A friend of mine, now in college, recounted her conversation in 8th grade with a boy who was startled to discover that females had pubic hair, too. He’d never seen it in the porn movies or the magazines.
Two things happened just before the pubic hair disappeared. The timing is not arbitrary. I will reverse the sequence. In the 1970’s the female teen body became an erotic fetish. In 1974 Larry Flynt began publishing Barely Legal, with frontal shots of eighteen year-old girls. In 1976, an underage Jodie Foster played a twelve-year-old prostitute in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver; in 1978, Brooke Shields did the same in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby. Both were underage when they played these parts.
It’s what preceded this that is significant: the female teen fetish went mainstream after feminism rose to challenge male predominance. It was in 1972 that the Equal Rights Amendment, requiring that females and males be treated equally by law, passed out of Congress. Feminists were hairy. Female body hair was a feminist badge—in arm pits, on legs, and particularly at the big V. It was the hairy girls, I recall, who were most likely to demand their pleasures. The feminist was not feminine. Just like Goya’s nude, she looked; she didn’t just want to be looked at. This eroticization of young girls recaptured the pure feminine, the subordinate, hairless virginal female against whom a man was clearly a man.
Feminism did something else as well: it sought to eliminate the sexual double standard, the public, pleasure-seeking man versus the private, love-seeking woman. It was now o.k. for a young woman to be heat-seeking flesh, looking for that spasmic flash. The young women who sought that kind of sex were in the vanguard of pubelessness. The Brazilian wax is part of that new erotic repertoire, a perpetual private reminder that you are always ready for action. “I’m so aware of down there now,” Carrie says in the episode of Sex and the City that brought it to the attention of tens of millions of young women in 2000. “I feel like I’m nothing but walking sex.” The waxed female body is a pure sexual body, its sex a public fact. Looking back you can see that it was not long after women showed their legs and their arm pits—with shorter skirts, nylons and the sleeveless dress—that these hair-coverings were shorn away. The same is now happening with the vagina. Even women who are about to deliver babies make emergency calls to their aestheticians to get waxes. “Everybody is going to be in that room,” one explained to her waxer, “and I don’t want to have any hair.” Pubic space is becoming public space.
For young women the removal of pubic hair becomes a painful rite, my daughter Hannah explains to me, a proud marker that you unashamedly own your sex, that you are ready, accessible, and you demand your own pleasure. It is an erotic sacrifice, not unlike young initiate warriors suspended with hooks in their shoulders. It is a display of badness, not only for the man who dares to get that far, but for other women in the gym or the shower room before whom you show you are willing to go to the limit, to endure a measure of pain for your pleasure, and are thereby owed a measure of awe by other women.
Because women could now forthrightly demand their pleasures—if he got his, she should get hers—they expected their sexual partners to grant them reciprocal oral favors. But there was a problem: American men tend to see the vagina as a smelly orifice, a medium for residues of urine and microbes. “Fishy” is the attribute I remember from the poker games in college. Recent surveys reveal the guys are unlikely to orally pleasure young women outside of a relationship. Some young men I talk to explain that they want their sexual partners to be shorn so they don’t get smells and urine traces on their faces, so that oral contact is more direct. In a society that has banished all human odors through washing, deodorants and cleansers, tooth pastes and mouth washes, it is no wonder that the smell of a woman has also been erased as a baseline experience. Hairlessness, like the vaginal mint, advertises that a vagina has been purified for male taste.
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