Enough with the Pubic Hair Panic

Bidisha is sadly not a reader of this blog. If she did, perhaps she wouldn't have written this piece in the Guardian yesterday. She is the latest feminist to tackle the apparently troubling issue of public hair removal, and porn as a motivator for this behaviour among women. Bidisha does (finally!) recognise that growing numbers of men are also removing their public hair, but she confines this to just men in porn, commenting that: 'You can see the spring branches of their willies and their little bobbling balls, outlined in their scrota like farm eggs in a chammy cloth.'

In Bidisha's analysis, men are all heterosexual (like I really need to say something about that?) but men are apparently able to resist pressures from their porn performing brethren thanks to some inner qualities. Bidisha notes that: 'Men are not as cowed, self-hating, obedient or biddable as women in this regard. They are not going to make the effort to do anything to please a woman, at the cost of their own comfort.'

Okay dokey. Don't worry, Bidisha still has lots of venom to fire to men, apparently believing that men can not (thanks to their near constant wanking at pubic hair-free porn) compute the notion that a woman might not have public hair (yet can oddly note the continued presence of hair on themselves but not in porn). She suggests that: 'Upon seeing some real hair on a real woman for the first time they may well vomit or faint, or both. That is something I'd like to see: a man so dizzied by the shortfall between reality and his own ignorance that his brain can't take it and he loses consciousness.'

Oh dear.

Julie Bindel on Facial Hair

Julie Bindel has written a rather funny and engaging piece in the Guardian's G2 today. She looks at the issue of women's facial hair, revealing that she has 'a particular terror of fuzz appearing on my face' and is fairly open about the contradiction of this position with that of her general no makeup rule. Of course, many of us have contradictions in our views (I certainly do) but it's nice when people are honest in this way. She highlights the efforts of the Hairy Awarey campaign (fab name) which seeks to tackle the social assumption that women's bodies should be hairless. Read more on that campaign here.

She also tackles a subject that remains so very taboo and the broader issue of body hair is one that icnreasingly affects men as well as women. It seems to me that men, particularly gay men, are increasingly under pressures to conform to a specific identity and body hair is an impotant feature. The 'bear' is all about the possession of body hair (and often facial hair too) whilst the twink is the opposite. More and more men also seem conscious of pubic trimming or total shaving of their nether regions. A subject that rather like women's facial hair we tend to avoid as a society.

Read the Bindel piece here.