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The Female Eunuch
The Bald Vulva read it all at Echidne here>>
Excerpt: It sounds like the national bird (of the US, that is), doesn't it? The Atlantic has an article about women shaving off all their pubic hair or getting Brazilian waxes down there or even having the pubic hair permanently zapped with laser treatment. I recommend reading the whole piece from the beginning to the end to note how the actual reasons for this trend are subsumed in all sorts of dead-end theories about why young women, quite suddenly as history goes, have decided that a bald vulva is a necessary fashion or health accessory. Nothing replaces that reading as an exercise in learning how smoke is blown into our eyes when it comes to political issues about women. And this IS a political issue. I'm not really blaming the writer who does do the necessary work of discussing the real reasons. But all the fluff around that real reason, about low-slung pants requiring the shaving of pubic hair (what about men?) to the age-old argument that women are smelly by nature are trotted out, and so is the idea that femininity means hairlessness (even if biology disagrees). ......(skiped important info) The reason, of course is in p*rnography (which so far isn't that interested in eyebrows). It became widely available, in forms which did not require a man to walk into a crummy shop to buy a magazine, about twenty years ago. We now may have a generation of heterosexual men who formed their first ideas about how naked women look by watching p*rn. And women in those depictions do not have pubic hair. This is so that one can see all the dangly bits and the jingly bits better, of course. Imagine such a man having first-time sex with a woman who actually has pubic hair! Might he not express shock or disgust at this horror? Might she not then feel that she, too, must shave her vulva bald? ...more |
posted by Greenconsciousness
at 10:29 AM - Link
2 Comments:
Heh heh (that's my bitter mirthless laugh ;-) - but I told DH way back when that while I had no problem w/shaving my bikini line, if he wanted less hair than that, he'd best not let the door hit him in the ass...
(back when we were working out all our why's & wherefores)
I truly do feel sorry for this generation of young women, faced w/overwhelming pressure for perfectionism like never before. Sheesh, I'd be anorgasmic for sure!
I responded to this post so strongly because a younger female friend was heard expressing outrage at the thought that some women do not shave -- how disgusting she said, how unsanitary -- she was so offended that i was reminded of Germaine Greer's book "The Female Eunuch" wherein she said that men wanted women to look like children (hairless) so the idea of dominance would arouse them. And the fashion industry dominated by homosexuals wanted women to look like young boys. I never shaved anything except I did electrolysis on my mustache. And the hair on my legs disappeared and the rest is soft and silky. I don't like hair on men's faces though. Too rough.
Val please go up to todays post "the most important thing" and write the white house or just pass on the message. It is so important. I know people who have been jailed for writing with chalk on the sidewalk outside a primate researcher's home. This is a fascist threat to democracy.
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