Shaven Pussies Make Me Sad

 'Jesus Hates Bald Pussy' 
- Hunter S. Thompson

I started writing this as a response to a recent Hooking-Up Smart post where the talk turned to the current preference amongst college-age boys for the shaven punani.

It's kind of interesting looking at the 100 or so years of nude photography & also the developments in pornography & seeing how sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s the female body, which had been worshipped in its natural state as the wonder that it is for a hundred thousand years or more was for the very first time suddenly judged as wanting. Plastic, artificial bodies - silicone & botox & genitals scraped free of hair became seemingly commonplace pretty much overnight. Compare any Playboy pic from before 1984 to one from 1994, & then again to one from 2004 & beyond & you can see the whole sorry downward slide played out in pictures. The sad thing is that a whole generation has grown up with that being the norm, & of course it's hard for any of us to see outside our societal conditioning (cf. Feminism, for example, just to try keep this site on topic).

Shaving for women did not become popular until 1915 when the May edition of Harper's Bazaar was published with an ad showing a model in a sleeveless summer dress and bare armpits. This was supplemented by the Wilkinson Sword Company, who ran an ad campaign in 1920, whose purpose was to convince the public that feminine body hair was both unladylike and unhygienic. This ad campaign was successful and in two years the sales of razors doubled. Now, this way of thinking has become so engrained in our society, through generations of daughters following their mothers, that most women never question the fact that they shave themselves. - A History Of Shaving

A shaven pussy always seems a little sad, to me, like a laboratory animal, all interfered with & wrong, somehow. It's like when you see a beautiful wild moor ripped up & turned into a golf course for visiting Japanese businessmen. These are symptoms that have accompanied the growth of capitalism, consumerism & the advertising industry. Fear is the best way to make people buy stuff they don't need, so making people question & distrust their own bodies is a great way to make people spend money on waxing strips & deodorant, ladyshaves & aftershave, pancake makeup & anal bleach. The message being: Your Body Is Wrong Unless You Fix It (With Our Product).

The natural world is being made to seem unacceptable & natural processes are increasingly obscured by the artificial things we create. We are divorced from what our food is, how it is grown & where it comes from, we don't see what happens to the plastic shit we throw away, don't see it being buried in the ground in landfill sites, the battery acid seeping into the rivers. Our human relationships are carried out through glowing rectangular screens, & even our own bodies are becoming foreign to us. It's batshit crazy & thankfully a blip in human history which cannot last, but try telling that to a 19 year old. Does it even matter to them it never used to be this way?

We've had a little excitement at the Bal Nègre and Joe's mind has slipped back to the eternal preoccupation: cunt. It's at this hour, when his night off is almost concluded, that his restlessness mounts to a fever pitch. He thinks of the women he passed up earlier in the evening and of the steady ones he might have had for the asking, if it weren't that he was fed up with them. He is reminded inevitably of his Georgia cunt.. What gripes him most about her is that she doesn't put on any flesh. "It's like taking a skeleton to bed with you", he says. "The other night I took her on--out of pity--and what do you think the crazy bitch had done to herself? She had shaved it clean ... not a speck of hair on it. Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat? It's repulsive ain't it? And it's funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn't look like a twat anymore: it's like a dead clam or something." He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. "I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me ... it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously. You'd imagine I'd never seen one before. And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there's nothing to it after all, especially when it's shaved. It's the hair that makes it mysterious. That's why a statue leaves you cold."

- Henry Miller, Tropic Of Cancer 1934