Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig

Figure I.3. An eighteenth-century engraving of a slave market, depicting a potential buyer licking an enslaved man’s chin to determine whether he had been shaved. (From Le Commerce de l’Amerique par Marseille [1764]. Reproduced courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.)

      What accounts for this increasing antipathy toward body hair? Previous historical investigation sheds little light on the matter. Even the voluminous scholarship devoted to various beauty practices in the United States—cosmetics, breast enlargements, plastic surgery, hairstyling—largely overlooks hair removal.³⁵ How, then, might we understand the prevalence of practices that are repetitive and expensive, at best, and not infrequently messy, painful, disfiguring, and even deadly?

      SEARCHING THROUGH EXISTING scholarly and popular literatures for answers, one discovers that two broad causal stories about hairlessness turn up with special frequency: the first might be referred to as the “evolutionary” explanation, the second as the “gendered social control” explanation.³⁶ The sheer repetition of these two accounts is revealing. Let us therefore pause here at the outset to look at them directly.

      Perhaps the most common explanation for contemporary hair removal practices, inaugurated by Desmond Morris’s 1967 best-seller The Naked Ape, attributes the allure of hairlessness to deep, animal instinct. “Madison Avenue clearly exploits universal preferences,” summarizes one recent socio-biological account, “but it does not create them.”³⁷ Advocates of evolutionary explanations for routine hair removal often propose that the unusual hairlessness of humans—one of very few mammals to lack fur—allowed them to remain relatively free of fleas, ticks, lice, and other external parasites, along with the diseases they carry. The process of natural selection initiated by hairless hominids’ greater resistance to disease was in turn augmented and reinforced by sexual selection, as potential mates responded to the unconscious messages of health and fitness conveyed through hairless skin. Contemporary homo sapiens allegedly maintain that ancient pattern by waxing, plucking, shaving, and so on. Another version of the theory proposes that because early bipedal hominids were under pressure to carry their infants (since bipedal infants could no longer grasp with their feet, like other primates), infant survival depended on the maternal desire to carry—a desire made stronger, so the theory goes, by the pleasure of (hairless) skin-to-skin contact. Here again, sexual selection is thought to have augmented the process of natural selection, as adults sought hairless sexual partners in order to recreate the pleasurable skin-to-skin contact of the mother-infant relationship.³⁸ Echoing these evolutionary lines of thought in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy, investigators Mark Pagel and Sir Walter Bodmer suggest that the “common use of depilatory agents testifies to the continuing attractions of hairlessness, especially in human females.”³⁹

      The popularity of evolutionary explanations for behaviors such as the “common use of depilatory agents” points to the rising cultural authority of the sciences noted above. They also raise as many questions as they answer (as Christian creationists are quick to point out).⁴⁰ If the common use of hair removers signals the instinctual appeal of hairlessness, why would hair removal be conducted so much more diligently and obsessively in some times and places than in others? Are contemporary Americans somehow more driven by evolutionary imperative than their eighteenth-century counterparts? More than twenty-first-century Germans or Italians? If the loss of body hair provided early humans with better health and longevity, why would pubic and armpit hair remain?⁴¹ And what’s so inherently distasteful about hairy skin–to–hairy skin contact? Isn’t soft, touchable fur a large part of the appeal of some domesticated animals (why they are lovingly referred to as “pets”)? As one paleoanthropologist, Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, concludes, “There are all kinds of notions as to the advantage of hair loss, but they are all just-so stories.”⁴²

      Evolution did play a role in shaping American hair removal practices—but not because those practices reflect “Early Man’s” aversion to fleas and lice.⁴³ Rather, the growth of evolutionary thought, particularly the influence of Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871), transformed framings of body hair, especially women’s body hair. Rooted in traditions of comparative racial anatomy, evolutionary thought solidified hair’s associations with “primitive” ancestry and an atavistic return to earlier, “less developed” forms. Late-nineteenth-century medical and scientific experts extended these perceptions of degeneracy, linking hairiness to sexual inversion, disease pathology, lunacy, and criminal violence. Popular culture, too, advanced hair’s atavistic connotations. The display of a young, unusually hairy Laotian girl known as Krao as a “missing link,” a vestigial embodiment of civilized “man’s” primitive roots, exemplified this trend (figure I.4).⁴⁴ In short, readiness to attribute hair removal to the innate allure of evolutionary “fitness” is itself a consequence of cultural change.⁴⁵

      A second common explanation for Americans’ intensifying pursuit of hairless skin focuses not on primordial instinct but on vested social interests: specifically, efforts to constrain women’s lives. In this narrative, hair removal appears as a mechanism of “gendered social control,” one exerted in proportion to women’s rising economic and political power.⁴⁶ This explanation, also born of a particular historical milieu, owes much of its popularity to analyses provided by feminist social scientists. Social psychologists, in particular, have found that women who resist shaving their legs are evaluated by others as “dirty” or “gross,” and that hairy women are rated as less “sexually attractive, intelligent, sociable, happy, and positive” than visibly hairless women.⁴⁷ None of this scholarship ascribes such evaluations to an orchestrated plot against women (other than the stakes that “multi-million dollar companies associated with hair removal” have in promoting the message that “hair is dirty”). Yet several studies propose that “the hairlessness norm” imposes distinct new psychological constraints on women and girls, even as other longstanding legal and social restrictions are eased.⁴⁸ The overall effect of the norm, social scientists suggest, is to produce feelings of inadequacy and vulnerability, the sense that women’s bodies are problematic “the way they naturally are.”⁴⁹ Practices of hair removal, in turn, are said to produce “pre-pubescent-like,” “highly sexualized” bodies, which ultimately “may contribute to the increasing objectification of young girls.”⁵⁰