Barbara Ellen
Body Language
One of my strangest assignments was being asked to review an example of “erotic fiction for women”. If I remember rightly, it was called something like The Silken Flesh or Sigh Of Desire. Oddly, for a mucky book, none of the female characters appeared to have vaginas, clitorises, or any of the usual equipment.
Or rather they did, but they were called things like “pearls of delight”, “velvet tunnels”, and, my personal favourite, “the sacred mound”, which made it sound like a nice place for a picnic.
Amused but somewhat untitillated, I couldn’t see this kind of euphemistic sex drivel catching on. To my mind, a vagina was a vagina, and any woman who shrank from calling it thus shouldn’t be allowed to have one.
However, that was before I realised that a significant amount of women would gladly swap their real vaginas for something less troublesome – an unexploded warhead in their back garden, say. While all men have an ongoing love affair with their genitalia, some women communicate with theirs by fax.
Which might explain the latest bikini-wax phenomenon sweeping the United States, where everything comes off. In effect, the woman reclines, in the giving-birth position, while what hasn’t come off with wax-strips is painstakingly tweezed away, hair by hair, by trained beauticians, who surely can’t get paid enough.
They’re calling it the Brazilian wax, but you might know of it by its earlier name – medieval torture. Getting rid of superfluous hair is hardly news – for many women, the beach-thong is a new and frightening fashion god which must be appeased with the occasional pubic sacrifice.
However, tweezing away that hair seems a pluck too far. No one seems to be acknowledging that, previously, the only women who looked like this were “specialist” porn stars and unfortunate chemo-patients.
On the contrary, American women seem to have accepted Brazilian waxing as a natural progression from shaving one’s legs.
US magazine Allure chattily informed its readers of the best salons to visit, without once suggesting that yanking out your pubes by the roots might be bizarre and unnecessary. Even Hollywood is plucking itself like a chicken. Gwyneth Paltrow (of all people!) is said to have left a photo at a Brazilian waxing salon, bearing the legend: “Thank you – you changed my life.”
Clearly, female pubic hair is considered terribly unfashionable in the US, and might soon be declared illegal. Just as clearly, women, not just in the US but everywhere, are still intent on tinkering away with their “hairy, smelly, scary” bodies, trying to turn what God gave them into a design classic.
If anything, the real surprise is that it took women so long to stop obsessing about the size of their breasts and turn to their next “problem”, the beautification of the vagina. The answer to that may lie in our ingrained squeamishness about our feminine destiny. Indeed, bar special occasions when the vagina suddenly becomes useful (sex, menstruation, childbirth), most women still prefer to pretend that they simply haven’t got one.