Posted by figleaf
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Sat, 2009-07-04 23:25
Seriously, about this recurring pubescent/pre-pubescent meme about pubic hair and shaving: with or pubic without hair both men’s and women’s genitals look as different from children’s as men’s faces do with or without beards.
There are plenty of perfectly good reasons not to shave or trim but the “pre-pubescent” thing says more about denial and unfamiliarity with grownup bodies than anything else.
For instance (since they’re frequently photographed together) Google around for images of George Clooney and Brad Pitt and tell me that a) Clooney looks immature without a beard and b) Pitt looks mature with one. It’s the same with people’s genitals.
Submitted by 3047 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-07-05 06:29.
I suppose we've come to that assumption because in the U.S., women are told to shave everything. Shave your pits, shave your legs, hair anywhere on a woman is gross.
So, because only women have been told to shave/pluck all body hair below the scalp - but yay! we get to keep our eyebrows! if well-groomed of course - yes, it's deduced that it's some crude method of keeping the woman down.
Being told to shave your pubes is just an extension of that "women's hair is gross and must be removed" rubric. (Men receive the 'shave your pubes' message much, much less often than women do. For men, it's an option; for young women in particular, it's a requirement.)
Which, translated, is meant to keep women in a lower-ranking state, and since no hair is closely associated with pre-pubescence, which is also a lower-ranking state on the maturity level, pre-pubescent is a handy descriptor.
Submitted by 3047 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-07-05 08:05.
I can't say if this is a central issue, but you might also bear in mind that when it is women who are saying that, what women's view of female genitalia most frequently is. In other words, it's from the top down, without seeing much more than the mons and outer labia. Most women aren't sitting legs spread in front of a mirror daily.
And from THAT view, indeed, when there's no pubic hair, it doesn't look that dissimilar.
I also think Lynn had some valuable things to say in her comments.
And btw? I do think Clooney looks more youthful than Pitt in that photo, despite being older, and that the facial hair differences probably are at least part of why. The soft-focus probably helps, too. :P
Submitted by 3047 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-07-05 12:16.
The cliches and jokes about hairy- lesbians/spinsters/peasants/foreigners/werewolves tells you a lot about the shaving issue. Body hair is as much a class and racism issue as it is gender and sexuality.
Fashions of shaving or not and what areas are an extension of tribalism and identifying us against them. The prepubescent bit is a red herring.
Submitted by 3047 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-07-05 13:33.
I think it's an age-dependent thing. As in, a 18-yr-old boy who grows a beard will look MUCH older. But a 30-yr-old who does won't change their apparent age much. An 18-yr-old girl who shaved her pussy might manage to look 13. But a 30-year-old is just going to look like a 30-year-old with a shaved pussy.
Submitted by 3047 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-07-05 14:35.
I don't think you can discuss this topic meaningfully without ever mentioning the "barely legal" porn, which is far more than just a minor niche. And you don't. You've written numerous posts on shaving, and as far as I recall, they're always radically decontextualized from pornography and the pressures on young women.
Nor does it make sense to treat shaving as if both genders are viewed symmetrically. They aren't. Men are rarely told that no one will want to lick their lollipop if they don't depilate it first.
A shaved pussy doesn't need to look "pre-pubescent" to bear a lot of loaded meanings and power imbalances related to gender and age. Nor do cunts mean the same thing as chins, symbolically and culturally.
Finally, having slickly naked genitals is wonderful and all - until the hair begins to regrow, and ingrow, and itch. As far as I can see, this is an issue even for porn stars. If someone has a real solution, I'd love to hear it! (Heather said this better on the other post - she rocks, as always.)
This will become a purely libertarian playground the day that both men and women are equally encouraged to shave their genitals, and equally free from shame if they don't. In the meantime, trimming would seem to offer many of the benefits of shaving with little of the drawbacks.
[Hi Sungold. My experience with regrowing hair after shaving, both with my face and when I experimentally shaved my pubic hair a few years back, is that itching is unavoidable to the point where, once you're used to shaving, it's just easier to continue shaving than it is to let it grow. The trick, if you want to call it that, is that after about 7-10 days the itching stops and you're home free. I think it might be nice to publicize that part because I think a lot of people perceive itching as something "wrong" instead of just par for the course. As for the "Barely Legal" thing, maybe I'm just old but my recollections from such websites earlier in the 1990s is that "barely legal" didn't mean "no pubic hair yet." And finally, I think the "libertarian playground" would be one where people can make whatever grooming choices they wished without peer- or partner pressure or societal shaming *regardless* of choice. Not that I'm optimistic about libertarianism in general either. In theory. In practice though men and women can style our scalp hair anyway we want but... we still end up subject to enormous peer- and social pressure to conform to various styles. Since I've always thought that was a shame. (Farah Faucett's mullet didn't look good on everybody in the 1970s, Ollie North-style crew-cuts looked awful on many of *his* imitators in the 1980s, etc.) Anyway, when I take issue with the prepubescent argument in particular, or the shaving debate in general, I'm not, at all, saying I think anyone or everyone should do it. Or shouldn't. I don't even think it's a bad debate to have. I just think some of the common tropes of the debate are get in the way of much deeper ones. (To name one: *my* take is that the pubic hair thing is a very natural, very internally-logical extension of men's, and women's, decades old, pre-mainstream-porn, pre-prepubescence-debate disapproval of women's leg and armpit hair. Case in point: "Hairy Legged Feminists with braided armpit hair" *definitely* coincided with the 60's and 70's era fetish for *more* pubic hair on women. Therefore I think it would be very productive to address the problem as an extension of the HLF meme instead of trying to correlate pubic hair and porn. In other words porn grooming is only a *symptom,* not an underlying cause.) Thanks. --fl]
Submitted by 3047 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-07-05 16:04.
I don't know, I've shaved basically since I started growing pubic hair, and I've never noticed that it itches or is in any way uncomfortable--but that's just my personal experience. And I get the impression that figleaf is talking about a specific aspect of the shaving/no shaving argument--that an adult woman's pussy looks just like a little girl's if it's not hairy. Which, no. It doesn't. And if you're just talking about power structures and using children as a handy comparison, that's fine, but I get the impression that a lot of the people who say that mean it literally.
I think there's a lot to the argument that the cultural expectation to shave is about an extremely narrow definition of what constitutes 'acceptable' in terms of the female body. It is a loaded issue, because men aren't subject to the same expectations--and I don't think this post is suggesting that they are. It's just that as Adela said, the prepubescent thing is a red herring, a way of confusing the issue.
Submitted by 3047 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-07-07 05:01.
I don't mean that all "barely legal" porn necessarily features hairless genitalia; I haven't looked at enough of it, myself, to be able to make statements about what it does or doesn't do. What I mean instead is that much of porn is focused on the youth of girls/women - not just that particular but rather large niche - and so I think there's a symbolic element to hairlessness. Heather also pointed out, correctly I think, that hair removal might not make one look prepubescent but it often, um, shaves a few years off of a person. The longer history of pressure on women to remove leg and armpit hair might also be part and parcel of the imperative to look as young as possible.
As for 1970s hair fashions, I don't remember ever hearing that a luxuriant bush was considered superior! At any rate, the demand *not* to shave (legs and armpits) was confined to countercultures - hippies and feminists - and served as a marker of politics and values.
Today, though, there's really only one norm, and that's where porn matters, because it doesn't just reflect the change in standards, it perpetuates and enforces them. Even if a young woman hasn't seen much porn, it's likely that her partner has.
I really appreciated your follow-up post, where you name some of the other issues here - that's the context that was missing up to now. So thanks.
Submitted by 3047 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-07-07 18:58.
Not to be obtuse, but could you explain specifically how an adult's vulva looks different from a child's? I'm a woman and when I have shaved it does look to me a lot like it looked when I was a little girl.
[Hi Jessica. Oh, and there's the really, seriously obvious matter of size -- adults are just *bigger* than children. There's also seriously contextual stuff like adult vulvas appear on *adult bodies!* Adults have all the usual secondary characteristics like different leg proportions, different hip and waist sizes, breasts, butts, faces, shoulders, body language, smells, textures, tastes... And I know, I know, at this point most people are thinking "no, can you tell the difference in isolation, detached from anything else about the individual -- say in a close-up photo or through a keyhole, or while surgically draped from a distance where you can't tell size, proportion, or anything else?" And while I'm not sure that actually ever occurs and if it did I'm not sure it would even count as a sexual context yes, you *still can.* At the superficial level you can tell the same way you can tell a shaven man's face from a child's: even with the most boyish-looking men the geometry, the muscles, and fat distribution are different under the skin, and the teeth, mouth, lips, nose, complexion, etc. are *very* hard to mistake for children's. In grown women the inner labia are thicker and more pronounced as is the clitoris and clitoral hood. The mons is more pronounced and (not sure how else to say it) more integrated into the rest of the pelvis (in the sense that genitals often begin to grow sooner than the rest of the body.) It's like you can tell children's feet from grownups, children's ears from grownups, children's hands or eyes or noses from grownups. The point being that grownups, with or without hair look different *all over* from children. And while we might not be *familiar* with the differences it's got a lot more to do with, well, *familiarity* than actual differences. But if the only way one can tell is by the amount of hair then one just doesn't have a lot of experience. Hope that makes sense. --fl]