If you are
a habitual reader of The Independent, you would not have
failed to notice the raging debate that spread like bushfire last month. It was
triggered by a book published by that intellectual giant, Cameron Diaz (not
just a pretty face, I’d request you to keep in mind), which, sadly, I have not
yet got round to read.
In the book
Diaz devoted a whole chapter, imaginatively titled “Praise of the Pubes”, waxing
lyrical about pubic hair. Diaz likes them. She grows (presumably) lots of them,
these days. Pubic hairs are natural, Diaz would like to inform the world. Not
wanting pubic hair is like—Diaz told a girlie magazine—not needing your nose. “Don’t
wazzle your vajayjay,” urges Ms Diaz (may be not in these exact words).
There are
many who might not like their noses; and have the option of going under the
knife to have it the way they want, for a price that would put many in the mind
of a second mortgage. You can change the size and shape of your breasts, ass,
thighs, lips, tummy, and penis. I can’t think of a body part that you can’t get
upgraded these days, if you have the desire and the financial resources.
Getting rid of unwanted pubes is, by comparison, cheaper. Also, is it really
fair to compare your pubic hair to your nose (to the nose or to pubes)? Most of
us would agree that we do need our noses; a nose serves a function most will
have no trouble appreciating. No one in his right mind, I will put it to you,
will say that they don’t need their nose.
But pubic
hairs? What purpose do they serve other than making your nether regions look
like my back garden which has not been tended for months? Apparently they serve
important medical functions. (I am full of admiration for the doctors. There is
nothing out there that does not have some medicinal value. I read a report in
the BBC sometime back that some research has shown that if you drank four cups
of coffee every day you were less likely to kill yourself than those who were
coffee-free. But four, apparently, is the magic number: you drink the fifth cup
and all the benefits are lost.) Some doctors are claiming that shaving your vaginas
will put you at a higher risk of developing infections from bacteria the names
of which I can’t spell but which sound scary. Shaving your pudenda also makes
the skin sore and itchy, the doctors say. Having a bald pussy makes you more
prone to herpes, some doctors are warning. (Can’t these problems be avoided by
using less blunted razor, and good personal hygiene?) A hairy bush is like
armour which will protect you against these disgusting, if not deadly,
diseases, though not, it goes without saying, against STD. (It may however serve
as a very effective contraceptive.) (I am going to be blunt here: the subject
of pubic hair seems to exercise women more than men; or, to be precise, Western
women; or, to be even more precise, a large section of Western women; or—I
can’t be more precise than this—those women who think the subject is important
enough to write newspaper articles on it. Always nice to know that while the
world might be facing many problems some women have more pressing and important
matters, such as whether or not their girly bits be draped or not by the fur
curtain, to write about; and there I was worrying whether I’d be able to pay
the mortgage if the Bank of England increases the interest rates.)
Are there
any disadvantages of a hairy fanny other than running the risk of catching your
curlies in the zipper of your jeans? Sloppy personal hygiene will leave your
pudenda with an immigration problem worse than that in the worst nightmare of
the most rabidly xenophobic Tory working himself into a frenzy over Eastern
Europeans; and the lice will face the more overcrowding than on London’s
underground.
Do pubic
hairs serve sexual function? That, as my philosophy tutor was fond of saying
whenever I asked him any question, depends.
Does a bush
make you sexually attractive? That (again) depends. It depends on what your
partner finds sexually appealing. If you have what the feminist Naomi Wolf describes in her book Vagina: A Biography, a heterosexual
vagina and the sight of an overgrown patch of briars and brambles gets your
partner’s juices flowing, then I’d say go for it. Let those curlies and twirls creep
out of your knickers. If, on the other
hand, he does not have a taste for a hairy pie, you’d better do all that is
necessary to wake him in the morning with a vertical smile.
Are there
any non-sexual pleasures to be had from a bouffant down there? Apparently there
are, as Caitlin Moran, a popular British newspaper columnist (and, of course, a
feminist), reveals in her book How to be A Woman. Say you are lying
down in a hammock on a sunny day, staring at the trees and the birds, thinking
of what dress to wear for this evening party. Totally chilled out. What can
enhance your pleasure? Why, a hairy fanny of course. What can you do with a
hairy fanny? You can fingercomb it (Ms Moran informs). Fingercombing your fanny
is one of the many pleasures of adulthood; ask Ms Moran if you don’t want to
take my word for it. It goes without saying that Ms Moran disapproves heartily
of the practice of robbing your crotch of its natural treasure.
The
unspoken subject, the unasked question, the elephant (or the rhinoceros,
according to the original German saying), in the esteemed opinion of Felicity Morse who was moved to write an article on the subject in the Independent, is of
oral sex. I was saddened (but not surprised) to learn that men are wholly to be
blamed. Apparently there are many men out there who don’t want their
girlfriends or partners to wear a generous bush. A Brazilian landing strip is
as far as they are willing to go. Sea weed is fine when it is crispy and on a
plate and when you are in restaurant Hong Kong, but you don’t want it stuck in
your teeth when you are licking the sweat off the old meat-curtains. This is
clearly unacceptable, Ms Morse says. Your partner must find you sexually
attractive as you naturally are; and if he doesn’t and is putting unacceptable
conditions before he would consent to taste your bacon sandwich, you’d better
evaluate your relationship, is Ms Morse’s (rather drastic) advice. Now, at the
risk of sounding like a chartered accountant who sees the world as consisting
in its entirety of detailed negotiations—pro versus cons, loss versus profit .
. . those sorts of things—, I’d say that if you are prepared to end a relationship
over this issue, probably something more is going on in the relationship than
your partner’s refusal to get excited in the trouser department unless you
remove your beetle’s bonnet. Also, supposing you do consider this matter
important enough on its own to end a relationship, how would you ensure that
you don’t make the same mistake of meeting another man of similar (perverted)
persuasions? How do you find out that he is not going to start retching at the
sight of your muff? How would you ask him to clarify his position—so to
speak—on this subject before you lower your knickers? A bit awkward, I’d have
thought.
I have to
say that quite a few women whom I had the good fortune to know closely over the
years, and who never struck me as enslaved by men, refused to sport a generous
bush on aesthetic grounds. Some years ago I ran into my immediate line
manager in the company I was working for at the time. This was a woman—let’s
call her Cathy (they are always Cathys or Hazels or Joans)—was abnormally thin—the
type, if I remember correctly, described in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of Vanities
as a bottomless pit—with a flat face and
a disproportionately larger bust. Cathy was not known in the company for her
sparkling wit or easy manner, although, to be fair to her, neither was she
malicious. She was, in fact, a bit peculiar. She had odd social manners. She never looked you in the eyes while speaking to you, focusing instead on a
point behind you at a lateral angle. She also had the habit of jigging to and
fro on the balls of her feet like a Morris dancer with haemorrhoids. She was
not given to expressing emotions: you could have set her eyebrows on fire and
she wouldn’t have blinked an eyelid. To the best of our knowledge Cathy was
single and prurient male colleagues would fill the lunch hour with ribald
speculations about her sex life, which, the consensus was, amounted to her
right hand. It would be fair to say that Cathy was not made for sex. (In my
opinion Cathy was not secure about her body and—moved by the spirit of
improving her self-esteem—I had thought of complimenting her on her watermelon
breasts; but such things are more to be felt than said.) Anyway, when I crossed
Cathy in the street, my then girlfriend, who was with me, screeched, as soon as
we were out of earshot, “Oh my god! How do you know that woman?” “She is my
line manager. How do you know her?” It then turned out that Cathy went to the
same gym my ex-girlfriend went to. In the women’s changing room, the
ex-girlfriend told me, Cathy would take all her clothes off and roam around
stark naked, showing no urgency whatsoever to put on the gym clothes. The other
women had taken to calling Cathy as “scary naked lady” or “mad naked lady”.
“Why scary?” I asked. “Oh my god!” the ex-girlfriend screeched (she was
inclined to invoke the lord’s name in vain), “you should see her bush!” I
informed the ex-girlfriend that the chances of my eyes alighting on Cathy’s
privates were less than slim. “Oh my god! The woman has probably never shaved
in her life. Wild animals are roaming in the jungle down there.” The hair
began, the ex-girlfriend—determined to spare no details—said, just below Cathy’s
naval and progressed, in ever increasing concentric circle, to the point where the
burgeoning line merged, like a river, into the Sargasso Sea on her mound. From
there the hair invaded her inner thighs. “It is like a terrier has landed
between her thighs,” the ex-girlfriend took recourse to metaphor to further
illustrate her point. Words failed—she told me (despite the obvious evidence to
the contrary)—to describe the horror of Cathy’s hairy fanny. “Why?” the
ex-girlfriend asked plaintively, “Why would anyone do this to themselves?” I
had to remind her that Cathy’s only crime was to let her pubes grow
unrestrained. “Ugh! It’s disgusting. And why does she have to parade it? One
look at it will make you bring up your dinner.” Needless to say that the ex-girlfriend
was the type who waxed her fanny to within an inch of its life, wore half a
kilogram of make-up, worried all the time that her ass looked fat in her jeans
(it did), and (I suspect now) probably faked orgasms.
But surely,
I hear you thinking, whether to have your nether region bald as Andre Agassi’shead or hairy as Brian Blessed’s face is a personal choice. I agree. It is no
one’s business but yours, or, if you are inclined to include another person in
the debate, your boyfriend’s. But, apparently, I am wrong. It is a feminist
issue. Why is it a feminist issue? According to Caitlin Moran, as she helpfully
elucidates in How to be A Woman, it is a feminist issue because modern women
are brainwashed into believing that a shaved crotch would make them look more attractive
and more feminine. In other words, if I have fully comprehended Ms Moran’s
logic (which I might not have), the decision of the modern woman to shave her fanny
is highly suggestive of her cultural oppression. Whose fault is it? Ms Moran
knows: the American porn industry. America’s cultural hegemony apparently is
not limited to forcing down your throat tasteless food high in saturated fat
that will make you the size of a double Decker bus and eventually bring on a coronary;
America—via its porn industry—is determined to brainwash modern women into
shaving their clits, according to Ms Moran. Modern women obviously spend a
considerable portion of their waking hours watching porn—perhaps their
boyfriends make them watch it—and think to themselves, “I know what I want. I
want my tits to be the size of a cantaloupe melon, like that porn star, and,
since I don’t have the dosh to do that I will shave my vagina. That will make
me more attractive to men.” Can it really be as simplistic as this? I doubt
it, but I am not a feminist, so probably am mistaken. Or maybe boyfriends or partners of modern
women are addicted to American porn and insist that their girlfriend offer a
hair-free zone on which they can set their tongues to work. (I can say with
complete confidence that those of my ex-girlfriends who chose to go “bald” did
so entirely of their own accord. Not a single one of them felt obliged to ask
my views.) But maybe porn is to be blamed for the problem of vaginal hair (or
lack thereof) in the anatomy of most modern women. On a related (or shall I say
nearby?) subject, Naomi Wolf, in Vagina: A Biography, lays the blame
squarely at the door of the porn industry for the penchant of the modern men
for forcing their girlfriends to have anal sex. Even the Mormons are doing
it, would you believe it?
I hope I
would not be quartered if I said that the issue remains contentious, with
chances of a consensus being reached more remote than the lasting peace in
Afghanistan. There are those feminists, (old, lesbian, Communist types, according to a
female friend of mine, though obviously not including Ms Moran and Wolf) who
would have you believe that shaving your clit is the single-most act of
betraying the sisterhood. And there are those who believe that shaving their
vaginas to within an inch of their lives empowers women. Indeed there are those,
like Ms Boyle (Sian, not Susan, I should add; in the latter’s case it’d probably
be forest not a bush), another writer of article in the independent, who have
chosen to permanently remove their pubes by the laser technique. Not because
their partners are insisting that they should cavort like porn stars in the
bedroom but because they have made the informed decision of getting rid of
unwanted minge-mat just in the same way many would want to get rid of the
unwanted fur-coat on their upper lips.
If I were
an epidemiological researcher of women’s pubic hair, I would consider dividing
women into following categories based on their preferences and attitudes
towards pubic hair. (a) Women who don’t like their pubic hair and shave them
off. There are occasional reported cases of extreme phobia (a case in point Ms
Sian Boyle) where the subjects may take the extreme step of permanently
removing pubic hair. (b) Women who don’t mind pubic hair but indulge in regular
fannicure. They want to pamper their bush and give it a trim from time to time.
(c) Women who probably belong to category (b), but just can’t be bothered to
have a quim-trim and let the hair grow. (d) Women who deliberately,
intentionally and in full knowledge of what they are doing do not shave. A
proportion of such women might consider themselves to be feminists. These women
might view the women classified here under category (a) and very probably (b)—if
they were to become cognizant of the true intentions of category (b) women—as
man-pleasing barbies who have taken leave of their free will and senses. (The
category (a) women greatly resent such labelling (see Ms Boyle’s article in the
Independent) and would be at pains to explain that they want every
possible body part as smooth as possible in their quest to appear young.) A
further proportion of category (c) women
might be labouring under the belief that having a generous muff makes them more
feminine and sexually irresistible.
Finally,
there is a compelling case to be made that whatever the women choose to do with
their private hair, it is somehow fault of men. I have still not figured out (despite
reading How to be A Woman and Vagina: A Biography) how it is men’s
fault, but am very sure about my conclusion. Such men, however, are deserving
of compassion and sympathy, because they are in all probabilities addicted to
porn or chronic masturbation or both.
