So how does your lady garden grow?

This post is explicit, and links to pages which feature explicit photographs. Feel free to look away.

I admit to a passing interest in fashion trends. Well ok, maybe that’s exaggerating my interest. So this may not be breaking news, but I’ve been thinking about it since chatting with a lesbian friend 14 years younger than I am.

We were talking about our bodies, and how we felt about them, and she said she shaved all her pubic hair. I asked her how her lovers felt about this, and she looked shocked and said “they all have too, of course.” When I told her I have never slept with a woman who shaves all her pubic hair, she looked shocked again.

Now most of her lovers have been her age or younger, mixed racially, not identifying as feminist.

Nearly all of my female lovers have been my age or older, mixed racially, identifying as feminists (what can I say, women who love women and don’t like gender oppression, *sexy*).

So there’s a generation gap going on here, and possibly a different analysis about how women look after our beautiful bits between feminists and non-feminists.

Before anyone assumes I’m saying “feminists can’t shave their pubic hair”, let me clarify. Growing pubic hair is one of the changes our bodies go through when we move from childhood to adulthood, and I don’t know about you, but I love being an adult woman. Which includes, for me, loving pubic hair.

A couple of years ago in Wellington’s Comedy Fest, the only humour in common from all the wonderful female comics I went to see were “jokes” about their pubic hair being revolting. This is the bit that is anti-feminist as far as I’m concerned – cultural norms which tell us our ordinary bodies are disgusting and a return to a pre-adult look for our genitals is a must. But our bodies, including our pubic hair? Ours to do what we wish with, of course. Kinda a baseline for feminism.

Quite where our wishes come from of course is another matter. Pubic hair fashion, like all fashion, has changed over the years and most agree that Penthouse featuring shaved genitalia in 1970 kicked off a cosmic shift in hair removal.

90s porn culture targeted a new area of hair growth on women and deemed it unattractive and unacceptable. In fact, trimmed, shaped or completely removed pubic hair has become normative. It is difficult many to remember the previous aesthetic, an aesthetic that did not require a woman’s vulva to be shaved, waxed or shorn to be considered “attractive” or desirable.

The “attractive” thing is clearly not just heterosexual in gaze, as evidenced by my friend. It’s also strongly aged. One national survey in the US found that 38% of women aged 18-44 cf 3% women aged 55 and older believe most men prefer a manicured look to their pubes. And what men want is definitely part of selling the package of pubic maintenance to women:

Most women place a good deal of focus on their pubic hair not only for themselves but for their partners as well. In fact, many women are willing to indulge their partners when it comes to pubic hair styles. Why not?

In a recent study:48% of men preferred their women to get rid of it all.

29% of men said they preferred their women to be natural — that being trim and neat but not bare.
16% of men wanted their women to have a little tuft of hair or a patch — would that be a ‘soul’ patch, boys?

The rates of “heterosexually active men” who answered this small online survey were similarly clear about preferring little or no pubic hair, and the reasons for their preference:

Making oral sex “better”? I guess I have nothing to compare it with, but I’m not really sure how much “better” giving oral sex could get to be brutally honest. One in four men surveyed liking the woman they are having sex with to look younger or virginal while they are having sex with them? Just creepy.

Pubic hair grooming is big business, with a whole heap of options available. Which means companies making the tools to tend to our “lady gardens” can make awesome adverts:

Next time I’m-too-scared-to-call-my-beautiful-vagina-labia-and-clitoris-by-their-non -euphemistic-real-names I’m using tulip. But wait, there’s more:

But the most disgust expressed? The bizarre “neighbourhood is open” series, complete with canned laughter:

I’m really interested in how other people feel about this. But completely uninterested in misogynist expressions of disgust about women’s bodies, so please don’t comment if that’s your thing.

Feminist gets a wax, anaesthetises crotch with feminism.

Welcome to another infrequent installment of 'Lowering the Tone: Third-Wave Drivel with Ms Enid Tak-Entity'. Warning: contains swearing and references to 'catbags'.

It is a ridiculous state of affairs to have life rudely inform you that one does not learn everything about the state of womanity through reading Cosmo. But I was indeed surprised to recently discover that my current 'phase of life' is coming with some strange 'changes'. No, I'm not fourteen, nor fifty-five. But Cosmo and Cleo never said that the late twenties-early thirties female 'sexual peak' was a result of fluctuating androgen levels which could grant you the joy of getting hairier, zittier, and prone to moronic crushes on unsuitable people. No-one ever mentioned that just as we were getting some kind of control over our lives, that we had a good chance of being hit by a hormone bus and reincarnated as horny, greasy, idiotic teenage boys. I guess it explains Sex and the City. But yeah, thanks a lot Cosmo - or Jezebel or Feministing or Ms. or Jane or even Margaret fucking Atwood - you could have said something ladies. God knows, I was listening. But no, you were too busy being sex-positive third waver propagandists.* Sheesh.

So - I booked my first ever wax at age 30 last weekend. A bikini wax. Call me fussy, but the very slight increase in hairiness, noticeable only to me, was really starting to be irritating. I am not of hairy stock; some phenotypes are just programmed that way. I went through puberty half a lifetime ago, and was well past graduation when I first read an article around the turn of the century, that mentioned asshole-waxing. 'Christ, what girl has hair on their asshole?' I thought to myself at the time.

Eight years later: 'Ah.'

As a naturally unhairy feminist, I've always been able to be offhandedly smug about not shaving or waxing anything, ultimately because there was never any aesthetic demand for it, rather than because of retro-chic radical principle. But this year, fate finally played its bathetic hand, and as Carrie Bradshaw herself might have put it if her character had ever really been writing about sex rather than (sigh) feelings: 'Just as the world was about to get rid of one unwelcome Bush, the universe laid a brand new one on me.'

I just did not like it. It was annoying. It's the northern hemisphere summer right now people, so hot that I'm tempted to wax my head too. Some people think waxing is feminist self-actualisation, while others think that not waxing is feminist self-actualisation. Would waxing both head and my crotch cancel out the feminist or anti-feminist powers of the other end, leaving me neutral? For some reason, this makes me think of how Western porn has women dressed as hookers, but with the hairless crotches of children, while Japanese porn has women dressed as demure schoolgirls, but with completely untended grown-up pubic hair. My depilatory choice however, was rather more influenced by the weather than by porn or feminism. Was it a feminist experience getting hair yanked off my catbag? Did it make me more confident and empowered? Or was it an oppressive moment of false-consciousness and conformity, consigning me to Britneyland? Neither really: it made me minimally poorer, momentarily surprised, and slightly more comfortable in the long run.

But most importantly, drunk.

The advice from the internet and from friends for one's first ever crotch-wax was: get stoned and drunk. The first wax is always the worst, that much is widely acknowledged. I feared that, like chicken-pox, the older you are when you get it, the worse it would be.

Unable to score weed last minute, I swallowed three Nurofen, let them sink in while monitoring the gradual loss of my motor control, then swilled down a triple shot of vodka. Feeling no pain, indeed drifting out of my body, I shambled around the corner to the fancy-pants Clarins Institute. 'This is my first wax ever!' I said in a language other than English. 'Ooh la la', the attendant may well have responded. 'Don't worry though,' I said, 'I'm trashed!'

As the more serious-minded ladies of THM know, women who drink are just asking for punishment. But first, I was clad in what I can only describe as a surgical g-string, and laid out on a comfy leatherette chaise which put me in mind of nothing so much as a psychiatrist's couch. A really nice psychiatrist, with a soothing voice and no hang-ups about cigars. Staring straight up, my eyes were massaged by the soft ceiling accent of a circular blue sky. Wispy clouds drifted in a gentle vortex pattern, seemingly wafted along by calming limpid music that sounded like cucumber water dripping on sleeping eyelids.

rrrrrip 'Yaaaiii! I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm fine. Oh. There's more isn't there.'

The famed misogynist Milan Kundera lyrically examined the etymological and spiritual roots of compassion in The Unbearable Lightness of Being - in a nutshell (somewhere between the S&M role-play and the dog dying) we must experience each other's suffering before we can claim understanding. Why do so many women put themselves through the pain of stilettos, corsets, weave-tracks, or getting their pubic hair ripped out? In my Nurofen-and-Smirnoff reverie, whimpering just a little at each fresh rip, I wondered briefly if I was on an experimental oppression safari. Revisited by this second adolescence, it had seemed like a real lark to embark on my last ever teenage rite of passage. Like losing one's virginity all over again, which was, let's admit, like a holy mission at the time in terms of absolute determination to get it done and dusted, just to know. You knew it was going to hurt, but that was how you knew that you'd be able to take the pain of the rest of your life. It made sense at the time because teenagers are dramatic. Then later, you chill out, realise that sex is actually for enjoyment, and abandon No.1 Shoe Warehouse plastic heels for Kumfs and hoodies. (This, by the way, is the stereotype overseas of New Zealand women. That we are not drama queens, wear hoodies and comfortable shoes, and are kind of slutty. All attributable to early suffrage.)

My waxeuse's name was Virginie. She was very skilled, and it was mostly not that bad. The drugs and booze were definitely the right move. Half the time it wasn't much more of a shocker than ripping off a medical bandage. The right side was surprisingly painful though compared to the left. More neurology on the dominant side - there is no limit to the things you can learn from your vulva. As a finisher Virginie asked if I wanted 'a little off the top?' or 'a little off the sides?' just like an oldschool barber. Hey, I was drunk and high, I just gurgled a little, waved my hand. Yowch. Top and sides were stingy. I looked down and it appeared she'd given me a mohawk. I had the Maddox.

I was most apprehensive about the asshole, but it didn't hurt at all. The asshole, as I should well have expected, can take a lot of punishment.

Afterwards, I was still so boozed that I had difficulty reattaching my strappy gladiatoresque sandals proudly purchased from Kumfs. Wobbling out, and picking up a discount lipstick, "I couldn't help but wonder" if, despite this experience being embedded in a hundred years of feminist theoretical context, I had just successfully waxed my vag completely outside the field of either feminism or anti-feminism.

Well sure, it was still locked into gender theory, but that's neither here nor there, and you'll never be free of that shit anyway.

If you're determined to be superfeminist in every act of your life, I guess there are a few points you could score in this context. High end crotch-waxing will:
1. Give you a really weak example of physically arduous or painful experiences suffered by privileged women, from which you can extrapolate the far more arduous and painful experiences suffered by non-privileged women, and thus motivate your progressive activism through having re-engaged with real-world, everyday experiences outside the ivory tower. Right on.
2. Provide an opportunity to generously tip poorly paid immigrant female service workers, and encourage them to unionise.
3. Give you a great excuse to get shitfaced outside of the judgmental purview of ALAC.


*except for Margaret Atwood, duh.