Our foremothers were happily hairy, but depilation is the battle feminism
lost, writes Mimi Spencer.
What is it, do you suppose, that marks out us modern women from our
19th-century sisters, trussed up in their bodices and Sunday bonnets? You
may respond that we have the vote, or perhaps equal rights and pay. Yet you
would probably overlook a key difference between us: that we 21st-century
women spend a hellish amount of time, money and effort on depilation. And
they? They walked the planet with unmown shins and bushy armpits, a
stranger to their husbands' cut-throat razors.
I know this because the producers of the recent British TV adaptation of
Sons and Lovers took such pains to achieve period authenticity that
actresses were forbidden to remove any body hair in preparation for their
roles. Apparently, women simply didn't depilate in late-Victorian England.
In one hour alone of Sons and Lovers, there were nine explicit sex scenes
involving full-frontal nudity - and all of it filmed without recourse to
hair remover. If this sends a shudder down your spine, you're not alone.
After all, it has somehow become the accepted wisdom that women should be
bald from the forehead down, save for a mild eruption at pubic level - and
only then if it's kept as trim as a well-groomed box hedge.
The problem is, that's not how we are built. Whisper it softly, but most of
us have bristling knees, armpits and shins. Some of us have moustaches. You
wouldn't know it, though, for we spend great amounts of time perpetuating
the myth that we're as smooth as eggs. And why?
You might hate the bitter truth, but it has everything to do with the fact
that men prefer us that way. And if that's the case, surely this is
something we should have overcome by now - in the same way that we have
ditched eyelash-fluttering, corsetry and bustles.
While women have won many battles since D.H. Lawrence penned his opus,
depilation is the battle that feminism lost.
Perversely, the most up-to-date methods of depilation are the most
torturous, involving the kind of pain once lavished on the village witch.
Chief among these is the Brazilian bikini wax, which was surely developed
in Hades, but (get this) has actually received a good press from the
world's ditzy beauty editors.
So why do we do it? In her study on the relationship between a woman's
politics and sexual orientation and the shaving of her legs and underarms,
Dr Susan Basow, professor of psychology at Pennsylvania's Lafayette
College, found that the majority of women who did not shave their legs
identified as "very strong feminists and/or as not exclusively
heterosexual", and the major reason they did not shave was for political
reasons.
Great. If you don't depilate, you're either a man or a dyke. It's yet
another branch of beauty's pernicious directive to conform.
So, instead of letting it all hang out, we're trapped in an endless,
Sisyphean cycle of tweezing, waxing and plucking in some vain attempt to
quell the beast within.
But perhaps it's time to break the stranglehold that our hair has on our
lives. Cardinal rules - such as the classic "once shaven, always stubbly" -
could be taught in school, alongside how to fit a condom on a banana and
how to make pastry using the rubbing-in method. Or perhaps coming out would
work. They could do a Sex and the City special and make body hair hot.
If we were all to let it grow rife, I'm convinced we would soon find that
hair in all the usual places isn't quite such a turn-off after all.
Remember the German rock star Nena - noted for her 99 Red Balloons and her
rude gush of underarm undergrowth?
The hair - luxuriant and ape-like, as I recall - carried a hint of the
erotic, a sort of Euro-exotica that gave her the appeal of an up-for-it
she-wolf. At the time, boys loved it. Give us more Nenas, more of Julia
Roberts's armpit fur, more European tennis champs. Put it on the cover of
Vogue.
After all, it is incredible that the subject is still taboo. We freely
discuss anal sex, female sexual dysfunction, pedophilia and boob jobs. But
body hair in the wrong place is still off limits. Isn't it time to come
clean? Isn't it time to ditch the depilation, storm the shelves of
chemists, burn the bleach and spike the tweezers? Of course it is. But hey,
sister, you first.
The Guardian
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/27/1043534000743.html
