Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict Page A

was necessary: so many women get ingrown hairs from waxing, or they have irritated skin from dying their pubic hair hot pink or blue (often using a product called Betty Beauty, for “the hair down there”), or the glue from vajazzling creates clogged pores. The most disturbing part of the “vajacial” was that, unlike during a facial, when one’s mouth is presumably closed to receive relaxing treatment of the entire facial region, one’s mouth is not closed during a vajacial, and so you might find yourself making uncomfortable conversation with the vajacialist while she is nicking at ingrown hairs, pointing out areas that might benefit from a special vulva rejuvenation serum or from Pink Daisy labia bleaching cream, or suggesting the most gentle organic anal bleach (Dr. Pinks anal bleaching cream)—for next time.
    TRIMMING OR REMOVING pubic hair—the term for the preference for hairless genitals is
acomoclitism
—has long been a custom in many cultures for medical, religious, or cultural reasons. In ancient Egypt, removing hair meant fewer lice infestations. Greeks and Romans commonly removed all their body hair for aesthetic reasons. In Muslim cultures, depilation (removing the hair above the skin) or epilation (removing the entire hair including the root below the skin) is a basic hygienic ritual, on par with toothbrushing.
    In the sixteenth century, Michelangelo felt it was appropriate to create a David with stylized pubic hair, and by the eighteenth century, female pubic hair was often the centerpiece of Japanese erotic art, but it was typically not until the twentieth century that the Western tradition showed women with pubic hair. The celebrated nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, who seemed to have learned all he knew about women from art, not life, was so put off by his new wife’s body on their honeymoon—some think it was the sight of her pubic hair—that the marriage was annulled, unconsummated, years later. Ruskin never did get used to the notion of pubic hair and may have died a virgin.
    When Gustave Flaubert traveled to Egypt in the 1840s, he marveled at the women’s acomoclitic state: “The shaved cunts make a strange effect,” he wrote in his notes. “The flesh is as hard as bronze.” After an encounter with a prostitute brokered by a friend, he offers the following: “Firm flesh, bronze arse, shaven cunt, dry though fatty; the whole thing gave the effect of a plague victim or a leperhouse.”
    The art and practice of pubic-hair maintenance traveled with Islam through northern Africa to Europe. In the 1860s, a Turkish diplomat commissioned Gustave Courbet to paint
L’Origine du monde
, with the proviso that the model brandish a full nest of pubic hair. The painting created a public scandal for its extremely naturalistic portrayal of a woman’s bushy pubic mound and passed quietly through private collections before arriving at the Musée d’Orsay. It reminds me of the paintings of Lucian Freud and of the illustrations in
Th
e Joy of Sex
, which struck my preadolescent friends and me as scandalous. Why? Not because of the dozens of exotic sexual arrangements before us, but because the bodies in the drawings of men and women thus engaged were
so
strangely hairy.
    By the twentieth century, after clashing with Victorian prudishness, pubic-hair styling became—if not de rigueur—fully acceptable among the soigné Continental set. In 1930s Europe, the car dealer Baron Martin Stillman von Brabus reportedly shaved the pubic hair of his lover, Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, into a representation of the Mercedes-Benz logo.
    That seems commonplace next to the choices we have today. One can get temporary tattoos on one’s vulva, a practice called “vatooing.” (And again, a gentle reminder: do not google the phrase “Willie Nelson vagina tattoo.”) There is Betty Beauty dye, available in a rainbow of