Joanna Rothkopf ’12 wrote a dank column near the end of her time here, which I guess you could call a “feminist column” (squirm) called That Thing Down There. (I squirm not because I feel uncomfortable to call myself a feminist, but because of how many people abandon ship when they hear a bright-eyed white-skinned Middlebury girl say that. It’s like sliding up in your Birkenstocks, whispering “sustainability” and popping your liberal arts insured booty on the hood of your daddy’s Range. If your rants start to smell like pop feminism, if you’re tagged as an activism fetishist, if you cannot skillfully walk the line between stone cold revolutionary c-word and really active listener to all voices, your take-me-seriously card is revoked. Side note: I recently have taken ownership of the c-word and I have a lot of feelings about it. Email me if you want to discuss.) That Thing Down There used to be a great, steady feminist voice on our campus, and I wanted to do a mini-homage in my vague-cloud-column this week with a haphazard brush with the discussion of modern conceptions of modesty and immodesty.
So let’s talk about that hair down there. Ooooh, touchy subject? Bush seems to make people around here more uncomfortable than talking about masturbation (but maybe still more acceptable than discussing anal play?). For the record, to all you ladies tagging Insta’s of your flowing Garnier Fructis locks with “long hair don’t care,” that phrase isn’t about topside mane. That phrase refers to pubes and armpit hair. Just ask Lil’ Wayne. The ability to hold shame and shamelessness in tension is one of the most fun feminist pickles to put on the side of a slice of hot meat at the Girldom Deli. We evaluate our goods and decide what we are ok or not ok with presenting to the world, instructed by other ‘doms, especially Sexdom and Media-dom. Personally, when I get home at the end of the day, I’ll take off all of my clothes. Visitors, friends, strangers; I cannot count how many people have seen my Ts. I’m not about to join a nudist colony, but I am pretty cool with being naked. And since high school, I’ve eschewed hair and felt a part of the norm.
Even being cool with being naked makes things a lot more complicated and body-centric than it seems it should. How many thinkpieces about Lena Dunham and her show Girls could go for 800 words without mentioning how much she featured her naked body on screen. None of them, as many secondary thinkpieces pointed out (including the one you’re reading right now, sigh). Censorship of da ladie$ in public spaces and forums has become most evident to me in artistic venues. At Maisie Ogata ’14’s performance art piece during the Symposium last Friday outside of the Johnson Memorial Building, I learned that you aren’t allowed to be nude in public spaces on campus. A couple days later, while helping Lily Miao ’14 install some art in the foyer by McCullough Social Space, she was not allowed to post a painting with full frontal nudity.
Who is ok with what and why are we ok with that? In Istanbul I enjoyed keeping it hairless down there. Often for religious reasons, many women (and men) in Turkey wax off a lot of their body hair. Elif, my Turkish bikini waxer, once answered the phone mid-wax. It was her mother. I find it worth sorting through the juxtaposition of how near someone is allowed to my nether regions and for what reasons to figure out just what the deal is. In traditional Istanbul, sex resulted in a kind of invisible or internal blemish, a stigma, but to get a full Brazilian was part of a ritual maintenance of cleanliness.
Our constant body evaluation is coupled with a shifting relationship with how much of this we can see on a daily basis as well as its connotations to others. The fake math of body economics is relentless. If I take my top off on Battell Beach, I am technically at risk of getting a citation. If I grow my hair out, I wonder how many boys here at Middlebury would pump the brakes at the feel of OG-sin, Eve-style pubic zones mid-romantic-entanglement. If my name is now Google-associated with the word “bush,” how many job offers have I lost?
Pubic hair seems to have a recent comeback in trendiness, even mainstream-ness, judging by recent articles in New York Times Magazine and The New York Times itself by Amanda Hess (a dope sex columnist, read up on her) and Marisa Meltzer respectively, about a month apart in publication. But even if the Times is glacial in its recognition of alt trends (Surfer chick 70s bush is suuuuuuch a thing you guys, it was not just hippies. Our moms were woooorking it.), it does suggest some sort of mainstream interest. As Hess notes in her December article and Meltzer in her January piece, several celebrities have expressed their tendency to keep it natch, and American Apparel, in their window display in Lower Manhattan, manikins posed with full bush under their sheer negligé. When I was in Los Angeles, capital city of hair removal down to the follicles, a group of post-grad friends confirmed their preference for bush. Turns out that hair is erotic to plenty of people out there. Recent mid-act with a signif. other actually left me worried about how bare I was down there.
So now I’m growing my own hair out, maybe because I’m a trend-chaser. Or maybe, I don’t mind getting less action in my final months here because I’m outgrowing Middlebury and its teenagers who are still learning that bodies are cooler and more fun if they don’t look like blowup dolls. Or maybe because my body, specifically my c-word, is the only space over which I feel I have political power at this point in my life. No matter what I choose to do with my pubic hair or how many people have seen my areolas, I’d like to think I still have purity of heart. Haha just kidding, I’m a deviant who’s going to hell on a River Styx Wet n’ Wild water slide.
Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS
