I had a bikini wax on Monday and it did not go as planned. While technically it went fine - the standard itchy red rash gone in twenty-four hours, which is half the time it usually takes to vanish from my body, and a lot less than a week, the time it randomly took to calm down last time I had a wax - aesthetically it did not: I now have basically no pubic hair! Just some tiny stupid little square! I went in for (and only paid for) a standard bikini wax, i.e. an inch of hair waxed off either side so that I can loll around on the beach next week in a swimming costume without looking down at any point and seeing a random bit of bush making a bid for freedom, drifting in the breeze, waving its hairs in the air like it just don't care. But now the VAST MAJORITY of it is gone, and the tiny bit left is WONKY! VERY WONKY! It looks like a REALLY SHIT BRAZILIAN!
It doesn't actually matter because it is only for beach purposes, and because I am living with my parents at the moment and single so no one's going to be seeing it (although in my experience, people trying to have sex with you don't give a flying fuck what your pubic hair looks like, anyway - unless what it looks like is "crawling with crabs"). But I don't want just THREE PUBIC HAIRS! I went through the HELL of adolescence and all I got were some tits and a bush! I worked for that! It's MINE!!
I am in general Not For Brazilians/waxing it all off. This is because 1) there is no practical reason for it, as as I just mentioned, lady-fanciers having sex with you tend to be so happy about the minge in their faces they don't care about your pubic hair, unless your pubic hair is, like, encrusted with cornflakes. And 2) no one, as far as I'm aware, is filming close-up shots of what Seth from Superbad once called "dick going IN", so there's no need to worry about the bush impinging on that beautiful vista.
I will turn to Caitlin Moran's book, which puts these things much better:
This gigantic, billion-dollar Western obsession with Brazilians and Hollywoods, that millions of normal women have to time events in their lives around, endure pain and inconvenience for - and, I regret to tell you, ladies, actually makes your thighs look bigger - is all down to the technical considerations of cinematography. It's just a lighting thing. [...]
Given that it is simply an 'industry thing', our widespread adoption of it is as bizarre as everyone, in the early days of black and white television, walking around in the thick panstick make-up and black lipstick like the presenters used. It's like - ladies! This shit doesn't apply to us! We're not getting paid for this! We don't need to bother! Grow your little minge-fro back! Be Hair Now!
Equally, if you forget this waxing-it-all-off crap and instead hang onto it and love it, you can be
[...] safe in the knowledge that you have not only reclaimed a stretch of feminism that had got lost under the roiling Sea of Bullshit, but will also, over your lifetime, save enough money from not waxing to bugger off to Finland, and watch the Aurora Borealis from a five-star hotel whilst shit-faced on vintage brandy.
And finally:
Can you imagine if we asked men to put up with this shit? They'd laugh you out the window before you got halfway through the first sentence.
This is all from the book she just published, How To Be a Woman, an autobiography intertwined with feminist rant, which I just finished and which is really really good. Read it!