Mara Altman

“At the root of this is misogyny,” she said. “It’s a patriarchal culture that doesn’t want powerful women. We want frail women who are stripped of their power.” She explained that in Western culture, men are fundamentally threatened by women’s power and eroticize women who look like little girls. “We don’t like women in this culture,” she said. “Pubic-hair removal is especially egregious. It’s done to transform women into prepubescent girls. We defend it and say it’s not about that, that it’s about comfort. They say they don’t want their partner to go down on them and get a hair stuck between their teeth as if that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to them.”

Archaeologists believe that humans have removed facial hair since prehistoric times, pushing the edges of two shells or rocks together to tweeze. The ancient Turks may have been the first to remove hair with a chemical, somewhere between 4000 and 3000 BC. They used a substance called rhusma, which was made with arsenic trisulfide, quicklime, and starch.
In Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, Victoria Sherrow explains that women in ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Roman Empire removed most body hair, using pumice stones, razors, tweezers, and depilatory creams. Greeks felt pubic hair was “uncivilized”—they sometimes singed it off with a burning lamp. Romans were less likely to put their genitals in such peril and instead used

“How do you think it came to be this way?” I asked.
“At the root of this is misogyny,” she said. “It’s a patriarchal culture that doesn’t want powerful women. We want frail women who are stripped of their power.” She explained that in Western culture, men are fundamentally threatened by women’s power and eroticize women who look like little girls. “We don’t like women in this culture,” she said. “Pubic-hair removal is especially egregious. It’s done to transform women into prepubescent girls. We defend it and say it’s not about that, that it’s about comfort. They say they don’t want their partner to go down on them and get a hair stuck between their teeth as if that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to them.”
When I got off the phone with her, I admit, I felt pretty tense. She made hair removal sound like it was the beginning of the end of this civilization. I didn’t need that kind of responsibility.

I needed to know if there were any reasons why, evolutionarily speaking, humans might be more attracted to hairlessness. I have to acknowledge that during my reading, I did find evidence that even though hair removal wasn’t popular in early America, it has been done on and off for as long as humans have existed.
Archaeologists believe that humans have removed facial hair since prehistoric times, pushing the edges of two shells or rocks together to tweeze. The ancient Turks may have been the first to remove hair with a chemical, somewhere between 4000 and 3000 BC. They used a substance called rhusma, which was made with arsenic trisulfide, quicklime, and starch.
In Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, Victoria Sherrow explains that women in ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Roman Empire removed most body hair, using pumice stones, razors, tweezers, and depilatory creams. Greeks felt pubic hair was “uncivilized”—they sometimes singed it off with a burning lamp. Romans were less likely to put their genitals in such peril and instead used plucking and depilatory creams. When in Rome . . .
This means that though I’d like to place all the blame on advertisers, maybe they were just jumping on an inherently human trait and exploiting it legitimately.