Read It and Wince
This Observer Woman article on ‘intimate’ waxing caught my eye this morning, as I was contemplating the summer drudgery that is shaving my legs, defuzzing my armpits, deep conditioning my hair and painting my toenails – roll on autumn, when I can be hairy and unkempt in peace.
But one activity this grooming routine emphatically does not include is the Brazilian wax. I’m with Carole Cadwalladr all the way on this. I’d rather look like a simian in a bikini than willingly put myself through that, and I think women who do are insane:
50 Things Not to do This Summer
Does it really need saying that only a fool would allow a total stranger bearing a pot of wax heated to boiling point to come anywhere near their private parts? Apparently it does, because, no disrespect to you ladies out there who have them on a regular basis but you’re quite mad, possibly delusional, with the kind of psychosocial problems that could keep an expensive therapist busy for months.
Why would anyone willingly cause oneself excruciating pain in one of the most sensitive parts of one’s anatomy (other than for purely titillating reasons, but that’s another subject entirely) ?
More to the point, why would any woman want to debase herself by exposing herself to a stranger, while paying through the nose for the privilege? I have real difficulty understanding the motives of those who do. It can’t be total vanity, since the vulva is mostly covered most of the time – or at least it is if you’re not Christina Aguilera or a Reader’s Wife.
Because it’s not just the pain, and the embarrassment, and the money, it’s that the aim of the procedure (and I’ll quote Wikipedia here in a transparent but ultimately doomed attempt to distance myself from the entire, sorry business) – ‘the complete removal of hair from the buttocks and adjacent to the anus, perineum and vulva (labia majora and mons pubis)’ – is to leave you looking like a pre-pubescent girl. And should you happen to stumble across a man who likes that sort of thing, any hope of fulfilling sexual congress is likely to be marred by the nagging thought that it might be because he’s a closet paedophile.
Imagine the shock on coming face-to-face, as it were, with an unpruned undergrowth. Will they be permanently traumatised, like John Ruskin is said to have been on his wedding night, on first seeing his bride’s (hairy) naughty bits? Ruskin went on to fixate on a nine-year old girl:
Ruskin’s one marriage was annulled for non-consummation; his wife is said to have written to her parents claiming that he found her person repugnant. He later fell in love with a nine-year-old girl ? although he did not approach her as a suitor until she was seventeen. Ruskin is not known to have had any other romantic liaisons or sexual intimacies. This has given rise to suggestions that he was a paedophile.
Now I’m not asserting that all those who do this are paedophiles or paedophile enablers. And I can see how judicious depilation can be an aid to oral gratification. Hair between your teet van be very irritating indeed, and I can see that it’s quite a big practical and aesthetic consideration in that circumstance, especially if you work in the sex industry.
But most women don’t. I resent like hell the ongoing trend to bully women into looking and acting as though they were sex workers in order to be considered sexually attractive. The current epitome of female sexual beauty seems to be to look like a liitle girl: to have a body like a prepubescent child, but with massively enhanced boobage – just look at tabloid darlings Jordan or Victoria Beckham.
The bare vulva trend plays right into that and, of course, depilation is a massive profit-centre for the beauty industry. The more novel places it finds to depilate, the more profit it makes.
Funny how it always comes down to someone making money.
