Caitlin Moran: On Female Pubic Hair

Not surprisingly, Caitlin Moran holds the same opinions I do regarding female pubic hair and its political importance and connection to consumerism.  A few selections from How to Be a Woman:

"Hair is the opening salvo in decades of quietly screaming 'WHO AM I?' while standing in front of an array of products in the drugstore, clutching an empty basket."

"Pubic hair must be confined to a very small area or, increasingly, removed completely…While some use the euphemism 'Brazilian' to describe this state of affairs, I prefer to call it what it is--'a ruinously high-maintenance, itchy, cold-looking child's vagina.'"

"'I remember when it was all furry round here,' I will say sadly in the changing rooms of the gym, surrounded by smooth, pink genitals. 'Hairy toots as far as the eye could see. Wild and untamable. An arbor of nature. Playground of my youth. I used to spend hours there. Now…now it's all waxed and empty.  All the wildlife has gone. The bulldozers have moved in. They're going to build a new Safeway, there, on the vaginas.'"

"It is now accepted that women will wax. We never had a debate about it. It just happened--and we never thought to discuss it."

"I can't believe we've got to a point where its basically costing us money to have a vagina. They're making us pay for maintenance and upkeep of our lulus, like they're a communal garden. It's a stealth tax. Muff excised…God DAMN you, mores of pornography that have made it into my undies. GOD DAMN YOU."

"The real reason all porn stars wax is because, if you remove all the fur, you can see more when you're doing penetrative shots. And that's it. This gigantic, billion-dollar Western obsession with Brazilians and Hollywoods, which millions of normal women have to time events in their lives around, endure pain and inconvenience for…is all down to the technical considerations of cinematography."

"The crotch, the upper lip, and the armpit are miles apart…What happens to them, and why, is wholly different--primarily because armpits aren't intimately associated with sexual maturity, or, indeed, sexuality at all…So what you do with your armpits is just an aesthetic concern--and not really part of the Struggle."

Caitlin Moran: On Pornography

I recently started reading Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman, and, as expected, I found her comments on contemporary pornography to be spot on.

"Essentially," Moran writes, "the Internet vends a porn monoculture."  Precisely. When a person searches for pornography on the Internet, the majority of results will be short clips or pictures from mainstream American studios, filmed in the San Fernando Valley.  The woman will likely be slim and Caucasian (although mainstream "niches" feature women of other ethnicities as well), wearing heavy makeup and ridiculously revealing clothing, and sporting a completely hairless pubic region.  Her male partners will also likely be completely hairless, and will most certainly be well endowed.  The short video will begin with the woman performing oral sex on the men, who will often handle her roughly, slap her face, call her degrading names, and force her to gag on their genitalia.  The men will then proceed to penetrate the woman's vaginal, anal, and oral orifices, until the scene concludes with the men masturbating until they ejaculate on the woman's face. (The material from European studios will be mostly similar, although perhaps without the derogatory language and with most certainly with more fashionable clothing.)

As Moran observes, "That single, unimaginative, billion-duplicated fuck is generally what we mean by 'porn culture.'"  She then goes on to list several of its signature characteristics that have had a tremendous influence on the world outside of pornography: "Brazilians. Hollywoods.  Round, high plastic tits. Acrylic nails that make it impossible to do up a shoe buckle, or type. MTV full of crotches and tits. Anal sex being an assume part of every woman's repertoire. Posters for makeup, or TV shows, that show women glassy-eyed, open-mouthed, and ready for a faceful of come.  Knickers being replaced by thongs. High, high heels that aren't really made for walking--just lying back and being fucked in." Aside from the breast implants (which are no longer in fashion), Moran's list is certainly accurate.

As a result of the proliferation of porn culture, according to Moran "12 percent of the images of women on the Internet are of them either on all fours, rammed into some highly unhygienic PVC, or being forced around outsized male genitalia, as if their sundry openings were some manner of tube bandage."

As Moran's description emphasizes, porn culture is not erotic.  In fact, porn is the complete opposite of eroticism.  Porn depicts the distorted bodies of 21st century consumer capitalism engaging in an uninspired performance of various sex acts.  While the overwhelming majority of mainstream American porn focuses on men dominating and abusing women, the process effectively dehumanizes and degrades all those involved.

In response to anti-porn Feminists, Moran notes that "the act of having sex isn't sexist, so there's no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist."  Instead, she writes, "it's the porn industry that's the problem.  The whole thing is as offensive, sclerotic, depressing, emotionally bankrupt, and desultory as you would expect a widely unregulated industry worth…$30 billion to be.  No industry ever made that amount of money without being superlatively crass and dumb."
 
Porn in its industrialized form is human sexuality distorted by consumerism and commodified.  Porn perfectly illustrates McLuhan's point that "medium is message": it does not matter that most porn is consumed without paying for anything other than an Internet connection, because the very process of consuming it transforms us into more prolific all-around consumers.  By feeding us plastic sex acts devoid of desire, porn distorts our relationship to ourselves, our bodies, our sexual partners, and our own desires.  We then attempt to fill the void created by porn with renewed consumption in all aspects of our lives.  The consumer of porn may witness countless ejaculations, and may himself ejaculate more often than is healthy, but he never achieves the satisfaction of orgasm.  Porn creates desires but does not satisfy them.

Moran correctly notes the deleterious affect that porn culture has on the young, both male and female alike.  While porn is only intended for adults, its proliferation ensures that children will nonetheless come in contact with it at some point.  As a form of sex education, industrialized porn presents a single homogenous conception of sexuality, entirely centered on the phallus.  Porn teaches young women that they must remove their pubic hair and wear revealing clothing to attract men.  They are shown that their pleasure is not important; instead, their role in sex is to please the man and allow him to take his pleasure from her however he sees fit.  Men, in turn, are shown a selfish and violent version of sexuality that essentially amounts to masturbation, using the woman to achieve orgasm. 

Moran imagines that young boys encountering porn for the first time would be "scared of someone who looks like an angry Burt Reynolds, bumming someone across a landing."  I would add that even adults who encounter porn culture for the first time can end up feeling disturbed, if not frightened, by what it communicates.  A short personal anecdote may help illustrate this point.

Like Caitlin Moran, I count myself as belonging to "the last generation before free online pornography starts being handed out, with the same largesse with which the postwar Labour government handed out milk and spectacles."  As a teenager, pornography for me meant magazines with pictures of naked women, from the frustratingly obscure Playboy to the more satisfying and revelatory Penthouse, Hustler, and Gallery.  When I first started viewing internet pornography while at college, it was still confined to photos rather than videos.  The closest I came to the porn industry was through film stills (such as the scene between Nikita Denise and Lexington Steele in Heavy Metal 2, which was an early favorite of mine for some reason).

Fast forward a few years.  It was late at night, and I was surfing the web for some porn.  I came across a page with a few short clips featuring an Asian woman and two extremely well-endowed Caucasian males. (I later learned that the scene was from Redlight District's Two in the Seat, featuring Tolly Crystal, Steve Holmes, and Brandon Irons.) I was both horrified and incredibly aroused by what I saw, as the men handled Tolly very roughly, using her for their pleasure.

Tolly is clearly not enjoying the experience.  Early in the scene, Irons tries to insert his finger into her anus while he is penetrating her vaginally, but Tolly pushes his arm away.  Irons nevertheless persists, at one point telling Tolly, "I'm gonna hurt you, bitch." (He also tells her she has a "filthy pussy" and calls her a "whore").  Meanwhile, Tolly performs fellatio on Holmes, who pushes her head down on his penis.  At one point, Holmes tries to kiss Tolly, but she vehemently refuses.   When the men take turns sodomizing Tolly, they are obviously hurting her.  As she winces and screams in pain, Holmes moans in pleasure, and Irons emits his own joyful exclamations.  After a lengthy double-penetration sequence, the two men ejaculate on her face.  Tolly's relief at the conclusion of the scene is evident--although her body is damages, she has survived the ordeal and will get her pay check.  

As a sexually experienced adult, I can appreciate the Bataillean transgressiveness of the scene.  It is so obviously wrong, in so many ways--Crystal, a Mongolian who came to the porn industry through Budapest, died shortly after the scene when she "fell" from a roof under mysterious circumstances. (It remains unclear whether her death was a suicide, an accident, or a murder carried out by Eastern European mafioso and/or human traffickers).  Yet to this day it continues to arouse me, and remains one of my the few mainstream American porn offerings that I still watch.

The problem, however, is that there are just too many scenes like this out there, offering essentially this same violent and sadistic version of sexuality.  Two in the Seat is arousing in the way rape fantasies are arousing--as an outlier, a variation on shared, consensual, non-exploitative sexual experiences.  But when it becomes the norm, it looses its transgressive character.  When there are too many rough and abusive porn scenes out there, sex itself becomes impoverished.

As an alternative to porn culture, Moran suggests a new, female pornography,"something that shows sex as something that two people do together, rather than a thing that just happens to a woman when she has to make rent.  Something in which…everyone comes."  Indeed, if there is one critique to be made of today's American and European pornography, it is that it is exclusively phallocentric.  Even so-called "lesbian" porn scenes revolve around penetration and often female "ejaculation" (urination).  As in Tolly's scene, when the men ejaculate, the scene is over and the woman's work is done.  Her pleasure is not even an issue, let alone a focal point of the encounter.  Men and women alike would benefit from more female orgasms in pornography, and less focus on the phallus and male ejaculation as the center and focal point of each scene.

Moran then offers a brief vision of what female pornography might involve: "I suspect that female pornography, when it really gets going, will be something wholly other: warm, humane, funny, dangerous, psychedelic, with wholly different parameters to male porn." I agree with Moran on the dangerous aspect, as female pornography will certainly not be vanilla or politically correct.  Even Joan Sewell confessed in I'd Rather Eat Chocolate that, since adolescence, her fantasy has been that "these knights from the Middle Ages would ravish me" (essentially, that she was a prisoner having forced sex).  In my own experience, the women with whom I have viewed pornography tend to appreciate the rougher variety: gang rape, tentacle rape, etc.

What separates this sort of violence from the violence in mainstream pornography (aside from the fact that simulated rape scenes do far less damage to a woman's body than most "consensual" anal and gangbang scenes) is the ability to shift perspectives.  Whereas today's porn almost exclusively forces the viewer to experience the scene from a phallic perspective, Moran envisions female pornography as a polymorphous, pan-sexual journey: "In their fantasies, the women grow and shrink, shape-shift, change age, color, and location. They manifest as vapor, light, and sound, they strobe through conflicting personas (nurse, robot, mother, virgin, boy, wolf) and a zodiac of positions…Imagine if pornography was not this bizarre, mechanized, factory-framed fucking: bloodless, naked aerobics, concerned solely with high-speed penetration and ostentatious ejaculation. Imagine if it were about desire."

Google Offers: Brazilian Wax

Found this in my inbox this morning: 60% Off Brazilian Waxing.

Ladies, please, don't do this to yourselves.  Seriously, you don't need to spend money and put yourself through great pain just to make your body acceptable for porn-addicted American males.  It's December, for fuck's sake, don't even bother to shave your legs!

Note the price, too, a suggestive $69.  Message: if you want him to perform cunnilingus on you, don't let yourself go! Remember, as a woman your body is naturally disgusting! You have to remove all your pubic hair to keep him happy!

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.

Fascism & Female Pubic Hair Removal: Hygiene

The American twentieth century featured a gradual erosion of female bodily hair.  It began with the legs and continued to the armpits, until by the end of the century women felt the pressure to remove all or at least most of their pubic hair.

The immediate link between female hair removal and consumerism is obvious: more shaving means increased sales of razors, creams, and lotions. Today, female hair removal is a multi-billion-dollar industry that encompasses everything from standard household razors and creams to professional waxes and laser-hair-removal.

In order to convince women to spend their precious free-time and hard-earned cash on pubic hair removal, Consumer Society attacked on several related fronts: hygiene, self-confidence, peer pressure, and the perceived preference of males.

First, there is the completely inaccurate and misguided notion that a hairy pubic region is somehow unhygienic.  Males constantly repeat this mantra, to each other, to the women in their lives, and all over the internet.  Women also speak of feeling "cleaner" when they have a shaved pubic region.  This illusion of cleanliness is of course due to the fact that for over a decade now women have been fed the message that their pubic hair is "unclean," whether from their female peers, from men, from mass media, or from pornography.

A central tenant of Fascism is its focus on cleanliness and cleansing.  The unclean ethnic "Other" must be cleansed from the pure national race so that it can flourish.

In our Misogynist Consumer-Fascism, the unclean Other is woman, with her menstrual flow, her vaginal discharge, her vaginal odor, and her "unsightly" pubic hair.  The disorder of her Otherness poses a threat to the controlled order of the phallus.  For our male-dominated, phallocentric society, the vulva is a foreign body, composed of complicated folds, nooks, and crannies that lack the familiarity of the simple and dominant penis.  The vagina itself is a terrifyingly empty cavity that supposedly emits vile and noxious substances. Many American men seem to hold a notion that the female genitalia is inherently "unclean" and in need of constant maintenance lest it resort to its foul and repulsive natural state.

(Hence the sheer brilliance of South Park's "Poor and Stupid" episode [Season 14, Episode 8], where Cartman becomes a NASCAR driver for Vagisil, and there is much talk about making stinky vaginas "minty fresh."  Thankfully, Patty ultimately gets revenge on her husband for the shame he repeatedly makes her feel over her vaginal odors.)

Female pubic hair is just one element of the female genital region that apparently disgusts American men.  However, female pubic hair is something men can easily control by removing it, thereby exposing the vulva to the male scientific gaze.  As long as they can see the vulva, without any hair in the way, the vulva no longer seems so mysterious and frightening.  Instead, in real-life the bare female vulva is as familiar and unthreatening as the shaved pussies American men have been staring at and masturbating to all their lives, in their controlled world of pornography.  (Or as the hairless vulva of a pre-pubescent child.)

Although his obsession with female genital hygiene stems from both sexes, it is the product of an exclusively male-dominated Fascism.  It is therefore no coincidence that men are largely oblivious to their own uncleanliness. 

As anyone familiar with humanity can attest, the male body is obviously far dirtier than the female body.  To put it another way: men smell like shit.  The wealth of hair around a man's anus ensures that he will not be able to cleanse himself properly after defecation unless he washes immediately afterwards.  The perineum and the scrotum will also absorb some of the fecal smell, particularly if the man sweats during the day.  Even a man with a shaved pubic region will smell awful after a day of sweating.  And uncircumsized penises have a particularly unpleasant smell all their own.  Yet we do not see commercials telling men how they can "keep their anus fresh" or stop their balls from sweating or make their foreskin more hygienic.

Similarly, unlike women, men always expel a thick, sticky, glutinous substance when they achieve orgasm.  Yet a man who patently refuses to perform oral sex on a woman (even a woman without pubic hair) will nonetheless expect to ejaculate in her mouth and even have her swallow his semen, despite its nauseating consistency and unsavory flavor.

This phallocentric attitude is perfectly captured in this clip from Andrew Dice Clay circa 1987.

After talking extensively about how important it is for women to perform oral sex on men (beginning at around the four-minute mark), Dice offers his reflections on the female genitalia: "You ever see a vagina up close? It's frightening. It's like a haunted house down there. It's covered with shrubbery and weeds. You gotta cut through with a machete."  Of course, that was back in 1987, before most American women removed their pubic hair.  Dice would be much less frightened by today's hairless vulvae, thanks in large part to the fact that so many American men have embraced the misogynist attitude of Dice's on-state persona.

Women are constantly bombarded with these false notions that their genitalia are unhygienic, whether it be from the mass media, from their male peers, or from social institutions.  This Daily Beast Article on Yale Sex Week relates the story of a middle-school sex-ed class, where "the boys and girls were separated: Boys were taught about wet dreams, and how they’re OK; Girls taught about periods, and how to stay clean. The message to boys was 'you’re sexual beings, don’t worry about it.' To girls, 'you’re dirty, don’t forget to douche.'"

The perceived necessity of female pubic hair removal is just the latest effort by Misogynist Consumer-Fascism to establish the female body as unhygienic so that women will purchase products to alter their natural bodies.  The pubic razor and the professional wax have now become standard consumer products, joining the douche and the feminine wash among the unnecessary items women purchase to keep their womanhood under control and mold it to masculine sensibilities.

(For the record, of all the women I have performed cunnilingus on, I have never once encountered a single one whose genitalia smelled unpleasant.  And the overwhelming majority of these women had full, natural bushes.  And this includes quite a few encounters when the woman was coming straight from a long, sweaty workout at the gym.)

People of course have the freedom to groom their pubic regions in whatever manner they choose.  However, it is important to question WHY you want to remove your pubic hair, whether it be by trimming, shaving, waxing, or laser-hair-removal.  Why is it that a woman will say she feels "cleaner" without pubic hair?  Is it even possible that, in America (and the world) today, a woman will desire to remove her pubic hair entirely of her own accord, without any influence from the New Fascism? Consumerism always sells slavery under the illusion of choice and freedom.

Unfortunately, regardless of her own personal reasons for doing so, each time a woman removes her pubic hair, she is conforming to the wishes of those who whine that "pubic hair is gross," who leave comments like "shave your pussy bitch!" all over the internet, and who urge women to "keep it clean."

Remember, the obsession with cleanliness and cleansing the Other is a central tenant of Fascism.  What distinguishes this New Fascism is that it concentrates its efforts on the very essence of a woman's womanhood:  her genitalia.  Cleansing through pubic hair removal is just the latest in a long line of campaigns that attack the defining physical characteristics of the female genitalia, whether it be menstruation, vaginal discharge, vaginal odors, or the pubic hair that began to sprout when a woman made those first steps from childhood to puberty on the path to becoming an adult.  By virtually requiring women to remove their pubic hair, today's Fascism seeks to ensnare women in a perpetual, child-like state of submission to adolescent male desires and to the forces of Consumerism.

Control the dangerous Other by sheering off her womanhood.  Keep her clean so you can use her with minimal disgust.  Then dispose of her when you're through.

The New Fascism

Pasolini spoke of consumerism as "the new Fascism."  Of course that was back in 1975, when he was filming Salò.  Consumer-Fascism isn't so "new" nowadays, especially in the U.S., where consumerism has been deeply engrained since the early 20th century.

But the current, early 21st-century version of Consumer-Fascism seems to have focused on a particular target: women.  Contemporary consumer goods from magazines to internet pornography to video games are the vehicles through which Fascism works its oppression, either on women directly or indirectly by shaping male behavior toward women.  This latter method is perhaps the most dangerous and innovative.

Specific features of Misogynist Consumer-Fascism include the following: a presumption of female uncleanliness and a fascination with maintaining feminine hygiene; a direct assault on the female body, particularly the pubic and genital region; increased social pressure on women to succeed in the workplace; an insistence that women maintain their traditional role as homemaker and mother; professional dress codes that continue to sexualize women while endowing men with phallic authority; an encouragement toward males to remain in a state of perpetual adolescence; and a culture of internet pornography that provides both sexes with a phallocentric and brutally misogynist view of human sexuality and gender relations.