Pubic Hair

[poliphilo]

I understand that no-one under thirty likes pubic hair.

See here

I grew up in the 60s when pubic hair was the holy grail. Why do you think anyone ever watched anything by Jean-Luc Godard?

No, that's unfair; Godard in his pomp rocked my soul. Weekend was a life-changing experience. But it didn't hurt that he had chicks walking around in the background with their panties off.

And back then chicks with their panties off meant huge, cushiony swatches of pubic hair.

The temple was veiled....

O.K., OK... Now I'm embarrassing myself.

Apparently the fashion for bare pubes is down to porn. Porn stars wax. And we all aspire to be porn stars (Ach, we are such sheep) just as we all once aspired to be the Venus de Milo or the Apollo Belvedere.

Though that was a little before my time.

The first artist to paint pubic hair was- I rather think- Gustave Courbet. Thereafter the bush had a golden age that lasted approximately a hundred years.

I think the human body benefits from that patch of shading. To me it looks unfinished without it.

The pornstar look is an android look- No hair out of place, boneless bits that don't wobble. Immaculate.

I reject it. I like flesh that behaves like flesh. Follicles that work.

The call of the wild.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Isn't it weird. What a long journey we took to get back to where we started.

At the risk of sounding like a boring old fart, I feel sorry for young people today...

[kinderheldin.livejournal.com]

I feel sorry for them, too. I read the whole article -- and it articulated something I wasn't able to say, quite -- but have understood to be true:

"In the words of one American writer, the western world has been "pornified" in the past decade. The worldwide web exposes more or less anyone who goes online to images few of us would have had a clue where to buy a decade ago, showing sexual acts we might never have heard of. It has made porn stars out of ordinary people, global celebrities out of porn stars. It has brought pornography into the workplace, children's bedrooms, the collective consciousness.

Above all, though, the internet has readjusted the boundaries of pornography, normalising it into the wider culture.
…
Levy argues that they [females] have internalised the aesthetic of pornography, interpreting it as the new female sexual norm."

I see how showing cleavage is a fashion statement these days, even in teenage-dom (or especially there) and the professional world. Girls basically seem to think they're being fashionable when in fact, they're trapping themselves in the pornographic aesthetic/gaze.

I don't think women are becoming sexually liberated, rather I see them as defining themselves through this gaze: a veritable cage surrounded by mirrors. They're more concerned with being "sexy" than "pretty" (not that either should be the ultimate expression of feminity), and their idea of sexy, comes from "normalized" pornography. Even using the word "porn" like it's a kind of ice cream, makes it more accepted in everyday conversations.

Personally, I think pornography is really bad for both men and women -- having a dissociative effect either way. It's dehumanizing. As a feminist, though, I feel it's difficult to address the subject with young women because the whole culture tells them that to gain approval/belonging, "look and act like this." The (anti-)"aesthetic" of pornography really is insidious. (Susan Griffin wrote a book called Pornography and Silence" that addresses this idea of the pornography in the collective unconscious.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It seems as though porn has become more and more unnatural.

You look at 70s porn, 80s porn- and the people are still human; they have hair and blemishes and jiggly bits. But somewhere along the line the humanity dropped away; pubes got shaved, breasts got stiffened with silicone.

Someone I was reading the other day said the contemporary porn-star is aiming to look like Barbie.

Porn isn't about men and women at all. It negates the human; it negates the body. It's the expression of a warped, self-hating Puritanism

[kinderheldin.livejournal.com]

Actually, I googled Susan Griffin's book here mentioned, to see if it had a "search inside this" tag on it. I couldn't find the book on Amazon. Anyway, I found this prof's blog, where she's talking about the same phenomenon:
http://www.vickiforman.com/?p=306

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd realised till now just what a big issue this is.

These things kinda creep up on you.

One moment you're living in Pleasantville; the next you're living in Pleasureville.

We've turned sexual liberation into a new form of sexual oppression.