by Kate Lister
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2 Carmelo M. Vicario and others, ‘Core, Social and Moral Disgust are Bounded: A Review on Behavioural and Neural Bases of Repugnance in Clinical Disorders’, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 80 (2017), 185–200
3 Marco Tullio Liuzza and others, ‘Body Odour Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Authoritarian Attitudes’, Royal Society Open Science, 5.2 (2018), 171091
4 Michael N. Pham et al., ‘Is Cunnilingus-Assisted Orgasm A Male Sperm-Retention Strategy?’, Evolutionary Psychology, 11.2 (2013), 147470491301100
5 D. P. Strachan, ‘Hay Fever, Hygiene, and Household Size’, BMJ, 299.6710 (1989), 1259–60
6 Alison Leigh Browne et al., ‘Patterns of Practice: A Reflection on the Development of Quantitative/Mixed Methodologies Capturing Everyday Life Related to Water Consumption in the UK’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 17.1 (2013), pp. 27–43
7 Calendar of Close Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office: Edward III, vol. 2 (London: HMSO, 1898), p. 610.
8 Geoffrey Chaucer and Jill Mann, The Canterbury Tales (London: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 821, 17.
9 Ibid., p. 123.
10 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D ’Arthur, ed. by Helen Cooper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 129.
11 St Jerome, The Sacred Writings of Saint Jerome (London: Jazzybee Verlag, 2018), Kindle edition, location 7151.
12 C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 108.
13 Abū al-Qāsim Khalaf ibn ‘Abbās al-Zahrāwī, Albucasis on Surgery and Instruments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
14 Martin Levey, Early Arabic Pharmacology (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973), p. 9.
15 Edward H. Schafer, ‘The Development of Bathing Customs in Ancient and Medieval China and the History of the Floriate Clear Palace’, Journal of The American Oriental Society, 76.2 (1956), 57–82, 57.
16 J. C. Mardrus and E. P. Mathers, The Book of the Thousand and One Nights (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013), p. 42.
17 Jonathan Reinarz, Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), p. 64.
18 Mandy Aftel, Essence and Alchemy (New York: North Point Press, 2001), p. 190.
19 Jacquelyn Hodson, ‘The Smell of the Middle Ages’, Trivium Publishing LLC, 2018
20 John Russell, Wynkyn de Worde and Frederick James Furnivall, The Boke of Nurture (Bungay: Printed for the Honourable R. Curzon by J. Childs, 1867), p. 68.
21 Quoted in James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 527.
22 Giovanni Boccaccio, Guido Waldman and Jonathan Usher, The Decameron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 543.
23 Tania Bayard, A Medieval Home Companion (New York: Harper, 1992), p. 130.
24 William Langham, The Garden of Health (London: Christopher Barker, 1579), p. 147.
25 Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 54–5.
26 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Legend of Good Women’, in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by Walter William Skeat (London: Cosimo Classics, 2013), p. 91.
27 Quoted in Karras, Common Women, p. 54.
28 Ibid.
29 Terry Gilliam, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (EMI, 1975).
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
A History of Pubic Hair
One of the best and scariest things about Twitter is the instant feedback. I have posted all kinds of historical titbits, which have led to some fairly heated debates in the Twittersphere. But no subject causes the reaction that pubic hair does. Whenever I post an image of a woman with a full ‘bush’ (1600), inevitably an argument ensues. Interestingly, for as long as I have been tweeting them, no one has ever commented on the state of a gentleman’s manscape, but a woman’s knicker ‘whiskers’ (1942) will upset someone every time. A criticism that comes up and again and again is cleanliness. Somehow, a full ‘thatch’ (1833) has become associated with being dirty and unhygienic.
Twitter users’ reactions to a nineteenth-century photograph of a woman with pubic hair.
A Victorian lady, resplendent in fuzz.
Let’s be clear about one thing: this chapter is not pushing you to cultivate a full bush, nor am I going to recommend fashioning yourself after an eel and marinating in a bathtub of Veet. Whatever the hell you want to do to your own body hair is entirely your choice: wax the lot off and decorate your bald pubis with macaroni pasta and sparkles, or weave dreadlocks and have them hanging down your leg. It’s your hair and I fully support whatever you want to do with it. But this is what I do want you to think about: when did our own body hair become alien to us? How have we arrived at the conclusion that pubic hair is ‘disgusting’ or ‘gross’? Because this is always the cause of the arguments: someone recoils in horror at the sight of a woman with pubic hair you could wipe your feet on, and voices this online. Having a ‘type’ is one thing, but this voicing usually goes well beyond expressing a personal preference, and marches straight into outright revulsion at the prospect of a lady ‘garden’ (1966) gone to seed.
When did this happen? When did our body hair, hair we have all got, hair that is supposed to be there, start to elicit the same levels of disgust as a matted hairball bunging up the plughole? It gets even stranger when you consider that a mere two foot north of the offending ‘silent beard’ (1702) is another crop of hair that we collectively devote billions of pounds every year to styling. A cursory glance at any hairstyle magazine reveals adjectives such as ‘glamorous’, ‘sultry’, ‘flowing’ and ‘luxurious’ being used to describe a mop that tops and tails another barnet capable of making adults wince. Again, I am not trying to convince you to allow your ‘pubes’ (1721) to go feral, but I do want to pause and ask why are we so anti-fuzz? Because that’s where we currently are: our own bodies revolt us, and we shame people for having hair that we have too.
So where did all this start?
Many have pinned our plucking obsession on the Sex and the City phenomenon, and there may indeed be some truth to this, but removing body hair goes back much further than Carrie Bradshaw discussing Brazilians over cocktails with the girls. The earliest solid evidence we have of hair removal comes from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. I say solid, because it has been speculated that prehistoric man would have managed his beard and hair – but without unearthing a neolithic Gillette Mach Three we are unlikely to be able to confirm this.
The removal of pubic hair is an ancient Islamic tradition and is done for hygiene, as well as religious reasons. Although the Quran doesn’t mention body hair, Abu Hurayra (AD 603–681), a companion of Muhammad, once said ‘five things are fitra: circumcision, shaving pubic hair with a razor, trimming the moustache, paring one’s nails and plucking the hair from one’s armpits’.1 The Niǯde Archaeological Museum in Turkey and the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara both hold examples of obsidian razors dating to 6500 BC, which are the oldest known examples of hair removal in the world.2 Removing pubic hair is still a widely observed practice in Islam today.
According to the Encyclopaedia of Hair, copper razors dating back to 3000 BC were found among ruins in Egypt and Mesopotamia; tweezers and pumice stones have been found in Egyptian tombs.3 This was done for aesthetic but also for religious reasons: Ancient Egyptian priests shaved or depilated all over daily, so as to present a ‘pure’ body before the gods.
Evidence of pubic hair removal becomes less patchy (if you’ll excuse the pun) in Ancient Greece and Rome. The Greek playwright Aristophanes (446
–386 BC) wrote: if women ‘pluck and trim [their] doorways like good spiders; the flies come strolling in’.4 The very wealthy Romans could even employ a ‘picatrix’, a young female slave whose job was to style her mistress’s pubic hair.5 But we also have evidence that not everyone in the Ancient World favoured the shaven haven. Written on the walls of the Roman city of Pompeii are the immortal lines: ‘A hairy cunt is fucked much better than one which is smooth; it holds in the steam and wants cock.’6 What this charming sentiment shouted from AD 79 tells us, is that beneath the toga some women were smooth and some were hairy, and some were steaming (apparently).
Of course, the Greeks and Romans were public bathers, so pubic hairstyling was of some consequence, but the coiffured cunt seems to have fallen out of favour in the Middle Ages. The supreme beauty for the medieval women (in Europe, at least) was pale, smooth, slightly plump, with a high forehead and a shiny face; nowhere are a lady’s ‘tail feathers’ (1890) mentioned.7 But, frustratingly, references to removing hair to achieve this ideal are very rare in medieval texts. A notable exception is Trotula de Ruggiero’s eleventh-century treatise De Ornatu Mulierum (About Women’s Cosmetics), which includes this entry: ‘In order permanently to remove hair. Take ants’ eggs, red orpiment, and gum of ivy, mix with vinegar, and rub the areas.’8 As concepts of sexual sin changed, attitudes to pubic preening also changed, and hair removal came to be considered vain, and therefore sinful. In the medieval Confessionale, clergymen are encouraged to ask those who came to confession: ‘If she has plucked hair from her neck, or brows or beard for lasciviousness or to please men … This is a mortal sin unless she does so to remedy severe disfigurement or so as not to be looked down on by her husband.’9
One of the most famous references to pubic hair in medieval literature comes from Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ (1400). A love-struck but simpering parish clerk, Absolon, is in love with the miller’s young wife, Alison (but she is having it away with her lodger, Nicolas). Absolon sings outside her window late at night and begs for a kiss. Intensely frustrated with his wooing, Alison sticks her ‘naked ers’ (arse) out the window, where, in the darkness, Absolon kisses ‘her hole’, believing it to be her mouth; he then jumps back, having ‘felte a thyng al rough and long’. Disgusted, Absolon then begins to shout that ‘womman hath no berd’ (beard), and Alison and Nicolas fall about laughing ‘A berd! A berd!’ For Alison’s Brazilian blowout to be described as ‘rough and long’, like a ‘beard’, suggests this sex kitten does not favour the razor.10
By the sixteenth century, texts that combined medical treatments with beauty treatments became increasingly popular. A 1532 beauty manual gives this recipe for a homemade depilatory cream: ‘Boil together a solution of one pint of arsenic and eighth of a pint of quicklime. Go to a baths or a hot room and smear medicine over the area to be depilated. When the skin feels hot, wash quickly with hot water so the flesh doesn’t come off.’11 There is no detail on this concoction being used on the pubic area, but we all hope it was not. Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana Andaluza (1528) is about a Roman sex worker, Lozana. She talks about whores ‘who pluck their eyebrows and others who shave their private parts’. She also recounts how she accidentally ‘burned off all the hair from the private parts of a lady from Bologna’ and healed it by salving it with butter.12 While some women were obviously willing to souse their ‘trouser sprouts’ (2000) in acid, pubic hair was seen by many Europeans as the must-have sexual accessory. Slang terms for pubic hair from the Renaissance are overwhelmingly positive and include ‘feathers’, ‘fleece’, ‘flush’, ‘moss’, ‘plush’, ‘plume’ and the ‘admired abode’.
Shakespeare makes a number of bawdy pubic hair double entendres in his work, suggesting ‘muff’ (1655) was de rigueur. In his Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare writes about ‘Sweet bottom-grass’ that lies between ‘Round rising hillocks’;13 in Much Ado About Nothing, Cupid is wryly referred to as a ‘good Hare finder’,14 and many have argued that the ‘black wires’ that grow upon the speaker’s mistress in ‘Sonnet 130’ is a reference to pubic hair.15 But more than just being the norm, an abundance of pubic hair was a sign of health, youth and sexual vitality. The hero of Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665) complains that an elderly woman he sleeps with had no pubic hair: ‘I apprehended my danger the greater because I found no rushes growing there, which is an observation of the people; judging the bog passable which hath such things growing there on.’16 The Renaissance Brit, in particular, favoured a Hairy Potter. Spenser, in Strange and True Conference (1660), wonders at ‘the Spanish mode of shaving off all the wenches’ hairs off their commodities’.17 And the Earl of Rochester declared, ‘My prick no more to bald cunt shall resort.’18
Thomas Rowlandson, The Hairy Prospect or the Devil in a Fright, 1800.
One reason for removing hair was pubic lice, which could only be got rid of by shaving, but an even more unpleasant reason for malting muffs was syphilis. Syphilis was first recorded in Naples in 1495, and one of the many unpleasant symptoms of secondary-stage syphilis is hair loss (head hair, eyebrows and pubic hair). Even though this is a rare symptom, the treatment for syphilis was mercury, which most certainly does cause hair loss. As a result, patchy pubes came to be regarded as a sign of disease. Whereas we may view a snatch patch as ‘disgusting’, your Elizabethan lover would have viewed a ‘bald eagle’ (1987) in very much the same way. In Thomas Middleton’s Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), a character called Audrey is attacked as an ‘unfeathered, cremitoried quean, you cullisance of scabiosity’.19 In Westminster Whore (1610), one ‘lascivious bitch’ is cursed to have ‘a cunt without hair and ten thousand poxes’.20 And in Night Searches (1640), Mill describes whores who are ‘out of date, some tattered; some want a fleece, some a nose’.21 One ‘Loose Song’ from 1650 tells of a man who refuses to have sex with a pubeless woman as ‘her stuff rustles like buff leather jerkin’.22
If a lady had got to the point that a comb-over was no longer disguising her tufty ‘tuppence’ (1987), she could always go for a pubic wig (merkin). The Oxford Companion to the Body points to 1450 as the year ‘malkin’ – from which the name for a pubic hair wig derives – first appeared.23 Rochester complains the ‘Merkins rub off and spoil the sport’.24 Mentions of the merkin appears in numerous slang dictionaries from 1600s until the nineteenth century. The merkin is also mentioned in Alexander Smith’s A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen (1714) in a bizarre story of a highwayman selling a cardinal a harlot’s merkin and telling him it’s St Peter’s beard: ‘This put a strange Whim in his Head; which was to get the hairy circle of [a] prostitute’s Merkin … this he dry’d well, and comb’d out, and then return’d to the Cardinal, telling him he had brought St Peter’s Beard.’25
Though some ladies may have been wigging it, throughout the eighteenth century bush was most certainly meant to be lush. Despite the introduction of Jean-Jacques Perret’s safety razor in 1770, pubic hair was still associated with rude health. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies 1757–95, an almanac of sex workers available in London, is extremely positive about ‘the mossy grot’. Miss Devenport is described as being well thatched, ‘though not yet bushy, might truly be stiled Black Heath’; Miss Betsy has ‘ebony tendrils that play in wanton ringlets round the grot’, and Madam D—sl—z’s ‘lower tendrils, which sport on her alabaster mount of Venus, are formed to give delight’.26 Cleland’s heroine, Fanny Hill (1749), describes the ‘mossy mounts’ of her ‘soft laboratory of love’, and ‘the curling hair that overspread’.27 Fanny also admires her lover Phoebe, who ‘played and strove to twine in the young tendrils of that moss, which nature has contrived at once for use and ornament’.28
Two girls and a muff, nineteenth century.
Victorian erotica is also full of praise for the ‘happy trail’ (2003), in some cases describing a ‘tuzy-muzy’ (1672) that, frankly, could scour a greasy pot clean. In Romance of Lust (1875), the hero Charlie Roberts describes many
furry lovers and finds body hair a turn-on.
Her position brought out all the beauties of the vast wide-spread mass of black curly hair that thickly covered all the lower part of her magnificent quim, ran down each thigh, up between her buttocks, and opening out on her back, had two bunches just below the two beautiful dimples that were so charmingly developed below her waist. There was as much hair there as most women have on their mons Veneris. Her whole body had fine straight silky hair on it, very thick on the shoulders, arms and legs, with a beautiful creamy skin showing below. She was the hairiest woman I ever saw, which, doubtless, arose from or was the cause of her extraordinary lustful and luxurious temperament. The sight I was indulging in brought out my pego in full bloom; as we both rose she saw it sticking out under my shirt.29
Francisco Goya’s The Nude Maja (1797) is considered to be the first European painting to show a female subject’s pubic hair, but women continued to be depicted with featureless genitals in high art throughout the nineteenth century.
Indeed, it has been suggested that one of the reasons the famous art critic John Ruskin was unable to consummate his marriage to Euphemia Gray was because he was horrified to find that, unlike works of art, women have pubic hair. Their marriage was never consummated and was eventually annulled, and the only clue we have as to why is in a letter written by Euphemia in 1848.
Francisco Goya’s The Nude Maja, 1797, is considered to be one of the first depictions of pubic hair in Western art.
Finally, this last year he told me his true reason (and this to me is as villainous as all the rest), that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife is that he was disgusted with my person the first evening.30
