Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies. Hadley Freeman
So I’m about to sleep with a new gentleman caller for the first time. Should I go get a Brazilian wax?
Well, I don’t really know. Is your gentleman caller a paedophile? A porn merchant? If so, then the state of your pubic hair is really the least of your problems. If not, no. So in short, the answer, in all scenarios, is no.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of ladies’ pubic hair, without, hopefully, finding anything nitty or, indeed, gritty in there, let us first get a grasp on the linguistics of the subject while struggling, ever so diligently, not to make any ‘cunning linguist’ jokes. I leave that to my local sex shop.
The bikini wax is, as its Ronseal-does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin name suggests, a wax around the sides so that one can go to the beach without sparking too many comparisons to Grendel’s mother.
The Brazilian is a very extreme bikini wax, leaving one with just a mere centre line of pubic hair which some people insist on referring to as ‘the landing strip’ which in turn suggests that they only do missionary position.
And then finally, there’s the full Brazilian, where absolutely everything is removed. This is also occasionally known as ‘the Hollywood’, which tells you everything you need to know about that town: it insistently remakes foreign products with American dialogue and it prefers its women to resemble Barbie.
Now, I am very much of the belief that, as long as it’s legal, a woman should be allowed to do pretty much anything if it makes her feel happy and confident in herself and, yes, that does include the styling of her pubic hair. What she should not do, however, is feel pressurised to torture her genitals because she assumes that is what sexual partners and society itself expects of her. Yet at some unspecified point over the past twenty years, pubic hairlessness became a shorthand for mainstream female sexiness. Once women with hairless vaginas were something one saw on cards in public phone boxes. Now such a thought is as outmoded as the phone boxes themselves. If anything had to cross over from the porn industry, I wish it had been the commendably straightforward movie plots (‘I’m here to fix your photocopier.’ ‘Great!’) but, sadly, it turned out to be pouring hot wax around one’s labia and ripping out the hair. Oh well.
Look, I am as susceptible to the daftest fashions as the next person who has a subscription to multiple fashion magazines and I accept that fashions and expectations change, even in the pubic hair industry, as such a thing does indeed seem to exist.
But the advocation of the Brazilian wax and in particular the Hollywood is where I throw down my copy of Sunday Times Style, sell my flat and move to a mud hut in the Hebrides and spend my days carving recorders out of twigs and playing ‘Annie’s Song’ to passers-by. There is nothing fashionable about following a trend that is derived so wholesale from the porn industry, nor is there anything trendy in encouraging gentlemen callers to think of it as both sexy and a given.
I never thought about Brazilian waxes much when I lived in London in my twenties. In fact, I thought the only people who had them were crazy-eyed trophy wives who were forced to submit their bodies to all manner of indignities so as to stop their piggy-eyed husband from shagging the sloaney nanny too often. This is because I believed – and still believe – that the only kind of people who dislike signs of female sexual maturity are ridiculous, repulsive people. Here’s a slogan to embroider on a pillow on a rainy Sunday: sexual maturity is an attractive quality in an adult.
When I moved to Manhattan in my thirties, though, I could barely move without some white-coated woman trying to rip out all my pubic hair.
Every time I went for a bikini wax I had to have lengthy discussions explaining that, no, I did not want hot wax poured inside me, nor did I want to return home afterwards with my knickers full of blood as though I’d just had a backstreet abortion. The beauticians looked at me as though I were a wholesome German hippy, explaining why I brush my teeth with a leaf and plait my underarm hair.
I did think for a much longer time than I ever expected to muse upon the state of my pubic hair whether it is hypocritical for me to be disgusted by the rise of Brazilian waxes (THE RISE OF THE BRAZILIAN WAXES: now there’s a horror movie I’d like to see, if only for the poster) and yet get a bikini wax before any occasion that necessitated me wearing a swimsuit in public, and I decided that maybe it is, a little, but not truly. My objection to the Brazilian is that it is such a weird combination of the aesthetics of porn and paedophilia and it encapsulates so many of the very wrong ideas that exist about women, sexuality and sexiness. Bikini waxes, for me at least, have nothing to do with sex. They are about not wanting to flash my pubes on the beach, because while there are some things I don’t mind sharing with the public (my pubic hair care, apparently), my actual pubic hair is not one of them. A bikini wax is about, at the very least, privacy. Tidiness, too, like brushing my hair (on my head, that is.) And for the record, I’m not all that keen on seeing men’s pubic hair creeping out of those tiny Speedos on the beach. I am an equal opportunities prude.
Brazilians are a whole different pubic hair ballgame.
‘You really should try it,’ said the New York beautician, frustrated again in her pursuit to pour hot wax around my labia, ‘your boyfriend will love it.’
‘If he did, he would not be my boyfriend much longer,’ I huffed, a retort that perhaps would have carried a bit more heft if I wasn’t at that point lying prone on a table wearing paper knickers.
Why any woman would sleep with a man who likes their women to resemble porn stars or pre-pubescents is just one of the great mysteries of the modern bedroom, along with why is it called a one-night stand as surely some people must still do it lying down.
It is so obvious that impossibly high heels are nothing but a modern-day version of foot binding and the normalisation of Brazilian and Hollywood waxes is the twenty-first-century western version of genital mutilation that it feels incredible that this even needs to be said. No, Brazilian waxes do not involve a clitoridectomy and destroy any chance of a woman experiencing sexual pleasure (although awareness that one is sleeping with a man who likes his ladies to have childlike genitals might kill the buzz a little). But they do involve pouring hot wax all over a woman’s vagina and ripping out her hair in order to turn on a man who has presumably spent at least 89 per cent of his life wanking over porn.
When I ask my New York female friends – smart, funny, seemingly normal women – who do this to themselves on a monthly basis why on earth they bother, they always give the same two answers:
1 ‘It’s because then he goes down on me more often. I mean, there is a lot of hair down there so it’s only fair.’
2 ‘Because it gives me sexual confidence.’
Both of these are, clearly, nonsense. In regard to the first answer, any guy who says he is not giving a woman oral sex because she has pubic hair is a lazy selfish jerk who is making a phoney excuse for being all take and no give, or is a paedophile. Take your pick, ladies! Yes, hair is closer to the main dish on a woman than it is on a man but I can think of other things a woman has to contend with when giving oral sex that a man does not. So next time a guy says he’ll only go down on you if you get rid of all that hair say, ‘Sure! But only if you shove a massive dildo down your throat every time I go down on you, right? THANKS.’
As to the second point, if you need to rip out your own vaginal hair to feel confident, your vaginal hair is not the problem.
Pubic hair is proof of sexual maturity and if your partner finds that a turn-off, you should probably reconsider that partner.
So, in short, no, you do not have to have a Brazilian to get laid. In fact, any guy who likes a Brazilian shouldn’t be in your bed at all. So following that logic, having a Brazilian will actively prevent you from getting laid.
Don’t be mean to your genitals. After all, they are so nice to you.
10 May 2012.
11 To be fair to Cosmopolitan, its, shall we say, limited concept of feminism does mirror that of the woman most associated with the magazine. While Brown commendably encouraged women to enjoy their self-sufficiency and sexuality, the emphasis