “naughty bits.” The naughty bits had to be compelling, too, as with video came the fast-forward button: Former actor Tim Connelly says that while there was “craft […] a certain element of art” in pornographic films for the big screen, “Now you can’t even think about porno without thinking about fast-forward, which is really a testimonial for why people didn’t want to do videos.”[xxx]
It seems inevitable that, in order to keep the viewer’s hand from wandering to the fast-forward button, the action’s pace had to pick up and the objects of interest be more prominently displayed than ever before. The narrative art was lost and the visual component made more prominent.
This is around the time the actresses began to shave and wax consistently. Though no one seems to have made the connection between shaving and the small screen specifically, it is true that, as Nichols said, hair removal is now expected of the women in porn.[xxxi] They may also be expected to be conform to more consistent images than previously: Almost all are now blonde, pneumatic, and waxed, with collagen lips and plenty of eye makeup. While Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat, was generally considered rather plain and had a long disfiguring scar on her chest, Connelly says the 1980s brought “the concept of the ‘Video Vixen’ — a girl who appears in videos and has got sort of a style [that] comes across as incredibly telegenic.”[xxxii]
Playing on the relatively small screen of a television, then, video required a special look of its actresses.
Part of that look would be a kind of intimacy; this is, after all, pornography showing in someone’s home, his private space. As Horace Newcomb has written about the difference between cinema screens and television more generally, the TV screen is a personal and intimate thing;[xxxiii] intimacy is impossible in a movie theater but absolutely required in the living room or bedroom. And with its close look at what’s usually concealed, a shaved or otherwise groomed vulva creates deeper intimacy as well as improved small-screen visibility.[xxxiv]
Pubic hair has always, and perhaps ironically now, been one of the determining factors when defining pornography. L’Origine du monde is shocking in large part because of the hair depicted. Theater owner Dave Friedman says that in the 1960s, “you didn’t dare show pubic hair. An L.A. vice squad cop told me, ‘If we see pubic hair, then it’s pornographic — and that gives us an excuse to pick up the print.’”[xxxv]
What was forbidden, and thus especially erotic then, has been banished again — this time, in order to increase a visually driven eroticism. The porn industry has erased one mark of perversion and, in the eyes of some commentators at least, substituted another: To some people, the hairless mound is fetishized than the hairy one, and fetishes are not just perverted — they’re dirty.
An informal survey of women who don’t shave comes back with comments such as “I don’t have the time,” “It would itch too much,” and “I think there’s something wrong with men who want women to look like little girls.” Writing for Salon.com in 1998, Joan Walsh expressed the psychological discomfort many women feel: “creating the illusion of a hairless pubis seemed like one more example of how we glorify the sexless child’s body over what’s womanly, a step in the direction of kiddie porn.” Even men often declare themselves uncomfortable with the idea of confronting a vulva that looks like Lolita’s — and yet another informal survey indicates that they are invariably fascinated with a shaved vulva when they encounter one; they call for more light and will delay intercourse in order to explore with their eyes the secrets laid bare. Jschinn1, who answered Cary Tennis, dismissed the child-monsaccusation as “idiotic”: “A full-grown woman […] does not suddenly become like a 12-year-old simply by shaving her crotch.” She remains full-grown, her hairlessness adding a new layer of sexual mystique.
People who frown on pornography don’t do so merely because they see it as exploitative; some suggest it is ruining sex. A twenty-eight-year-old man told Pamela Paul, author of Pornified, that he stopped watching Internet porn because “I began to find it more difficult to stay aroused when having sex with a real woman.”[xxxvi] One “Anonymous” respondent to Tennis claimed that pornography has led the “younger generation” to an unsatisfying sense of performance rather than participation: “The men are less present […] then [sic] they used to be. The preference for shaved pussy goes along with this.” A lack of hair and a lack of individualized inspiration go hand in hand, and it’s easy to blame porn.
There is another potential model for the topheavy, bare-mounded feminine ideal, one with a historical tie to the sex industry. Another of Tennis’s respondents, Anne, says that a shaved mons reminds her not so much of a little girl as of a Barbie doll — the toy with which a little girl might play in order to fantasize and learn about being a woman — and there is some relevance to the observation. Barbie herself was copied in 1959 from a naughty German doll called Lilli, which was marketed primarily to men and based on a comic-strip character who devoted her life to teasing men and to “mildly sordid double entendres.”[xxxvii] She is thus an early pop product of the modern sex industry, one who infiltrated the culture in a more subtle and pervasive way than production companies like Vivid Entertainment could ever hope to do. People who compare the airbrushed women in Playboyand Maximto dolls and “dollies” are tapping into the ideology that created Barbie.[xxxviii]
So here are connections to porn and to adolescence. Are men who like their women shaved then to be considered perverts and pedophiles — that is, dirty old men? It depends on whom you ask. At the very least, this preference plays into the visual culture that makes most women feel insecure about their bodies. A poll conducted for Pornified found that 51 percent of Americans felt that porn “raises men’s expectations of how women should look.”[xxxix] One of the author’s informants, for example, says, “porn’s prevalence is a serious hindrance to my comfort level in relationships. […] my body image suffers tremendously…. I wonder if I am insecure or if the images I see guys ogle every day has [sic] done this to me.”[xl]
Cosmopolitan’s advice columnist “Irma Kurtz” assured a letter writer that a man who wants his lady to sport some kind of style isn’t necessarily a pervert and that she should “Play along for fun.”[xli] Interestingly, in the very same column, Kurtz tells a flat-chested woman whose boyfriend likes big breasts that she should not consider getting hers augmented “Because what really turns the poor jerk on is the idea of seeing women as objects.” Some fetishes — or preferences — are acceptable; but a line is being drawn. A woman might shave to please her man, but she should not have surgery. Perhaps shaving means a proclivity and surgery means perversion.
The somewhat contradictory message in Kurtz’s column speaks to a trend that Ariel Levy discusses in Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, a book aimed at a popular audience. In our present state of mind, pornography and its easily acquired accoutrements are often seen as empowering to women; some people even say the trend is a natural outgrowth of feminism, as it shows we don’t need to rebel against male ideals anymore. Levy reports hearing women say that “We’d earned the right to look at Playboy; we were empowered enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes. Women had come so far, I learned, we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny. Instead, it was time for us to join the frat party of pop culture.”[xlii]
Objectification is perhaps the greatest problem that Levy perceives: “The women who are really being emulated and obsessed over in our culture right now — strippers, porn stars, pinups — aren’t even people. They are merely sexual personae, erotic dollies from the land of make-believe.”[xliii] Under this view, pubic hair styling plays into an ideology by which women give up their personhood in order to conform to an abstracted, Barbie-like idea of sexiness.
There is another wrinkle to the debate, as some people say that shaving offers pleasures beyond the visual stimuli that one gives to one’s partner. The big advantage for the woman is increased sensation and convenience; without hair, the skin receives direct stimulation that increases many women’s pleasure. And as jschinn1 wrote to Tennis, “Cunnilingus is far more pleasant for both giver and receiver when it’s performed on a trimmed or bare vagina.” “Magpie Malone” also wrote in to say that porn stars shave “for practical reasons”: The longer a sex scene lasts, the easier it will be if “you are fully shaved and lubed.” Shaving can be not only arousing but also practical, a way of achieving pleasure for self as well as other.
Still, even when the woman acknowledges increased sensation, it is impossible to escape the insistence on male visual pleasure. In an episode of HBO’s television show Sex and the City, Carrie and her friends go to Los Angeles for a week of fun — part of which entails Carrie getting a Brazilian wax that leaves her, as she says several times, “bald” and hyperconscious of her own sexuality: “I’m so aware of ‘down there’ now. Now I feel like I’m nothing but walking sex.”[xliv]
Samantha, who seems to have some experience going bare, says that a Brazilian “makes you do crazy things.” In this condition, Carrie spends the night with a man named Keith, who refers to her pudendum when he tells her in the morning, “I like what you have going on down there.” Carrie giggles and passes it off with, “That would be a whole lot of nothing,” but perhaps the greatest pleasure we see her take in this episode is in receiving Keith’s compliment. Her satisfying sexual adventure is enabled by her daring new do, something the script takes pains to associate with LA’s film-and-beach culture, as opposed to New York’s more conservative milieu. However, Keith is never presented as wrong or perverted for liking a naked vulva.
Shortly after Keith’s remark, Carrie Fisher (playing herself) walks in and exposes him as a personal assistant, not the Hollywood agent he claimed to be. Carrie Bradshaw’s adventure becomes a misadventure, proof (like her new coiffure) of LA’s shallowness. When she returns to her own apartment at the episode’s end, she’s glad to be “inside,” where “it was all real” and “I was starting to feel like myself again. And the rest of me would grow back. Eventually.”
The half hour’s trajectory takes first Keith and then Carrie to an authentic interior. Keith is too shallow to appreciate the genuineness of Carrie and the true “inside” of her vagina, but despite the external changes, Carrie is smart enough to know she remains the same person and has enough self-esteem enough to appreciate herself and her vulva, which she expects to return to its natural state. Thus, the episode ultimately devalues the pubic coiffure, and it celebrates the real woman who might choose to alter her appearance “down there.” The wax is a novelty (except perhaps to Samantha), serving mostly to attract viewers whose interests may be as false as Keith’s.
The bookend to this episode comes three seasons later, when Samantha, the most sexually promiscuous and experimental of the four main characters, decides to honor her boyfriend’s request to grow a “full bush.”[xlv] As the hair comes in, she is surprised to find a gray one. As a result, she tries to dye everything she has, accidentally ending up with a fluffy carnival red tuft that makes her call herself “Bozo the Bush.”
Samantha shaves everything off and tells her boyfriend that, as a working woman, “I don’t have time for you to be down there searching for it [her clitoris]. So I wanted to make everything nice and simple.” (The efficiency factor was mentioned in the earlier episode, too, when Miranda explained the Brazilian’s West Coast popularity: “L.A. men are too lazy to have to go searching for anything.”)
Within three years on the show, then, a full pubic wax or shave went from a sign of LA’s counterculture (or hyperculture) to a matter of convenience and efficiency for a high-powered woman on the go. It has been normalized to such an extent that no one now feels the need to comment on the fact that Samantha normally shaves herself, probably bare.
Samantha’s bush-loving boyfriend is not alone. Even as the bare vulva has grown in popularity in both porn and the culture at large, the unshaved woman has come in for her share of fetishization as well — and in fact, if the men’s magazines are any indication, it is the natural bush that’s now the locus of perversion. Some Web sites, such as Fuzzywomen.com, offer contemplative, sometimes philosophical or quasi-scientific essays about the abundance or removal of pubic and other body hair. The effect is, however, altered in that they also feature photographs of hirsute vulvas and ads for “hot movies” and sites such as HornyHairyGirls.com.
Other ads for pornographic videos in magazines such as Penthouse make lavish promises: “This 21-year-old is so hairy that you can’t see her pussy until she pulls herself open!”[xlvi]; “Their hair has been growing wild their whole lives and they don’t want to shave any of it now!”; “definitely the hairiest vaginas ever seen!!!”[xlvii] Granted, the hirsute vulva gets fewer pictorials and less attention in porn than the naked one — but even in pornography, it is not an entirely bald world. The relegation of the full bush to “dirty” fetish-type pictures and videos only highlights the acceptance of the coiffed vulva, the new industry standard.
Naked, Clean, and Happy: or, The Once-New Hygiene
Certain concepts of cleanliness may be related to the jokes about efficiency and giving men quicker access. Perversion is dirty, and hygienic ideologies have come to motivate the waxing or shaving to such an extent that we are removing perversion and instating a kind of morality when we remove the hair. Americans’ obsession with cleanliness and sterility is notorious worldwide.[xlviii] It seems to come from a combination of our reformist heritage and our position as leader of the industrialized world; we have the belief that cleanliness is next to godliness, and we have the technology and medical understanding to enforce it.
At our cultural roots, we also have a Puritanical discomfort — and fascination — with sexuality, and that sexuality can be made “cleaner,” more moral, by adjusting the body’s appearance. As Mary Douglas has argued, getting rid of what seems dirty is a way of “imposing system on an inherently untidy experience” and “making an environment conform to an idea”[xlix]; if we label the hair as dirty, we can gain control of our bodies and our sexuality by removing it. Given our ardently reformist background, too, it is perhaps natural that we translate our fetishization of pornographic monsstyle into a concern with hygiene: We’re just more comfortable doing something, especially something sexual, if we can cite cleanliness as a motivator.
Even the dirty-picture industry has expressed an interest in the virtue next to godliness. In 1967, before the era of extensive genital topiary, Hugh Hefner described his ideal model in terms of a happy, clean nakedness: “The Playboy girl has no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy.”[l]
In the same interview, Hefner described another feminine type, the femme fatale: she “wears elegant underwear, with lace, and she is sad, and somehow mentally filthy.”[li] Even in the erotica business, to be clean is to be happy; a mind that acknowledges its sexuality straightforwardly is unsoiled. And the eponymous sexpot of Emmanuelle in America says that when sex is natural it’s “clean”; she then unzips the fly of her would-be killer and fellates him until he flees.[lii] Lust, then, and nakedness are clean — now it’s just a matter of defining how, in our contemporary culture, that clean body should look.
The eighteenth-century Reverend John Wesley, founder of Methodism, is largely responsible for dubbing cleanliness the virtue “next to Godliness.” Whether the god in question is Venus or the Christian version is currently open to interpretation.
Suellen Hoy, author of Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness,writes that this handy saying is somewhat misleading: “Clergy of that time favored cleanliness to promote not piety but Christian respectability, and eventually, health.”[liii]
Hygiene was thus conceptualized perhaps rather like the cup and saucer that represented some souls in nineteenth-century sermons, clean on the outside but dirty within; and in this case the outside — the appearance or impression of cleanliness — was what mattered. Some years after Wesley, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiographycalled cleanliness one of the thirteen virtues.
A proper shave was part of that purity. Franklin wrote, “if you teach a poor young Man to shave himself and keep his Razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his Life than in giving him a 1000 Guineas.”[liv] Shaving the face, like shaving the genitals, is motivated by visibility — and by reducing the number of vermin who might hide among the hairs. If it is hygienic to have a clean-shaven face, it may be even more important to have a clean-shaven mound (though, of course, Franklin dispensed no advice about this area, and in fact none seems to exist for the era).
From the beginning, women have been responsible for America’s domestic cleanliness. It has been their job to make sure that their homes and their families’ bodies are kept as clean as possible according to the standards of the day.
For all that, conditions in the early days were not what we could consider truly clean; the technology just wasn’t ready, and only the wealthy were able to maintain even minimal standards of hygiene. In the mid-nineteenth century, reformers began working to bring cleanliness to the masses. Writing books and proselytizing about the healthful effects of a dirt-free home, women such as Catharine Beecher were key players. Male health reformers again, as always, entrusted women with the health and cleanliness of their families.[lv]
The perfection and dissemination of the microscope in the second half of the nineteenth century revolutionized the medical profession and the way we think of hygiene. Visibility achieved new levels. Suddenly doctors and scholars everywhere could see what lives in a drop of pond water — or on a half-inch of human skin. In the 1880s, for example, it turned out that consumption was caused by bacilli that created tubercles in the lungs and other flesh (hence the disease’s new name, tuberculosis); the discovery spawned new cleansing technologies such as pasteurization and increased vigilance with personal hygiene. The hitherto hidden world of germs and parasites created a new unease with dirt, a new interest in washing. If the skin itself could hide so much, just think what might lie behind a tuft of hair.
Women, the Victorian Angels in Houses, are the traditional gatekeepers of American good hygiene (and the goddess Hygeia herself is a woman), so it is natural that current ideas of cleanliness should be writ large on the female mons. We might speculate that today, with a heightened fear of potentially fatal sexually transmitted diseases, perhaps some of the appeal of clean and clean-shaven genitals is that they give the impression of nothing to hide, no diseases to catch. Thus shaving confers another kind of respectability and virtue.
And the arousing narcissism of this kind of personal attention is part of the ideology of hygiene. Notions of cleanliness are often focused outward, on making the body fit for social interactions, whether those interactions take place in the office or the bedroom.[lvi] Under this kind of thinking, a woman who wants to express herself with a clean body is not such a narcissist after all; she is a thoughtful partner.
In fact, a lack of pubic hair can be read as either dirty or clean, depending on who’s looking. In 1999, a Cosmopolitan reader wrote in to ask if shaving pubic hair increases the risk of STD’s; the answer was no.[lvii] It’s a common concern, and not every doctor would agree with the article’s answer; a general practitioner once told me that the hair is necessary for keeping out germs — it’s the body’s way of keeping clean.
In 2003, Cosmo addressed the same issue in slightly different terms: “Back in caveman days, we needed pubic hair to keep germs out of the body, but now that we bathe and wear underwear, we no longer have much use for it.”[lviii] In 2001, the magazine made virtually the same point: “In prehistoric times, this patch of hair probably helped keep germs and dirt away from genitals […] now women usually wear underwear, which protects their privates.”[lix] The hair can be a useful tool in the fight against disease, but these days other innovations can take over that role. We’re free to shed the part of our bodies that filtered out those germs.
By far the most common opinion is that a hairless body is a clean one. Cosmopolitan’s “History of Bikini Waxing” argued that Middle Eastern women remove their pubic hair to “appear clean and pure for their husbands.”[lx] Medical science, too, would support this idea; traditionally, nurses have shaved a woman’s pubis when she is about to give birth — a way of keeping the area clean and the visibility good (the patients, however, sometimes complain that razor burn and itching from the hair growing in are the most long-lived problems of childbirth). Removing the pubic hair, then, can give that impression of cleanliness, even if the cleanliness comes with a certain degree of inconvenience.
The happy hygiene of contemporary pornography, unlike that of Hefner’s conception, also turns on hairlessness. One of Tennis’s respondents speculated about “slick pornography, where actors’ pubic hair shaving is pretty much a practical necessity for hygiene on the set.” That claim may have been conjecture, but the prostitutes on HBO’s Cathouse, a documentary series examining the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Reno, Nevada, explain that they shave — sometimes twice a day — in order to be “clean” for their customers.[lxi] A happy star or hooker is a hairless one; as throughout American culture, hygiene leads to good sex and to general contentment.[lxii]
This happy, hygienic nakedness is not, however, uncomplicated. Discussions of the potential benefits and drawbacks for both the woman and her partner, featured ad infinitum in the media, seem to be rationalizing one particular stance on the shaving question — that is, that shaving is desirable, its pitfalls avoidable, and a few basic techniques and products available to combat the discomfort.
The side-effects of shaving or waxing can indeed be uncomfortable as well as infectious. If the goal of a close shave is hot intercourse, the end result might disappoint expectations built up by watching porn: A bare mons is vulnerable to chafing, the downside of increased sensation. One gynecologist quoted in a 1999 Cosmopolitan calls pubic hair “a ‘dry’ lubricant, a barrier that prevents uncomfortable bare-skin friction during intercourse.”[lxiii] The article recommends “trimming unruly down-there hair rather than taking it all off.” Waxing is painful and can irritate the skin just as badly as shaving; see, for example, Joan Walsh’s article “From Happy Trails to Landing Strips.”[lxiv] Skin usually grows over the shaved hair as well, and some unsightly red bumps can pop up. Another drawback is oft-mentioned itching; as hair grows back, it can turn against the skin and cause irritation.
In short, a woman who wants porn-quality sex has to be willing to put up with a bit of discomfort on her way to pleasuring herself and her man. No pain, no gain; everything worth having is worth suffering for.
In response to these irritations, a new culture has grown up around this type of self-care, and that new culture, again, refers us to hygiene. If the discomfort sets in, plenty of advice — and plenty of merchandise — is available in the popular arena. The University of Iowa Student Health Service, for example, has a web page explaining how to avoid ingrown hairs and other discomfort.[lxv]
American enterprise has also sprung to the breach, and there are plenty of products available to circumvent these problems. Buying products is part of the self-care ideology; shaving, inspired by the porn industry, is made cleaner and more legitimate by purchasing accoutrements such as triple-blade razors and specially formulated lotions at the local drugstore. The woman who shaves or waxes again gazes at her vulva, evaluates it, as she takes measures to avoid infection and applies the recommended products: more of that healthy, sexy narcissism, and this time a narcissism truly directed toward hygiene and the public good.
Some of the advice given is quite basic, and yet it speaks to an endless process, chasing an elusive perfect pubic complexion. Exfoliation with a loofah or other rough scrubber is important; it is also advisable to moisturize, particularly with a product made for sensitive facial skin. And as specialized shaving has become part of our culture, so have specialized after-shave lotions such as Bikini Zone and TendSkin, which keep the follicles open and prevent ingrown hairs and unsightly red bumps. Thus, this new kind of hygiene associated with a new kind of beauty, itself explained in part by a desire for a good hygiene — a goal forever receding on the horizon, becoming more and more impossible as art and fashion make new demands on it.[lxvi]
Conclusion: Strange Bedfellows
So our Victorian forebears and our pornographer contemporaries are, in fact, not so far apart. The Angel in the House of one and the whore of the other are joined at the mons; while they may have advocated different kinds of cleanliness, their ideologies have permeated popular culture and fused in the image of the hairless vulva.
The trend may have begun with the increased demands for visibility as porn moved from the silver screen to the small one, the shift was quickly justified with a rhetoric already in place equating perceived cleanliness with morality and positive participation in the life of the culture. If we can see the vulva clearly, we can believe it to be clean and healthy in a way that will ease potential discomfort with sexuality itself.
There is a common denominator enabling the changes in all of these areas: new technologies. Some of these innovations let consumers watch pornography in the home, and some let them wax and shave with greater efficiency and comfort. These technologies converge to make the naked mons more possible, more normalized, and more visible; they also make it a form of technological innovation itself.
Rendered hairless through science and consumerism, the bare (or topiaried) vulva of the contemporary “dollie” becomes itself a kind of machine that helps drive the pleasures inspired by mass-produced pornographic materials. Current standards may say that we’re sexy, and that we’re clean, but this is a manufactured kind of sexy-cleanliness that has rendered the vulva an artifact, an aesthetic product perhaps that might lead to even less realistic expectations than the elided genitals of pre-twentieth-century Western artwork.
While aimed primarily at a male gaze, the pubic coiffure is still called a matter of personal choice and self-expression in women’s magazines. The notion of expression, particularly of the ever-elusive, always constructed self, calls into question the constructed nature of sexuality, of hygiene, and even of the distinction between natural and artificial.
In this age of strong visual media and of grooming products for every area, is it possible to be truly au naturel? Even if a woman allows her hair to grow to a full bush, as Samantha does on Sex and the City, she seems to be conscious of it as a “look” or a style. That very attentiveness means that even the natural becomes, to some degree, the artificial. We are both more and less naked down there now than before — more exposed to the gaze and more visibly manipulated. All of us now dollies, we wander through our own English gardens, admiring the topiary and dreaming of the real.
Works Cited
“100% Amateurs.” Advertisement. Penthouse, August 2001: 153.
Behind the Green Door. Film. Directed and written by Artie Mitchell and Jim Mitchell, story by
Anonymous. Mitchell Brothers Pictures. 1972.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin 1977 (first appearance 1972, as BBC documentary).
Bodnar, Sara. “Beyond the Brazilian Wax: The hottest bikini-line grooming trend is bolder than ever before. (What You’re Dying to Know About).” Cosmopolitan 240.5 (May 2006): 232.
Califano, Julia. “ ‘My Guy Wants Me to Try a Bikini Wax that Leaves Me Totally Bare. Is That Safe?’ (His & Hers).” Cosmopolitan 235.1 (July 2003): 106.
Castleman, Michael. “Porn-Star Secrets: Going Naked in Front of the Camera Necessitates Lots of Hair-Removal Tricks.” Salon.com, September 6, 2000. http://archive.salon.com/sex/feature/2000/09/06/hair_removal/rpint.html. Accessed September 2, 2006.
Cathouse. TV series, documentary. Produced and directed by Patti Kaplan. HBO, 2005.
Crescent Books. The Perfect Union: The Chinese Methods. New York, 1984.
Daly, Gay. Pre-Raphaelites in Love. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989.
Deep Throat. Film. Directed and written by Gerard Damiano. 1972.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1984.
Driggs, Deborah, and Karen Risch. Hot Pink: The Girls’ Guide to Primping, Passion, and Pubic Fashion. E-book, 2004. http://www.hotpinkbook.com. Accessed September 2, 2006.
Dunlop, M. H. Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York. New York: Perennial, 2000.
Emmanuelle in America. Dir. Joe d’Amato, screenplay Maria Pisa Fusco. 1976.
“Extreme Hardcore Videos.” Advertisement. Penthouse,July 2001: 163.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978, 1990.
— — — . The History of Sexuality. Volume 3: The Care of the Self. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1986.
Fuzzywomen.com. Website. Accessed September 2, 2006.
Gärtner, Peter J. Musée d’Orsay. Cologne: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, 2001.
Giles, Dennis. “Pornographic Space: The Other Place.” The 1977 Film Studies Annual: Part 2. Pleasantville, NY: Redgrave, 1977: 52–65.
Goodman, Elizabeth. “Bare Down There?” Cosmopolitan226.4 (April 1999): 118.
Graves, Ginny. “What’s Up Down There. (Vagina Examination.)” Cosmopolitan231.3 (September 2001): 332.
Hoy, Suellen. Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Kapsalis, Terri. Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Kurtz, Irma. “Agony.” Cosmopolitan 226.3 (March 1999): 74.
“Lesbian Pubic Hair.” Lesbian Life. Website. http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/lesbiansex/a/LesbianBush.htm. Accessed Sept. 2, 2006.
Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. New York: Free Press, 2005.
McCouch, Hanna. “What Your Bikini Waxer Really Thinks: A woman who spends her days doing Brazilian-style hair removal breaks her code of silence. (True Confession.)” Cosmopolitan 232.1 (January 2002): 90–92.
McNeil, Legs, and Jennifer Osborne, with Peter Pavia. The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. New York: ReganBooks, 2005.
Newcomb, Horace. TV: The Most Popular Art. New York: Anchor Books, 1974.
Nin, Anaïs. “The Basque and Bijou.” Delta of Venus: Erotica. New York: Bantam, 1969, 1977 (stories written 1940–1941): 154–201.
Paul, Pamela. Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2005.
Rawson, Philip. Erotic Art of India. New York: Gallery Books, 1977.
Réage, Pauline. Story of O. Trans. Sabine d’Estrées. New York: Ballantine, 1965.
Sex and the City. TV show. “Sex and Another City.” Episode 44. Directed by John David Coles, written by Jenny Bicks. HBO. 2001.
— — . “The One.” Episode 86. Directed by David Frankel, written by Michael Patrick King. HBO, 2004.
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness, and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Szuchman, Paula. “The History of Bikini Waxing: Hairstyles Come and Go — Even Down Below. (Your Body.)” Cosmopolitan 237.21 (Summer-fall 2004): 90–91.
Tennis, Cary. “Since You Asked: All the Guys I’m Dating Want Me to Shave Down There.” [lxvii] Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2006/08/08/shaving/. Readers’ letters in response: http://letters.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2006/08/08/shaving/view/?show=ec. Accessed Sept. 2, 2006.
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Walsh, Joan. “From Happy Trails to Landing Strips, a Bikini-Waxer Muses on the Fine Line Between Pleasure and Pain (Mothers Who Think).” Salon.com, June 12, 1998.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/time/1998/06/12time.html. Accessed September 2, 2006.
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Endnotes
1. See Sara Bodnar, “Beyond the Brazilian Wax,” Cosmopolitan240.5 (May 2006): 232. In addition, the Web site for the e-book Hot Pink: The Girls’ Guide to Primping, Passion, and Pubic Fashion, lists “flattering, fun pubic hair styles for you and a lover,” including “Power puff (or magic muff), Fan […] Rain cloud, Soul patch, Pubic sculpture (think topiary!),” and more. See Deborah Driggs and Karen Risch, Hot Pink: The Girls’ Guide to Primping, Passion, and Pubic Fashion(2004), http://www.hotpinkbook.com.
2. Cary Tennis, “Since You Asked: All the Guys I’m Dating Want Me to Shave Down There,” Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2006/08/08/shaving/. Readers’ letters in response: http://letters.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2006/08/08/shaving/view/?show=ec.
3. Bodnar, “Beyond the Brazilian Wax,” 232.
4. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1977; first appearance 1972 as BBC television show), 55.
5. Pauline Réage, The Story of O (trans. Sabine d’Estrées; New York: Ballantine, 1965), 161.
6. In a feature called “Lesbian Pubic Hair,” the website Lesbian Life, for example, features a letter from someone just coming out, wondering how lesbians prefer their partners’ pubic hair. The advice columnist tells the writer to do as she likes and that “Most of the lesbians I spoke to preferred a natural bush.” See http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/lesbiansex/a/Lesbian Bush.htm.
7. Hannah McCouch, “What Your Bikini Waxer Really Thinks: A woman who spends her days doing Brazilian-style hair removal breaks her code of silence. (True Confession.)” Cosmopolitan232.1 (January 2002): 93.
8. Berger,Ways of Seeing, 54.
9. Another example from literary erotica is found in the story “The Basque and Bijou,” written by Anaïs Nin for a private collector around 1940. In it the man known as the Basque has three of his friends hold the prostitute Bijou (who is also his lover) down on his bed so he can shave her with a straight razor and demonstrate that her bare vulva looks like “the paintings by that woman” (presumably Georgia O’Keefe). Once he has made her into an artwork this way, he stimulates her until she seems to be taking too much pleasure in his activity; he stops so that his friends won’t see her climax. See Anaïs Nin, “The Basque and Bijou,” in Delta of Venus: Erotica(New York: Bantam 1969, 1977 [stories written 1940–1941]), 154–201.
10. Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso 1997), 5–6.
11. Driggs and Risch, Hot Pink, http://www.hotpinkbook.com.
12. McCouch, “What Your Bikini Waxer Really Thinks,” 93.
13. See, for example, Philip Rawson’s Erotic Art of India (New York: Gallery Books, 1977) or Crescent Books’s The Perfect Union (New York, 1974).
14. Irma Kurtz (pseudonym), “Agony,” Cosmopolitan 226.3 (March 1999): 74.
15. Paula Szuchman, “The History of Bikini Waxing: Hairstyles Come and Go — Even Down Below (Your Body),” Cosmopolitan 237.21 (summer-fall, 2004): 90.
16. Ibid.
17. Szuchman, “The History of Bikini Waxing,” 90.
18. Quoted in Gay Daly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 163.
19. See Daly, 139. Things ended well for poor Effie, however: After a trial and a humiliating physical examination to prove her virginity, she obtained her annulment and an apparently happy marriage to the painter John Everett Millais.
20. Terri Kapsalis might disagree; on page 82 of Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Durham: Duke University Press 1997), she writes, “there is often only a tenuous distinction between the categories of art and pornography.”
21. M. H. Dunlop describes child pornography sold “behind green curtains at the rear of photograph shops” — and even featured in the New York Herald, with adolescent girls photographed with the clothes sliding off their bodies. See M. H. Dunlop, Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York(New York: Perennial, 2000), 156.
22. Dunlop, Gilded City, 52.
23. For a brief history of the painting’s ownership, see Peter J. Gärtner, Musée d’Orsay (Cologne: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, 2001), 96–99.
24. Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families(New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2005), 4.
25. Ibid, 15, 116.
26. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 1999), 36.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid, 48–49.
29. Quoted by Michael Castleman, “Porn-Star Secrets: Going Naked in Front of the Camera Necessitates Lots of Hair-Removal Tricks,” on Salon.com (September 6, 2006), http://archive.salon.com/sex/feature/2000/09/06/hair_removal/rpint.html.
30. Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne, with Peter Pavia, The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry (New York: ReganBooks, 2005), 368
31. Of course, earlier actresses were concerned about their pubic grooming, if not shaving. Sharon Mitchell, a star of the mid-1970s, says she traded pubic beauty sessions for lessons in fellatio: “Then I got into pussy hair coiffing. So I would exchange these cock-sucking lessons in exchange [sic] for coiffing Vanessa’s pussy hair.” See McNeil and Osborne, The Other Hollywood, 144.
32. Ibid, 370.
33. Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (New York: Anchor Books, 1974), 243–264.
34. Perhaps because of increased demand for intimacy, and for sheer volume of movies produced, some benefits came to women in video. VHS, however unexpectedly, empowered porn actresses, who now outearn their male counterparts. Ginger Lynn, a popular actress of the 1980s, says that when she began her career around 1983, she demanded, “I want script and cast approval, and I want a thousand dollars per scene […] these are the things I need in order for me to feel good about what I’m doing.” Director Henri Pachard says, “Women didn’t discover their power until video came along. Until then the power belonged to the director.” See McNeil and Osborne, The Other Hollywood, p. 366. This phenomenon is all the more interesting because the women are, as just about anyone would agree, objectified so strongly. Theorist Dennis Giles points out that men are not the “heroes” of pornographic films; their characters are much less developed than the women’s. Giles describes the viewer gazing at the vulva in a process of “projective identification,” by which the male viewer projects some of his own rejected sexual urges, such as passivity, onto the actress. As he watches the male actor possess her, he can identify with both figures onscreen. See Dennis Giles, “Pornographic Space: The Other Place,” The 1977 Film Studies Annual:Part 2 (Pleasantville, NY: Redgrave, 1977), 55–57. Pornography may be the one industry in which this objectification pays off: A Brazilian wax could mean a bigger paycheck.
35. McNeil and Osborne, The Other Hollywood, 10.
36. Paul, Pornified, 10.
37. Marco Tosa, Barbie: Four Decades of Fashion, Fantasy, and Fun (New York: Abrams 1997), 27–29.
38. See, for example, Paul, Pornified, 120.
39. Paul, Pornified, 92.
40. Ibid, 2.
41. Kurtz, “Agony,” 74.
42. Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005), 3–4 (emphasis in the original).
43. Ibid, 196 (emphasis in the original).
44. Sex and the City, “Sex and Another City,” episode 44 (directed by John David Coles, written by Jenny Bicks: HBO, 2001).
45. Sex and the City,“The One,” episode 86 (directed by David Frankel, written by Michael Patrick King, HBO. 2004).
46. “100% Amateurs” (advertisement), Penthouse, August 2001: 153.
47. “Extreme Hardcore Videos” (advertisement), Penthouse, July 2001: 163.
48. Even Americans recognize this as a typically American obsession. Suellen Hoy, author of Chasing Dirt, writes of the first time she saw “a woman in a beautiful bathing suit who didn’t shave at all!”: the people around her “said the woman was ‘foreign,’ and shaving legs and underarms was an ‘American’ custom” (xiii).
49. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo(London: Routledge, 1984), 4.
50. Quoted in Levy, Pornified, 58.
51. Ibid.
52. Emannuelle in America (directed by Joe d’Amato, screenplay by Maria Pisa Fusco), 1976.
53. Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3.
54. Quoted in Hoy, Chasing Dirt,4.
55. For a complete discussion of woman’s role, see Hoy, Chasing Dirt, 7 and 15–25.
56. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 3: The Care of the Self (translated by Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage, 1986), especially 51–54.
57. Elizabeth Goodman, “Bare Down There?”, Cosmopolitan 226.4 (April 1999): 118.
58. Julia Califano, “ ‘My Guy Wants Me to Try a Bikini Wax that Leaves Me Totally Bare. Is That Safe?’ (His & Hers),” Cosmopolitan 235.1 (July 2003): 106.
59. Ginny Graves, “What’s Up Down There (Vagina Examination),” Cosmopolitan 231.3 (September 2001): 332.
60. Szuchman, “The History of Bikini Waxing,” 90.
61. Cathouse (TV series, documentary, produced and directed by Patti Kaplan), HBO, 2005.
62. Michel Foucault might suggest that this transformation of visual investment in hairlessness into a concern with cleanliness has to do with the hygienic role assigned to sexuality with the advent of Freud and other like-minded doctors. The new sexual science, he writes, “set itself up as the supreme authority in matters of hygienic necessity […]; it claimed to ensure the physical vigor and moral cleanliness of the social body.” See The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (translated by Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage 1978, 1990), 54.
63. Goodman, “Bare Down There?”, 118.
64. Joan Walsh, “From Happy Trails to Landing Strips, a Bikini-Waxer Muses on the Fine Line Between Pleasure and Pain (Mothers Who Think),” Salon.com (June 12, 1998), http://www.salon.com/mwt/time/1998/06/12time.html.
65. University of Iowa Student Health Service, “Health Iowa,” http://uistudenthealth.com.
66. This part of hygienic ideology may be driven as much by the personal care industry’s desire to make a buck as by the porn industry’s. Hoy demonstrates that many body-care necessities came out of the soap industry’s marketing departments. For example, she says, Francis Countway, the presiden of Lever Brothers in the 1920s, was “the individual most responsible for the ‘discovery’ of body odors”; he essentially invented b.o. so his company would have a market for its wares. Listerine did the same thing for halitosis (147). See also Elizabeth Shove’s Comfort, Cleanliness, and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (Oxford: Berg 2003), 89.
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Susann Cokal is a moody historical novelist, a pop-culture essayist, book critic, magazine editor, and professor of creative writing and modern literature. Her latest book is The Kingdom of Little Wounds, set in the Scandinavian Renaissance, which received a silver medal from the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award series.
