"Pubic hair elimination. It's a small but itchy area of contention. Last month's Elle magazine and this month's Vogue contained long, unruly articles, by Avril Mair and Rachel Johnson respectively, combing through the various strands of argument for and against total pubic purging. The hot topic for winter 2011 is clear: to bare, or not to bare one's labia?
In a sympathetic mirroring of the melting Arctic glaciers, the hair around our vaginas is fast disappearing, propelled by a force even greater than climate change: pornification. First it was a light quim-trim. Then a narrow snatch-strip. Then the full-on Brazilian, plucked pudenda, Christmas goose look. Now, technological advances mean that women will soon be able to permanently annihilate their entire chocha bush and surrounding strands, for ever. Yes ladies: laser flange is here.
Women can now expose their pipi to the breeze from now until the day they die. Great.
Why would they want to? If porn told you to jump off a cliff, would you do that too? Porn has introduced a new aesthetic – perhaps as a joke or momentary experiment – and women have responded with unquestioning servility and breezy abandon. At least now we can confront the naked truth about women's submissiveness in all its stark, raw, bald reality.
Men in porn are often also fully waxed. You can see the spring branches of their willies and their little bobbling balls, outlined in their scrota like farm eggs in a chammy cloth. But men in the non-porn world are not dedicating themselves to full deforestation, writing about it in major publications as though it's a serious consideration, or putting pressure on other men to do it. Men are not as cowed, self-hating, obedient or biddable as women in this regard. They are not going to make the effort to do anything to please a woman, at the cost of their own comfort. That is something I have always respected about men. They are busy pursuing their own happiness, leaving women to fight through the thicket of their own Stockholm syndrome, perpetually pruning their pubic hair in a desperate bid to gain approval.
Will a woman really do everything she can to meet every passing fad, even if it's uncomfortable, time-consuming, irritating, expensive, troubling, humiliating? And look at the reward: intercourse with a porn-adoring male who actually loathes women's real, naked, hairy bodies?
Are women so ashamed of their bodies' natural beauty, so unaccepting of things as they are that they will do anything at all, even if it's degrading, to get some willy time? A man who withholds his attention and affection according to the follicle count of a lady's crotch doesn't deserve intimacy with a real-life woman. A man who likes a woman without pubic hair despises adult women so much that he wants us to resemble children. He should stay at home instead in front of a computer, masturbating alone to the hair-free images he reveres.
I worry about these men too, of course, those poor poonani-policing body fascists. They are now in danger of returning to a Victorian naivety. They may well believe that, like the hairless, passive and benign feminine allegories of grand masters' paintings, women naturally do not have any body hair. Upon seeing some real hair on a real woman for the first time they may well vomit or faint, or both. That is something I'd like to see: a man so dizzied by the shortfall between reality and his own ignorance that his brain can't take it and he loses consciousness.
As for the women, don't you have anything more interesting to do than dutifully coif your cassoulet? I got "cassoulet" from The Joy of Sex, by the way. It means "general musky pussy area". Check out the original 70s hand-drawn illustrations. The couple are as hairy as anything, but they look like they're having a lot of fun, fur and all."
painting by Courbet
