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Outline For In-Class Talk On "Public Health, Patrician Status, and Pubic Hair"

Mon, 2008-03-03 17:34 — figleaf

Outline of in-class presentation on the history of pubic hair removal


Hey, I’ve never done an outline this detailed. Which should be obvious if you’ve read any of my posts. It was staggeringly hard for me, at least the first time, though I could see how over time it would be tremendously useful. Especially once it felt more natural. That said, despite quite a lot of preparation by the end of my actual talk I’d free-lanced a much stronger conclusion that more effectively tied the last section on class to the almost sudden turnaround of hairlessnes from a sign of sexual restraint to a sign of sexual expressiveness. Before I’d deliver the talk again I’d revise the outline to reflect the differences (oh yeah, and really clean up the bibliography!) but for now it really did serve it’s purpose.

Specific Purpose

After listening to my

speech my audience will introduce listeners to the history of pubic hair grooming as it relates to questions of hygiene, tradition, and modern body-image issues.

Thesis

“Brazilian" waxing and

other forms of pubic hair grooming have been practiced all through history and all around the world for all sorts of reasons. I will discuss some of those reasons, and their implications, as they relate to questions of hygiene, social conventions, and body-image issues.

Why do I care?

I first became interested

when I read an article for women about shaving their genitals and I was startled to see that except for location the steps, and the obstacles, were similar to those for shaving my face! A little bit of Googling turned revealed that body-hair grooming traditions were way more complex than I imagined.

Why You Should Care

The impact of body hair

grooming in general, and pubic hair grooming in particular have affected millions of women and, increasingly, men. Looking at the history of pubic hair grooming might help put the recent fashion trends into a broader context and, perhaps, give us more perspective when we choose to respond.

Introduction

  1. On Sept. 3, 1999, I read an article in Salon.com about a new fashion craze called Brazilian waxing.
    1. A. I’d heard of people occasionally trimming or removing their pubic hair for health reasons or if they were porn performers but Salon reported it as a new fashion.
    2. B. Only three years later a relative mentioned that more than 50% of her Women’s Clinic patients in rural, central Maine had begun practicing some form of partial or complete pubic hair removal.
  2. Since I grew up during an era when one of the biggest Broadway musicals, Hair, was about never cutting any of your hair, I’ve followed the radical reversal in fashion with interest, accumulating quite a lot of information on the topic.
  3. I thought if I shared some of what I’ve learned about the history and culture of pubic hair removal around the world it might help put our current fashion into perspective.
  4. “Brazilian" waxing and other forms of pubic hair grooming have been practiced all through history and all around the world for all sorts of reasons. I will discuss some of those reasons, and their implications, as they relate to questions of hygiene, social conventions, and body-image issues.

Transition:

Let’s take a look first at body hair removal through the centuries

Body

  1. Although shaving or waxing pubic hair hit America in the late 1990s it’s been around for years, but if it’s been around for years why haven’t we heard more about it?
    1. Nobody really talked much publically about sex until
      1. Masters & Johnson released their study in the late 1960
      2. David Reubin wrote “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex" in the early 1970s
      3. Alex Comfort’s “The Joy of Sex" became a best-seller in the early 70’s.
    2. Almost none of the books I scanned in the library on sex, feminism, fashion, or porn from 1975 to 1985 refer to pubic shaving or waxing.
    3. Those that do make only oblique references.
      1. “Joy of Sex" mentions it as a surprise variation.
      2. A book about “swingers" in the 1970s mentioned that some women with died hair shaved their pubic hair to hide that they weren’t “natural" blondes.
      3. Towards the end of the 1970s some books and articles began to wonder why porn stars had started to shave their pubic hair.

Transition: So if there is

little historical evidence of shaving for sexual or fashion reasons what information is in the historical record?

  1. Ancient History
    1. Historians say women in the middle east made a depilatory called rhumsa turcorum three to four thousand years ago.
    2. Egyptians and Greeks used bronze or obsidian razors, pumice stones, threading, and sugaring to make themselves look more “refined" and less “barbaric."
    3. The prophet Mohamed specified that observant Moslem men and women should remove all body hair below the neck at least once every 40 days.
    4. We know that merkins were used by both prostitutes and nobility to disguise pubic hair loss due to parasite management and the effects of syphilis remedies.
    5. American pioneers and settlers shaved their body hair to control lice and other body parasites.
      1. John Wayne’s funny swagger may have imitated pioneers with razor burn or stubble!
      2. Ma and Pa Wilder probably shaved when living in their Little House on the Prairie and their House At Plum Creek, because we know many of their contemporaries did.
    6. French authorities refused to extradite a pornographer back to England for publishing photos of models with pubic hair (shaved models were considered non-obscene.)
    7. Anecdote: During the toxic-shock syndrome scare some women friends trimmed their pubic hair to reduce sticking and pulling from menstrual pads.

Transition: Can we make

any guesses about where the transition from assumptions about pubic hair as a Victorian signifier of greater sexuality might have begun to change?

  1. Body hair became an early 20th Century signifier for class, race, sexual “excess," and gender.
    1. In 1914, after the first sleeveless and leg-baring gowns were introduced, ads promoting armpit and leg hair removal began appearing, but only in very high-end women’s magazines like Harper’s Bazaar.
    2. Largely white Anglo-Saxon protestant, upper class feminists criticized recent immigrants from Mediterranean regions for their immodest attire, use makeup, flamboyance, and “coarse" complexions.
    3. Ads for shaving products in middle-class magazines didn’t appear 20 years after appearing in Harper’s Bazaar.
    4. Marketers trying to introduce women’s shaving products into Latin American markets noticed that women of European descent were reluctant to remove leg and armpit hair for fear of looking more like lower-status Native American women who they perceived to be more naturally hairless.
    5. The “Two Sphere" gender model dictated opposing qualities for men and women.
      1. If men were seen as strong, women must be seen as weak.
      2. If women were seen as nurturing, men must be seen as remote.
      3. If men were seen as hairy, mature sexual animals, women must be seen as hairless, sexless “pre-pubescent" angels.
  2. Not until the end of the 20th Century did removal of pubic hair begin to signify higher rather than lower sexualization.

Conclusion

Pubic hair removal was

present and common long before Americans became aware of it through sources such as Salon.com, Cosmopolitan magazine, and Sex and the City. In fact it was, and in much of the rest of the world still is, practiced for a variety of reasons including religion, hygiene, tradition, and status. Understanding this we may be able to assess contemporary media, marketing, and peer pressure to groom or remove pubic hair.

Bibliography:

Mon, 2008-03-03 20:30 — 1988 (not verified) #permalink

I’m totally with you, ks – for all the reasons you give.

Figleaf, I’m impressed with the level of detail. It’s downright Teutonic. I’ve always been sloppy about outlines, and I should work on that in hopes of stemming my tendency to write mini-dissertations. Which gets worse when my partner is traveling non-stop and I’m alone at home with a little time on my hands …

I’m glad you mentioned that the talk was meant to be informative, because your thesis statement wasn’t really a thesis (in the usual sense of being a point you develop and support with evidence – you actually do explain your thesis very nicely in comments above). So now you’ll be spared my stern-but-sexy instructor act.

Of course, you’re still welcome to drop in to my office hours. And since you’re not actually my student, the options are unlimited for role playing and tutoring and rehearsing your talk with, um, hands-on demonstrations.

[Agreed on the different definition of “thesis” but at least in this system it’s still very formally defined. The whole shebang, by the way, is based on a highly structured format. For instance everything before “Introduction” is unspoken and used to lay foundations for the actual talk, and to be honest in order to deliver the talk at all I had to go back and do what I’d call a “real” outline — terse keywords and transition points — so I wouldn’t just read the flipping thing off the page. Also, drop-in conferences? Hmmmm…. Yeah, I’d never do that with a current instructor but, also yeah, role playing at a whole ‘nother campus? I could see that! Thanks, Sungold! —fl]

Tue, 2008-03-04 14:36 — 1988 (not verified) #permalink

I was going to mention the John Ruskin story, but when I tried to find out more about it, it turned out it may be an urban legend. Great job, Figleaf, you’ve already made me smarter!

But eek, somebody waxes their eyebrows?! Don’t they know that when you pull out a hair, you might harm its roots so badly that it won’t grow back?

[Actually I just forgot about the Ruskin story. And yes, while the story might be an urban legend it might have been useful anyway given that his contemporaries believed it about Victorians in general and Ruskin in particular that it passed into legend in the first place. And yes, lots of people find out too late that repeated eyebrow pulling damages follacles. Although on the other side lots of advocates of body-hair waxing offer diminished hair regrowth as a long-term bonus. Thanks, Larus. —fl]

Wed, 2008-03-05 13:02 — 1988 (not verified) #permalink

Shirley Manson of the rock/electronica group “Garbage” did exactly that, and as you say, they didn’t grow back. When she appears in photo shoots now, her eyebrows are drawn on with a make up pencil.

Thu, 2008-03-06 15:02 — 1988 (not verified) #permalink

Hey Figleaf, this is why I will never get waxed…http://monkeyinasuit.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/the-agony-and-the-agony/.
Ouch oh fucking ouch. I am not brave enough. My husband sometimes trims my pubes with an electric razor, which is fun. I would shave for him if he asked me to. We all do things to make ourselves attractive to our partners and that’s all good.

[Hi Mag. According to my research less than 3% of the population waxes so as far as that goes you’re in great company. I’ve considered trying it but they say it would rip the skin off my face! Yikes! —fl]

Mon, 2008-03-03 18:18 — 1988 (not verified) #permalink

I was aware that in some places and times it was done to avoid lice and similar parasites. But for me, personally, I don’t care what reasons other people do or don’t do it. I shave my pubic and body hair because if I don’t, it itches when I’m wearing clothing. (Growing it out doesn’t help; in fact, it took me years to figure out that shaving was a solution to the problem.) Since it’s illegal to be naked it public, and I really would rather not tolerate that kind of discomfort for long periods, what other option do I have?

[Good point, of course, Nightfall. My talk didn’t go any further because it was just supposed to be informative rather than persuasive (harder than it looks!) If it had been meant to be persuasive I’d have done an inquiry into why our sense is that — whatever came before — the tendency not to groom during the 1960s and 1970s was also a fashion decision, that the period between the 1980s and 1990s had interesting social transformations relating to the “hidden discourse of desire” meme we’ve discussed a lot in class, and then the branching out of great new reasons both for and against for doing whatever the heck pleases us. So totally, more power to you, more power to me, anyone who says there’s a “right way” to do it is trying to dictated their fashion sense to you. —fl]

Mon, 2008-03-03 19:20 — 1988 (not verified) #permalink

That looks like it was an interesting talk.

My own personal reasons for keeping mine trimmed very short (shaving irritates my skin and waxing is just painful) are purely sexual. It just feels better to me with less hair in those areas, plus it’s easier access.

[It really does, doesn’t it? I mean, when I’ve had beards and then shaved them off it’s like… this whole new world of sensation on my face, and not just someone else’s face but even sunshine and summer breezes are heavenly on my newly bare skin. And, I might add, on the few occasions I’ve trimmed or shaved my pubic hair it’s been the same way there too. So yeah, once you cross the barrier to discussing desire all sorts of things become permissible to own for ourselves. Thanks, ks. —fl]

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