Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Womanly Virtues Wednesday

There is a piece up at The Atlantic about the disappearance of pubic hair in our lives. It's an interesting question. When I was an undergrad, girls without pubic hair were only available in the weirdest porn and it was tacitly assumed that men who bought the stuff were pedophiles looking for something just this side of illegal. Things have changed. A few years ago the Serpentine One and I overheard a conversation in which two sixteen year old girls were questioned by a group of younger girls about waxing and all of them clearly assumed this painful ordeal was a necessary rite of passage in their lives. It was pretty obvious from the rest of the conversation that all the girls involved were virgins.

As with so many things sexual, what were weird forbidden things that even porn stars refused to do a generation ago are now done by upper-middle class college and college-bound girls without anyone even asking them to do it. The Atlantic piece underlines this:
Less than two decades ago, the idea of "taking it all off" seemed painful, unnecessary, and even vaguely fetishistic; As recently as 1996, one harrowing, particularly memorable vignette from Eve Ensler's groundbreaking play The Vagina Monologues effectively turned the idea of removing pubic hair at the request of a sexual partner into something cringe-worthy and perverted. Trimming away a few strays during swimsuit season was one thing, but removing all the hair from one's genitals, effectively turning back the clock on puberty? Traumatizing. Selfish. Inhumane, even.
The irrelevance of feminists chapter 5674. And note the way that an older generation of women were trained to blame everything on men.

So what is driving this? That's the really interesting thing for the author of The Atlantic piece, Ashley Fetters (which would make a great porn-star name by the way) can't quite bring herself to simply blame men. And she cannot for there is simply too much evidence that suggests that girls themselves are a major source of the trend. Although not much research s available, Ms. Fetters informs us that,
What surveys have been conducted, however, tend to support what most of America already suspects: that Brazilian waxing is largely practiced among the young, white, heterosexual Sex And The City and Gossip Girl demographics.
So why is it happening? Well, like most social phenomena, it is probably over-determined. That's a highfalutin way of saying there is a lot of stuff going on at the same time. I have three possibilities to add to the mix.

A) Competition with other girls is driving this. I'd vote this the most likely cause. Fetters almost blunders into the truth when she writes about college girls:
Herbenick and Fitzpatrick both believe one demographic group has embraced the hairless-cat look more fervently than others: college students.

In theory, this should come as no surprise; The average U.S. state university actually has all the right features to act as a veritable incubator for anti-pube sentiments. Where else do youth, skimpy clothing, rampantly available pornography, and non-monogamous sexual habits all converge so gloriously?
That's all good but Fetters leaves a key data point out here and that is that there are now more women than men in undergrad programs. The more competitive the environment, the further women are willing to push to outdo other women.

Fetters may not know this, but in the 1970s and early 1980s, college girls generally dressed much more conservatively than high school girls did. In an environment where there were more men than women, there was less pressure to compete with other women.

B) Young women are more susceptible to peer pressure than  any other group in our culture. In other words, this is a well-established phenomenon. Get in a time machine and go back to the 1990s when women were wearing low-cut pants that were designed to make their thongs show and wave around the skin-tight leggings women wear today and most of those thong-wearing 1990s girls would refuse on grounds of modesty. But let a few super-competitive high status girls start wearing them and the rest of young womanhood will follow like so many sheep.

C) I have suggested before that the princess phenomenon is driven by girls reacting to a feminist-driven push to eliminate what feminists consider gender stereotypes and the rest of us consider normal girlish behaviour traits. Removing their pubic hair is a way of drawing a solid line between themselves and the group of older women who, in the opinion of younger women, are unfeminine, uninspiring role models.

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