Most popular It's the year of the bush –
time to rediscover all
female body hair Cameron Diaz is leading a movement rejecting
the shame heaped on women's privates by the
removal industry. Now time for underarms and
legs Sunday 19 January 2014
14.30 EST ‘2014 is looking voluminously rosy for those of us who love our lady gardens.’ Illustration by Andrzej
Krauze Emer O'Toole On John Ruskin's wedding night, legend has it, the critic fainted on finding that – unlike the
Elysian statues of his fantasies – women had
body hair. Monday is the 114th anniversary of
Ruskin's death. Who would've predicted that
instead of laughing at Victorian prudery, many
men still expect their sexual encounters to entail pudenda, pins and pits as marble smooth as
those of young Ruskin's imagination? But there's a change in the wind, a turn in the worm: oh yes, something's in the hair. Though
I'm no astrologer, I think 2014 might just be the
year of the bush. In an unlikely about-face, Cameron Diaz has proclaimed that pubic hair is there for a reason,
and to remove it is tantamount to saying, "I
don't need my nose". This is odd, as just under a
year ago she cheerfully told Graham Norton a
cute story about pinning an ungroomed friend
into the shower and forcibly de-fuzzing her. (I hope the poor woman's nose is still intact.) While Diaz was making her new hairy allegiances public, clothing label American
Apparel filled its New York shop windows with
be-merkined mannequins in sheer undies. A
spokeswoman says they're trying to spark up
conversations about the kinds of femininity
deemed beautiful and sexy. To add to these media events, a UK Medix poll recently found that 50% of UK women did not groom down there at all. It must be
admitted: 2014 is looking voluminously rosy for
those of us who love our lady gardens. But what's behind the last decade of wax in western culture in the first place? Many are quick to blame porn; and porn undoubtedly has a role to play, but I know plenty
of women who never need to clear their browser
history, yet still denude their bottoms. (Of
course, this doesn't preclude pressure from their
partners.) And when you apply the age-old
journalistic trick of following the money, what does the porn industry have to gain from regular
real-life girlfriends looking like shiny cyber
girlfriends? Not a whole lot. It's the "beauty"
industry that profits, and which is driving the
trend. Before the first world war, virtually no American woman shaved her legs. By 1964, 98%
of women under the age of 44 did so. Before that
war, underarm hair was not a cosmetic
consideration. Fashions up to that point, while
often clingy and form revealing, covered up
most of a woman's skin. But female fashions became ostensibly freer, and Gillette's first razor
for women came out in 1915, triggering
aggressive advertising campaigns on behalf of
more than a dozen "beauty" companies. Female
body hair was suddenly deemed unsightly. The capitalist drive to convince us that female body hair is unnatural and unclean has
been alarmingly successful. The removal
industry is worth millions, and uncountable
women are ashamed of and distressed by their
post-pubescent hair. But the industry is greedy.
It must now convince the world that female pubic hair is dirty too. It must now convince
people that male body hair is equally
unacceptable. So why, if women were so easily duped in the 20th century, are they seemingly wilier now,
seemingly more willing to reject the shame
heaped on their hairy privates? I think one
answer is that privates usually are quite private,
and – give or take a few spanners – our partners
tend to love us as we are, in a way that wider society does not. I think another answer is the
discomfort and the invasiveness of pubic waxing.
I had my first (and last) Hollywood in August as
research for the book I'm writing, and I could
not believe how painful it was. Or the rash and
itch that set in as it grew out. It's too much. It's too far. We resent the pressure, and we resent
being made to feel ashamed. The comedian Kate Smurthwaite has a skit where she describes being in the showers after
swimming, when two little girls run into the
changing room, point at her fluffy bits, start
giggling, and run out again. Kate, of a generation
confident of the normalcy of bush, shrugs and
thinks to herself, "they'll grow the same thing soon". But then she thinks about how they'll also
grow leg and armpit hair. So she stops shaving. Hollywood mania was a similar jolt for me. How could I try to claim that my pubic hair was
feminine and acceptable when I was so ashamed
of the hair on my legs or under my arms? I
realised that I was Ruskin: unable to deal with
the reality of the female body, squirmy about my
own sexual maturity. So, as others are doing in this, the year of the bush, I decided it was time to
stop swooning, and wake up.