she listens like spring

face-down-asgard-up:

moniquill:

thebaddominicana:

Earlier in this pregnancy, I filled out my “Initial Health History” form for prenatal and birth care. You know: check the box if you’ve experienced severe headaches, diabetes, all sorts of things. After the usual “Emotional abuse,” “Physical abuse,” “Sexual abuse,” I got to this very interesting item: ”ANY unwanted/undesired physical or sexual contact.”

read the link. so spot on.

[trigger warning LIKE WHOA at the link for rape culture, coercion, and general unwanted attention]

Because I can hardly stand the thought of these constant erosions of personhood seeming normal to our daughters and sons.

READ THIS

(Source: manifestfreedom)

karnythia:

tressiemcphd:

Insanely interesting.

lostgrrrls:

This is a really interesting article that I encourage reading top to bottom. While I like to keep myself trim, the whole idea of getting a full wax is still very strange to me, personally. That’s not a judgement on anyone else’s choices, I just don’t like the idea of seeing my own body completely bare. There’s a comment toward the beginning of the article about how many young men have never been with ladies that have ANY pubic hair, which makes me feel… something. Not sure how to put it into words.

I’ll leave you with this excerpt, but please click through for the whole thing. And sorry this bit is long, but I highlighted the first paragraph, then as I kept reading, thought, “Damn, this brilliant too! I can’t stop there!” and just kept going:

Two things happened just before the pubic hair disappeared. The timing is not arbitrary. I will reverse the sequence. In the 1970’s the female teen body became an erotic fetish. In 1974 Larry Flynt began publishing Barely Legal, with frontal shots of eighteen year-old girls. In 1976, an underage Jodie Foster played a 12-year-old prostitute in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver; in 1978, Brooke Shields did the same in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby. Both were underage when they played these parts.

It’s what happened before this that is significant: The female teen fetish went mainstream after feminism rose to challenge male predominance. It was in 1972 that the Equal Rights Amendment, requiring that females and males be treated equally by law, passed out of Congress. Feminists were hairy. Female body hair was a feminist badge — in arm pits, on legs, and particularly at the big V. It was the hairy girls, I recall, who were most likely to demand their pleasures. The feminist was not feminine. Just like Goya’s nude, she looked; she didn’t just want to be looked at. This eroticization of young girls recaptured the pure feminine, the subordinate, hairless virginal female against whom a man was clearly a man.

Feminism did something else as well: It sought to eliminate the sexual double standard, the public, pleasure-seeking man versus the private, love-seeking woman. It was now OK for a young woman to be heat-seeking flesh, looking for that spasmic flash. The paradox is that the young women who sought that kind of sex were in the vanguard of pubelessness. The Brazilian wax is part of that new erotic repertoire, a perpetual reminder that you are always ready for action. “I’m so aware of down there now,” Carrie says in the episode of Sex and the City that brought it to the attention of tens of millions of young women in 2000. “I feel like I’m nothing but walking sex.” In the world of the hook-up where partners exchange few words before jumping into bed, pubelessness functions as a signal of sexual readiness, not unlike lip gloss used to signal a girls’ availability for kissing.

The waxed female body is a pure, ready sexual body, its sex a public fact. If you look back in our history you can see that it was not long after women showed their legs and their arm pits — with shorter skirts, nylons and the sleeveless dress — that these hair-coverings were shorn away. The same is now happening with the vagina. Even women who are about to deliver babies make emergency calls to their aestheticians to get waxes. “Everybody is going to be in that room,” one explained to her waxer, “and I don’t want to have any hair.” Private space is becoming public space.

Because women could now forthrightly demand their pleasures — if he got his, she should get hers — they expected their sexual partners to grant them reciprocal oral favors. But there was a problem: American men tend to see the vagina as a smelly orifice. Recent surveys reveal that guys are unlikely to orally pleasure young women outside of a relationship. Some young men I talk to explain that they want their sexual partners to be shorn so they don’t get smells and urine traces on their faces, so that oral contact is more direct. In a society that has banished all human odors through washing, deodorants and cleansers, tooth pastes and mouth washes, it is no wonder that the smell of a woman has also been erased as a baseline experience. Hairlessness, like the vaginal mint, advertises that a vagina has been purified for male taste.

Reading a woman’s pubic hair is a tricky business. I think the disappearance of female pubic hair marks both a male disdain for a womanly body — its look, its smell, its very nature, but also a woman’s desire to look “clean,” the implication being that their natural bodies are “dirty.” Certainly microbes adhere to hair, but it is not really about hygiene. There’s soap and water, after all. It’s about becoming an instrument of pure pleasure, an active forgetting that one’s body is built to birth and to love. There is a deep historical irony here: Young women are pursuing sexual pleasures that were made possible by a feminism that also asserted the beauty of the natural feminine body. For these women, their sex is no longer dirty, but their bodies are.

I have been surveying student erotics for several years now and one thing is clear: Young women who don’t love and don’t feel loved tend not to orgasm when they have sex. Hairlessness, which does not contribute to female pleasure, is entwined with the rise of the pornographic, with love’s erosion as a believable state of grace, with women’s uncomfortable capitulation to sex as a portal to fuller affection. It is a mark of female sexual availability to men on masculine terms, a regular rite of submission. It is conditioned by the fact that just as women are achieving academic predominance and breaking into field after field as the economic order increasingly seeks the verbal, social and emotional skills they have to offer, the terms of trade are turning against them in the bedroom. Educated women must increasingly submit to the sexual demands of a shrinking pool of suitable men for whom the bedroom is one of the last domains outside of a football stadium where men can be men. And reciprocally for women, it is increasingly only their bodies that set them apart. Bodily hair masculinizes them, so hairlessness becomes a way to hold on to the feminine. Clean is acceptable code for pretty, like the smooth cheeks on their faces. Clean is a form of historical forgetting.

I don’t understand the fixation on hairlessness. Trimming has always made sense to me, but hot wax to achieve a prepubescent genital appearance? Not my idea of a good time.