#Feminism and the Dilemma of Pubic Hair Humiliation

Robert Stacy McCain blogged about this recently, "The Vagina as Commodity: What Does the Pubic Depilation Phenomenon Mean?"

But now here's this, from Dina Rickman, at Telegraph UK, "Like it or not, we need to break the pubic hair taboo" (via Instapundit):

The personal is political. And there are few things more personal than your pubic hair. Whether you shave, trim, wax (ouch), epilate (while breathing deeply and after two glasses of wine) or go au naturel, it's a decision. And for young women like me in our twenties, it is one which provokes gut-wrenching anxiety, writes Dina Rickman.

It’s no wonder - we’re living in an era when leaving your pubic hair untamed is so unusual that ‘hairy’ has become a form of niche pornography. One male friend of mine recently boasted that he had never seen a woman with a full bush. Another, 24-year-old Adam, finds pubes so alien that he was unable to perform sexually the last time he was confronted with a hairy woman. “We just ended up cuddling,” he explains.

For him, part of the problem is porn. Adam believes it has “heightened expectations” of how a woman should look. “One of my friends once said 'I 100 per cent need to sleep with a girl before I go out with her. What if she's got a hairy bush?’ It's incredibly off putting. It doesn't take much effort to tame it. I manage to, so I don't think it's a lot to ask."

Sophie Bennett, campaigns officer at the women’s rights group, Object, also believes pornography has changed the landscape - and not for the better. “Because young men often learn about sex and women’s bodies in this way, many feel uncomfortable with women’s bodies as they naturally are”, she says. The result? Low self-esteem, anxiety, and confusion.

Sporting a full bush is considered so subversive that few raised an eyebrow last year when Cameron Diaz told the BBC's Graham Norton Show how she and two accomplices had pinned an anonymous friend to the ground and removed her pubic hair.

But there are the refuseniks, like Rachel, 26. It took her 12 years, two vajazzles and more waxes than it’s polite to mention before she decided she’d had enough. For her, it was about avoiding the hassle of hair removal as well as feminism. “Now, my pubes stick out of the sides of my swimming costume in the leisure centre, but I'd rather look like that than anything else.” As for how men react? “I think most guys are so delighted that they're about to get laid they wouldn't notice if you had a full-on Zach Galifianakis-style beard down there. But there are some men who are probably a little bit more picky and prefer the bald look.”...

Oh brother.

More at the link.

But then again, don't miss Robert's commentary. It's hard out there for a refusenik.