REMEMBERING PUBIC HAIR

REMEMBERING PUBIC HAIR

Okay, call me old-fashioned, but I still like pubic hair. Internet porn sites now present several choices—completely shaved, vertical landing strips that look like exclamation points, heart shaped, the Charlie Chaplin with just a little patch above the clitoris, and a tiny triangle that serves as an arrow pointing to the clit—yet, for pubic follicles one has to search the Web for “hairy” sites that are considered as “specialty,” “kinky” or “fetish.”

Retired porn stars have commented on this phenomenon. Gina Rome, retired after six years, shaved every day. “It was part of getting ready for work.” When she switched from acting to film editing, she stopped shaving and let her pubic hair grow out. “Shaving was work. I don’t have to do it any more, so I don’t.” And Kelly Nichols says, “I was a Penthouse model in the early 1980s, and I posed with a full bush. No one in adult entertainment shaved back then. Now everybody does.”

Although Martha Stewart is back on TV, you can be sure that she’ll never give any suggestions on what to do about those big red razor bumps that result from shaving your vagina, so here’s a helpful hint I’d like to pass along—they can be largely eliminated with, of all things, Visine eye drops.

The porn industry has played an important part in shaping pubic styles. Jordan Stein writes in an article titled “Has Porn Gone Mainstream?”: “Consider the near icon status the female pom star has achieved. She is so mainstream that even good girls are imitating her various styles of undress, disappearing hair and all. Pom chic? You bet.”

However, Julia Baird writes in Celebrity Porn: “The idea that the fashion industry can strip, then exhibit women in the name of ‘porn chic’ is a bit silly, frankly. But, ‘flesh is the new fabric’ could be the new catchcry. Americans call their bush George W. It’s fashionable—the curious fact is that it is fueled by the pom aesthetic that celebrities love to love.”

Among Hollywood actresses, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kirstie Alley have both admitted favoring Brazilian wax jobs, where most of their pubic hair is removed, leaving a small tuft that remains hidden under a thong bikini. Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw, had her pubic hair removed during the third season of Sex and the City. Presumably, it’s now in the Smithsonian museum along with Archie Bunker’s chair and the Fonz’s jacket.

On ABC’s Women’s Murder Club, a medical examiner directs her gaze to the crotch of a female corpse and says, “That’s not your mama’s bikini wax.” On The View, Joy Behar said, “No pubic hair creates a wind tunnel.” And in a hysterical episode of HBO’s dark comedy series, Curb Your Enthusiasm,, former Seinfeld producer Larry David performed oral sex on his wife, and in the process he sort of swallowed one of her pubic hairs. The next day, he was still choking on it, like a cat trying to get rid of a hairball.

A psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, Nancy Etcoff, writes that “There’s also an erotic, sexual component to hairlessness because your skin is more sensitive when it’s more exposed. Women today are emulating porn stars who have no pubic hair, and I think men like it.”

My own resistance to the plethora of bald pussies stems from my preadolescent days when pubic hair was such a big taboo that I became obsessed with it. In those pre-bikini days, I would go to Coney Island and stroll around the sand, sneaking glances at ladies in the hope of finding a few stray curlicues of forbidden pubic hair peeking out from their various and sun-dried crotches. And if I was able to discover any, why, it felt as though I had experienced a really productive afternoon.

Betty Dodson, sex educator and producer of Viva La Vulva, says, “I think we have changing ideas about what’s public and what’s private. And now that nudity is more public—nude beaches, routine nudity in film, and the enormous amount of exhibitionism and porn on the Web—I’m not surprised to see a trend toward pubic shaving. I think it’s probably here to stay.”

As for men, California Governor and former actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was only joking when he announced that he was going to get a bikini wax, but actually, Beverly Hills skin care and waxing expert Nance Mitchell has about fifty regular male customers that come for pubic waxing who “are not gay and they are not porn stars. Some go totally bare, some just do the shaft and up around the pelvic area.” She explains that “It depends on what their wives and girlfriends want. Men go along because removing the hair makes the whole package look bigger.”

Yes, the illusion of size does matter.