Female Pubic Hair Removal: Porn & Male Preferences

The goal of Consumerism is to manufacture desires that individuals must then satisfy through expenditures.  So when anyone living in Consumer Society says he or she "wants" or "likes" something, it is worth asking whether that is an actual desire or preference, or one that is manufactured.  (I.e., when you're thirsty, do you really want a sugary fizzy drink, or do you just want one because advertising told you that you do?)

Consumerism gives us the illusion of limitless choice, but in fact carefully confines our available choices to that which those in power have already pre-selected for us.  For instance, you like certain songs you hear on the radio because someone else has already decided what kind of music you will even be able to hear in the first place. You like certain films and programs because someone else has already decided what you will be able to see in theaters and on TV.  And each of these screening decisions was made to further a single goal of maximizing profits.

The ultimate ideal of Consumerism would be to gradually erode and homogenize consumer tastes, producing a society of unsophisticated consumers who will consume easily produced items in a predictable fashion.

The multi-billion dollar porn industry is a key element of contemporary Consumer Society.  (I use the term "porn" to refer to the mainstream American variety of sexually explicit visual media, as opposed to international, non-mainstream, and non-visual varieties of pornography).  From the time they reach puberty, American males today are exposed to a particular version of human sexuality and to a particular image of the female body.  I will discuss the sex in a later post; here, I will focus exclusively on the image of the female body portrayed in contemporary American porn.

Thankfully, porn has largely moved away from the breast implants that became prevalent during the 1990s.  To its credit, contemporary American porn presents a much wider variety of female body types than can be found in mainstream advertising, Hollywood films, or women's magazines.  Today's porn features actresses with curvy bodies and smaller breasts--women who would be considered far too overweight and plain for mainstream advertising.  For the most part, female bodies are naturally proportioned and healthy-looking.

However, the one constant in contemporary American porn is the glaring absence of female pubic hair.  While a select few successful performers have in recent years rebelled against this trend by sporting pubic hair (Bobbi Starr, Kristina Rose, Kimberly Kane, Sasha Grey), the overwhelming majority of porn shows women with completely shaven or waxed pubic regions.

The problem with all this is that porn is shaping male desires rather than conforming to them.  Men are first exposed to porn during puberty.  Regardless of how careful parents are in protecting their children, there will always be at least one kid who manages to get hold of some porn and show his friends.  In reality, most boys today probably find a way to look at porn before their first real-life sexual encounters with women.  As a result, American men come to expect that the female pubic region should be entirely hairless.  Many men have actually never seen a woman with pubic hair, in porn or in real life.

Since it is so unusual to them, men today view female pubic hair as disgusting--just as men of previous generations would view armpit hair (think of all those jokes about French women) or leg hair as disgusting.  Consumerism shapes social norms, so that anything that fails to conform to that falsified normalcy appears disgusting, dangerous, and foreign.

Thus we end up with a vicious cycle.  Porn tells men that women should remove their pubic hair. Men tell women that their pubic hair is disgusting and that they should remove it.  From porn, men, and mainstream media, women come to believe that their pubic hair is disgusting and that they should remove it.  As more and more women remove their pubic hair, men have a gradually decreasing chance of ever encountering a naturally bushy adult woman, thus reinforcing their perceptions that female pubic hair is disgusting and inappropriate.

So it is not exactly the case that men want women to have bare pubic regions.  Truth be told, many men openly state that they do not prefer women without pubic hair, but rather prefer a natural bush or do not care either way.  The more commonly voiced preference among American males, however, is for the "groomed" look.  But even this so-called preference is a false one, fed to American men from the time they hit puberty by the porn industry.