Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Give him pubes, or give him death!

Here's a very silly, but passionate, defense of full, luxurious pubes in this age of shaving. Actually, I have no first hand experience, but have seen enough nude women on French TV and movies to know that they don't seem to be shaving down there... over there. Ahem! Maybe I'm just old and out of touch at 31, but I just don't understand pubic clear-cutting at all. When did young people decide that there was something wrong with a woman looking like she'd been through puberty? And why exactly?

10 comments:

sock monkey said...

Panky’s pubic hair chronicle was an amusing read!

On a more serious note, your post launches me into a flurry of thought. Depending on the era and culture, history is laden with depilation. Being smooth is certainly not a contemporary fad. Hair has been depicted as a symbol of power, and lack of hair with innocence. Of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive.

My curiosity in the immediate is whether there is a link between the Brazilian wax and sexualizing innocence.

Rufus said...

You're right about the historical ideas on hair. This is why even Egyptian queens had to wear fake beards. What weirds me out about the defoliation isn't so much that women do it, but that it so quickly became obligatory. I'll listen to kids, or even people my age, talk about unshaven women like there's something wrong with them. At first, defoliation seemed like a kinky sexual choice. Now it seems like a pathological revulsion over adult female sexuality.

As for sexualizing innocence, it really is disturbing to look at old Jane Russell movies and compare them to the sex symbols of today. You go from the "knowing woman of the world who could teach a man a thing or two" to these borderline retarded teenage girls waiting to get nailed by their mental superiors. Even Marilyn Monroe's characters were geniuses compared to the average Britney Spears/ Lindsey Lohan/ Britney Murphey fantasy of today. Not only is innocence sexualized, but I think experience and wisdom are looked at as somehow asexual. For all of pop culture's miming of sex, it really is distressingly prudish.

SecondComingOfBast said...

As your friend Hiromi used to say, better watch out for those ingrowns.

sock monkey said...

Patrick:

I thought you might know the answer to this -

During the Burning Times, weren't women sometimes stripped naked and shaved? Was it for humiliation? To remove them of power?

Rufus said...

This was also done during the liberation of Paris- we're talking about head shaving, right? There it was to single out the collaborationists and also humiliate them.

Rufus said...

I think Hiromi's a non-believer on shaving too.

SecondComingOfBast said...

Rufus: She mainly just worried about ingrowns, if I remember right, though it's been awhile.

Sock Puppet: There were no "Burning Times", that's a myth. Most of the people burned at the stake in medieval times were not witches at all, in fact there's no evidence any of them were. Any time you hear a modern witch or pagan speak of the Burning Times, they are buying into a modern myth that they really were witches being burned, but it's just not true. They were mainly just innocent old senile women, or people with mental problems, and a whole lot of the time just people that made the wrong enemies.

Rufus said...

Actually, she also wrote an anti-shaving statement, which is as interesting as the one I linked to, although less comedic:

http://www.moronosphere.com/hiromi/2006/01/hairesy.php#comments

sock monkey said...

Patrick:

Admittedly, the last time I had any conversation of substance about the “Burning Times” was after watching the documentary for a Women’s Studies class many years ago. This said, you are the first person, Pagan or otherwise, to describe this as a myth. I’m most intrigued.

If you are ever inclined to blog on the subject, I’ll read it with interest. Alternatively, could you point me in the direction of relevant reading – books or websites?

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