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I have been in prison for too long, and haven’t viewed erotica for even longer. The last time I read a Playboy magazine, Jimmy Carter was president of the United States. But hey, fuck the war and fuck the decline of the American presidency – what is of real significance here is the demise of pubic hair on American women. I score my first gape at a centrefold in a lot of years and, whoa and behold!, Miss April got no hair down there! I flip to the other pictorials only to discover that they all wear the same prepubescent vertical smile. I sense that something of great social and cultural import has passed me by. Where did all those dark and curly Bermuda triangles disappear to? And when? It’s like I fell asleep one night and, in a reverse Rip Van Winkle, the whole continent got busy with the shaving cream. But an even meatier question stares out at me from between the legs of this new fashion mode: why?
It’s only the nothingness that’s new to me. Women I’ve known have always had a penchant for pruning. I once had a girlfriend who shaped hers into a heart for Valentine’s. I knew another who clipped her fiance’s into a diamond on their engagement night, and then there was an all-girl band in the 70s who contoured theirs into little guitars. But this modern vogue, this movement toward clear-cutting, is a whole other slice of the honey pie.
Young women who like a clean line must, at least in part, inherit their crisp aesthetics from computer-era imagery, sort of a Lara Croft imitation. Or maybe it’s global warming. There are evolutionary raisons d’etre for body hair, and one of them is warmth. Perhaps with the earth temperature rising, there’s just too much heat down there in the pearly kitchen. How, then, do we explain the bare labes of those northern girls, especially the ones living above the 49th parallel? Don’t their lips stick to the crossbar in sub-zero weather? Surely, in a country where the national symbol is the beaver, the pelt isn’t becoming extinct?
In another evolutionary trick, hair south of the navel is there to trap pheromones in its tangled locks. Pheromones are those little dancing musk devils produced to attract the opposite sex – in the case of the female body, to lure the unsuspecting male of the species toward her cave. Perhaps women who shave are making a statement. They choose not to trap men with a beguiling scent, opting for a more open, more conscious and less subliminal means of attraction. If tthat’s true, some would have to ask themselves hard questions about perfume.
Pubic hair also acts as the local police force: it’s there to serve and protect, to prevent friction and act as a buffer. But with the advent of the female jock strap, hair presents only a feeble sort of protection. Some women may see it as simply obsolete.
Whatever all the different reasons women are trimming, there is one I know to be true. It’s because their sexual partners prefer them that way. This is some cultural/generational preference I am not getting. Maybe my generation just didn’t convey our wishes?
My generation is different from the young and the restless. I didn’t grow up with sex-ed classes about AIDS and hepatitis and all the STDs. I didn’t learn in grade six that condoms were as necessary as looking both ways before you cross the street. What is there to say to a generation of young lovers who’ve been taught that sex is death, that a deadly virus lurks behind every bush?
Small wonder they’re not looking for a mystery lair. They don’t want to peer through the undergrowth, or want their garden to be secret. They want a visible and clear shot at whatever they’re getting into. Or maybe it’s a search for prepubescence itself, because, at an even more subtle level, theirs is a generation that loses its innocence at a way too tender age.
After my initial shock and bewilderment at seeing Miss April with the southern isosceles of a 10-year-old, things have gone from bad to worse. I’ve since learned while out in the compound talking about this phenomenon to a new generation of cons that it’s now common for young men to shave – and I’m not talking 5 o’clock shadow here. It’s some sort of buff image trip. I’ve been in the weight pit off and on for over a century, and I believe that if you aren’t bulked like Arnie or at least flexing muscles in the professional ring, you’ve got to be like Robert Maplethorpe gay to be waxing the hair off your body.
The boys in the gym have tried to convince me that clean-shaven bodies are more attractive to the opposite sex, but I’m not even going there. Overly hirsute men are a turn-off for most of the women I’ve talked with, though I have heard of those with fetishes for thick back hair (they call these men bears). Knowing that doesn’t make me want to jump into a barrel of Rogaine, but neither will I now go soak in a vat of depilatory cream, even though I believe this new body gloss is much more than a fetish or a passing craze.
The trend is hooked to something deeper, caught up in a culture that has been relentlessly exposed to the marketing of the concept of an ideal human body. We’ve been sold on buns of steel, six-pack abs, cosmetic implants and total make-overs ad infinitum. The “perfection” of our bodies seems within our grasp, and we’ve come to see the ideal as more real than our own.
In the age of sophisticated software, a perfect design can be achieved with the simple click of a mouse. But is it real, or is it the same virtual perfection we’re trying to click onto in our lives? What makes us human, what keeps our worlds real? It can be found in the imperfection of our bodies, in the imperfect ways they move through this world.
Our bodies are made to be lived in, so celebrate your nicks and scars, adorn the skin with tattoos if you like, manicure your pubes to your heart’s content, but always remember the rounded tummy or the small droop in the imperfect breast is the one with soul. If I were you, my little playboys and dixie chicks, I’d guard my imagination – and most of my pubic hairs – against the onslaught of virtual beauty, because when the party is over and the morning light finds you alone in bed, they might be all you have to hang onto.
