BUSHWHACKING SOUTH OF THE BORDER

THE LAST TIME I READ A PLAYBOY MAGAZINE, Jimmy Carter (who, by the way, would have known how to properly treat Saddam — he would have built him a new house) was the President of the United States. But hey, fuck the war and fuck the decline of the American presidency; what is of real significance here is the demise of pubic hair on American women. I had my first gape score at a centrefold in a lot of years and whoa and behold! Miss April got no hair down there!

I flipped to the other pictorials only to discover they all wore the same prepubescent vertical smile. I know these models have to be at least twenty-one to win a staple through their nipple from Hef, so how come most sport none, or very little, pubic hair? Even those who retain a thin wispy line have a mons veneris that looks more like a “Got Milk” commercial than the garden patch of a grown woman.

I have been in prison for too long, haven’t viewed erotica for even longer. I sense that something of great social and cultural import has passed me by. Where did all those dark and curly Bermuda triangles disappear to? And when? It’s like I fell asleep one night, and, in a reverse Rip Van Winkle, the whole continent got busy with the shaving cream. But an even more meaty question stared out at me from between the legs of this new fashion mode. Why?

Why, since I last looked, have pubic hairs, at least the public pubes, been clipped, cut, tonsured, trimmed, shaved, depilatoried, mowed, and mohawked? Perhaps G-string thongs and ittier-bittier bikini bottoms have moved women to narrow even further that thin middle line of modesty. But bikinis of all sizes have been around since Frankie danced with Annette and only a slight cropping was all that’s ever been needed to make a wedge suitable for the viewing audience. And when it comes down to the G-string, modesty is no longer even in the movie. So why have all the nether goatees been so ruthlessly and utterly hacked into nothingness?

It is only the nothingness that is new to me. Women I’ve known have always had a penchant for pruning. I once had a girlfriend who shaped hers into a heart for Valentine’s. I knew another who clipped her fiancée’s into a diamond on their engagement night, and then there was an all-girls band in the ’70s who contoured theirs into little guitars. But this modern vogue, this movement toward clear cutting, is a whole other slice of the honey pie.

Young women who like a clean line must, at least in part, inherit their crisp aesthetics from computer era imagery. Sort of a Laura Croft imitation. Or maybe it’s global warming. There are evolutionary raisons d’etre for body hair and one of them is warmth. Perhaps with the earth temperature rising there is just too much heat down there in the pearly kitchen. How then do we explain the bare labes of those northern girls, especially the ones living above the 49th parallel? Do their lips stick to the crossbar in sub-zero weather? Surely in a country where the national symbol is the beaver, the pelt is not going to become extinct?

In another evolutionary trick, hair south of the navel is there to trap pheromones in its tangled locks. Pheromones are those little dancing musk devils produced to attract the opposite sex — in the case of the female body, to lure the unsuspecting male of the species towards her cave. Perhaps women who shave are making a statement. They choose not to trap men with a beguiling scent, opting for a more open, more conscious and less subliminal means of attraction. If true, some would have to ask themselves hard questions about perfume.

Pubic hair also acts as the local police force: it’s there to serve and protect, to prevent friction and act as a buffer. But with the advent of the female jock strap, hair does present a feeble sort of protection. Some women may see it as simply obsolete.

Whatever all the different reasons women are trimming, there is one I know to be true. It is because their sexual partners prefer them that way. This is some cultural/generational preference I am not getting. Maybe my generation just didn’t convey our wishes.

Something else changed with the young and the restless. I didn’t grow up with Sex Ed classes being about AIDS and hepatitis and all the STDs. I didn’t learn in grade six that condoms were as necessary as looking both ways before you cross the street. What is there to say to a generation of young lovers that has been taught sex is death, that there is a deadly virus lurking behind every bush? Small wonder they are not looking for a mystery lair. They don’t want to peer through the undergrowth, nor their garden to be secret. They want a visible and clear shot at whatever they are getting into. Maybe it is the search for prepubescence itself because, at an even more subtle level, theirs is a generation that loses its innocence at a way too tender age.

After my initial shock and bewilderment at seeing Miss April with the southern isosceles of a ten-year-old, things have gone from bad to worse. I have since learned, while out in the compound talking about this phenomenon to a new generation of cons, that it is now common for young men to shave — and I’m not talking five o’clock shadows here. It’s some sort of buff image trip. I been in the weight pit off and on for over a century, and I believe if you aren’t bulked like Arnie or at least be flexing muscles in the professional ring then you got to be like fireman calendar gay to be waxing the hair off your body.

The boys in the gym have tried to convince me that clean shaven bodies are more attractive to the opposite sex, but I’m not even going there. Overly hirsute men are a turn-off for most of the women I’ve talked with, though I have heard of those with fetishes for thick back hair (they call these men “Bears”). Knowing that didn’t make me want to jump into a barrel of Rogaine and neither will I now go soak in a vat of depilatory cream, even though I believe this new body gloss is much more than a fetish or a passing craze.

The trend is hooked to something deeper, caught up in a culture that has been relentlessly exposed to the concept marketing of an ideal human body. We have been sold on buns of steel, six-pack abs, cosmetic implants, and total makeovers ad infinitum. The perfection of body image seems within our grasp and we have come to see the ideal as more real than our own.

In the age of sophisticated software, a perfect design can be achieved with the simple click of a mouse. But is it real? Or is it the same virtual perfection we are trying to click on to in our lives? What makes us human, what keeps our worlds real? It can be found in the imperfection of our bodies, in the imperfect way they move through this world.

Our bodies are made to be lived in, so celebrate your nicks and scars, adorn the skin with tattoos if you like, manicure your pubes to your heart’s content but always remember the rounded tummy or the small droop in the imperfect breast is the one with soul. If I were you, my little playboys and dixie chicks, I would guard my imagination — and most of my pubic hairs — against the onslaught of virtual beauty, because when the party is over and the morning light finds you alone in a spinning bed, afraid you might be flung off the edges of the earth, a thick swatch of hair might be all you have to hang on to.