This article is more than 13 years old
This article is more than 13 years old
There's the Brazilian, the Hollywood and now the Showgirl… But what really lies behind the acceptance that women should suffer for their hairlessness?
Waxing. Even the word, with its central X, looks like a warning. At times I've felt like my reaction to the idea of a Brazilian wax has marked me out as not only old fashioned, but as almost… unclean. Not only is the effect weird, I think, but in essence isn't it sort of like paying someone to clean your bum? I'm reminded of the calls of a toddler from the toilet, that elongated, singsong "Fiiinished!"
The trend for hairlessness is interesting to me because it's evolved throughout my awkwardly formative years. In the late-90s Brazilians were discussed gigglingly in glossy magazines as a painful one-off for the glamorous sex-person; in the last five years specialist waxing salons have reported a tenfold increase in business. Aside from the issue of ingrown hairs, some have noted problems with where this might lead. Five years ago, as Brazilian waxes became more common, demand for labial plastic surgery increased, then for "vaginal rejuvenation", perhaps the creepiest of the rejuvenations.
The Daily Mail this week, in that charming passive-aggressive-stepmother way it has, sent a writer to have the Showgirl, a full body wax. "The new feminine ideal is of egg-smooth perfection from hairline to toes," she writes, describing the exquisite agony of having her fingers, arms, back, buttocks and nostrils waxed. It was this piece, so similar to the stunty features of 1998 where a journalist describes the bizarre experience of a bikini wax ("More painful than labour!" "Like controversial yoga!"), that made me realise the extent to which Brazilians have been normalised.
And not just that: those of us who choose to curate our own body hair find ourselves carrying with us a certain weight of guilt. As if, perhaps, in staying quiet we're saying too much. After 10 years marinating in images of hairless women (including the odd week of tabloid furore when a celebrity flashes a fuzzy armpit) and five years of bawdy office chatter, we assume everyone is getting waxed. With Brazilians, it's not like legs or armpits where, on a warm day, we can see exactly who chooses to depilate and who chooses not to – it's something far more mysterious, far more stubbly in its threat.
So fear sends us waddling to the waxer, looking for, if not the porny glow extolled by early adopters, then simply neutrality. We want to know we're normal. But what if fewer people are hairless than we assume? What if the panic that many women feel about their intimate areas, these rudely unswept beaches, is unfounded? Perhaps everyone is getting waxed only because they think everyone else is.
It's not about the old arguments – how female oppression is played out on the squash courts of our bodies or all that blahing-on about infantilising women with the removal of this curly signifier of adulthood – it's that we have begun to feel that body hair on a woman is wrong. Instead of questioning this instinct that we're impure in our natural state (or even just wearing, um, bigger knickers?), we have internalised the shame.
The more I think about it, the more bizarre I find it. I mean, it's for sex, right? It's to look more sexy. To look like you're good at sex. This is a pose I find odd, not only because all the high heels, etc, are often a bit of a pain, but because it's a pose that's basically repellent to other women, akin to bathing in Curious by Britney Spears. If everybody was comfortable basking in their body hair, then not only would the people who see you naked not expect anything different but there would be no pressure to conform to an imagined ideal. And it's this that makes me think that, in choosing to wax, a personal decision becomes bigger. The more people who embrace "egg-smooth perfection", the more others might feel compelled to follow.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or visit
theguardian.com/profile/evawiseman for all her articles in one place
