Edwina Ings-Chambers wrote an interesting, albeit disturbing, article in this week’s Sunday Times about 12 year old girls now believing it is essential to remove their pubic hair, in order to be accepted in their peer group. I remember when the first signs of pubic hair were an exciting mark of becoming a woman. Now, it seems, women aspire to look like little girls, and little girls have to revert to their pre-pubescent state to feel acceptable.
Most disturbing of all was the accompanying piece by Andy Jones who asserts that “all twenty-something men have a preference when it comes to female grooming … We know what we like and we aren’t shy of debating it in the pub”. Female pubic waxing is essential, he says, because “Men, egged on by pornography, have come to expect, nay demand, it”. Seriously? I know I’m no twenty-something, but when did men become so shallow and prissy? Are men are really so conditioned by porn that they can no longer bear to look at a woman’s vulva in its natural state?
And when oh when did women start believing they had to buy into such self-esteem lowering (not to mention creepy) nonsense? If porn is really the benchmark by which we’re supposed to judge sexual acceptability, then I doubt very much that many of these men who have nothing better to discuss in the pub than the supposed unacceptability of women’s bodies actually … ahem … measure up themselves. Any woman who finds herself, in Andy Jones’ words, dumped for not being ‘well-kept’ should tell the sorry excuse for a bloke to put that in his pipe and smoke it.
UPDATE 22/8/12
Here’s a very recent view from a doctor (director of the health centre at Western University in Washington State) underscoring my view that removing genital hair completely has adverse health and STI implications:
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