Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

In comments to my previous post about pubic hair and prepubescence Heather Corinna said “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.”

Doh! My apologies for any accusations about denial.

If the way you usually look at yourself then I can see how it might look a lot more similar than it would to one’s partner. But the usual assertion is that men want women to remove pubic hair so they’ll look prepubescent. In which case literally from men’s point of view it doesn’t really work that way.

That doesn’t mean men don’t make entirely unreasonable, oppressive, squeamish, or juvenile demands on their partners. And so neither does it mean that women should reflexively comply with either requests or, especially, demands from partners or to peer pressure (to shave or to not shave or, really, anything) from anyone else.

Instead its just that time spent imagining that men want women to look prepubescent is time spent not critically deconstructing the demand as, say,

• feeding men’s voyeurism or visual oppression
• adding yet another area for exacting beauty-standard conformity, assumptions that hair=male with its attendant overtones of intrinsic homophobia
• perpetuation of a two-sphere or yin/yang model of gender in which anything men are women can’t be or anything women are men can’t be
• standard demands for ever more default service and submission
• exploitation of women’s indoctrinated anxiety about appearance

• a manifestation of all those notions of uncleanliness

Oh, and of course,

• the relentless and obsessive, sexuality-alienating sexualization of women’s bodies, period…

• in a way that no amount of political, sartorial, military, or employer pressure on men to shave our faces will ever really compare to.

All such analysis, though, tends to go by the wayside if people just toss up the prepubescence argument anytime the question arises. And since all of the preceding is stuff that men need to confront, and since the prepubescent thing is maybe the single reason that isn’t why men might expect or demand hair removal I think it’s counterproductive and not just mistaken to repeat it.