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.

“Things that are considered to be attractive are also most childlike,” she said, “and hairlessness is something we associate with youth, children, and naked infants.”
She obviously hadn’t seen my baby pictures.
Jablonski went on to explain that women who are considered attractive often have facial attributes that exaggerate youthfulness and are reminiscent of children—thinner jaw, longer forehead, big eyes relative to the rest of the face, plump lips, small nose, and shorter distance between mouth and chin.
“In MRI studies, a huge part of the brain indicates affection, love, and an outpouring of positive emotion when a person lays eyes on a child,” she said. “So these same responses could be elicited in a man when he sees a woman with childlike attributes.”

was ghastly stuff. If a louse dies while copulating, then the pair can’t separate. The one that survives has to carry around the other’s dead body, connected via the genitals, for the rest of its life. I didn’t know whether to think it was tragic or beautiful—surely dying in each other’s orifices was more romantic than in each other’s arms, but still.

“You’re running at sixteen frames a second,” Langan said. “If you take out one frame at a time, each image will have a momentary truth to it, but it’s really the flow of it all that makes the difference.”

Keenan went on to explain a psychological phenomenon called top-down processing. A top-down process is when something already exists in our brains—a belief, an attitude, or an expectation—that affects our perceptions of the outside world. People judge a hill as steeper when they are wearing a heavy backpack. The more depressed someone is, the darker they will rate an image. How we see ourselves—our own reflection—is also colored in this way.

Our self-esteem—the idea of ourselves that exists in our head—colors how we see ourselves.
“That means people who have really bad self-esteem might think that they are less attractive?”

Along with positivity bias, he believes we look at our own face differently from how we look at other faces. “We look at other people’s faces in a holistic context—we see their whole face and all the expressions that go along with it,” he said. “But when we look at our own face, we’re not really interested in those social signals, but more for grooming purposes.”
In other words, we can’t see our face for the moles, pimples, pores, and smudged eyeliner.

Culture writes itself onto our bodies