Nature, including sexual nature, can be national. I have been working on the relation between love, erotics and religion among Italian and American university students for several years now. Although waxing kits are readily available, total depilation is rare among Italian women. Men don’t like it if there is not a tuft remaining on the mons. “They would not know where to go,” the Italian women joke. Likewise, hairless pre-pubescent girls are not a big segment of the Italian pornography market. Italian men, who are major consumers of porn, organize their alternative erotic reality around women, not girls. As a result, an Italian woman’s pubic hair tends to be shaped, not eliminated. This survival, I think, is related to the fact that Italians continue, much more than in the United States, to want and to have their sex with love. Young Italian men are romantic—more than their counterparts in America, and indeed even more romantic than Italian women.
For Italian men the smell of a vagina is something earthy. The vagina for them is a prize, a beautiful flower to be admired and won, not as in the United States, a term of disdain, a cunt. In Rome a vagina is una fica, a term deriving from the fig, a great thing, a delightful gift, a ribboned fruit. Among young Romans, the expression fica is a way to convey something extraordinarily good, akin to “cool.” They even make it into a superlative—fichissimo, meaning that something is the “cuntest” and very good indeed. Una fica is not only a sexually attractive woman, it is anything worthy of possession or experience. Imagine an American guy saying: “Wow, that is so vagina!” You can’t.
Reading a woman’s pubic hair is a tricky business. I think the disappearance of female pubic hair marks both a male disdain for a womanly body—its look, its smell, its very nature, but also a woman’s desire to look “clean,” the implication being that their natural bodies are “dirty.” Certainly microbes adhere to hair, but it is not really about hygiene. There’s soap and water, after all. It’s about becoming an instrument of pure pleasure, an active forgetting that one’s body is built to birth and to love. I have been studying student erotics for several years now and one thing is clear: young women who don’t love and don’t feel loved tend not to orgasm when they have sex. Hairlessness, which does not contribute to female pleasure, is entwined with the rise of the pornographic, with love’s erosion as a believable state of grace, with women’s uncomfortable capitulation to sex as a portal to fuller affection. It is a mark of female sexual availability to men on masculine terms, a regular rite of submission. It is conditioned by the fact that just as women are achieving academic predominance and breaking into field after field, the terms of trade are turning against them in the bedroom. Educated women must increasingly submit to the sexual demands of a shrinking pool of suitable men for whom the bedroom is one of the last domains outside of a football stadium where men can be men. And reciprocally for women, it is increasingly only their bodies that set them apart. Bodily hair masculinizes them, so hairlessness becomes a way to hold on to the feminine. Clean is acceptable code for pretty, like the smooth cheeks on their faces.
That women are going hairless is more than another grooming practice that might signal reproductive fitness. It means something. The question is what and to whom? Powerful vectors are at work in our underpants; unconsciously channeling our libido. The disappearance of pubic hair says something about the way we construct our humanness, how we compose our bodies and souls. The disappearing bush is a burning issue.
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