the times | Saturday June 11 2022 27
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Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826The Love Island look is all about self-disgust
Striving to attain a version of body perfection that’s rooted in pornography is painful, time-consuming and demeaning
was disgusted with my person [that]
first evening”. Except Ruskin’s
expectations of the female body were
formed by classical statues, not
PornHub.
Certainly unrealistic expectations
don’t make us happy. Nichola
Rumsey and Diana Harcourt,
authors of The Psychology of
Appearance, recently polled 77,000
adults and found only 16 per cent of
women and 27 per cent of men
reported liking how they look. I’d
hoped equality would mean women
becoming as insouciant about their
looks as men: instead, sadly, they’re
growing as insecure as us.
Now plastic surgery is normalised,
with soaring demand for labiaplasty.
Once the pubic beard shrouded
“imperfections” but now waxing
exposes a woman’s outer genitals, so
those who fear they fall short of porn
stars get them snipped into a neater
shape, saving up for this modern
form of genital mutilation.
The unmodified self, says
Chambers, is an act of resistance to
“disrupt social norms and structures
that denigrate bodies”. But until “sex
positive” feminism challenges the
porn industry’s misogyny, women
will stay enslaved by its cruel
aesthetics. How can women have
come so far, yet still be racked with
self-disgust? The natural is political.
Emma Thompson is right: bring back
the bush.natural state is seen as dirty, ugly,
lazy and sexually repugnant.
The writer Chidera Eggerue made
a Channel 4 documentary in 2020 in
which she and fellow Instagram
influencers stopped shaving their
nether regions for six weeks, a
challenge they regarded with genuine
horror. They’d never seen their bushes
in adulthood, since salons will remove
“virgin hair” of 12-year-old girls as
soon as it appears. Even Mumsnetters
discuss the best depilation products
for pubescent daughters. While signs
of male maturity — beard, chest hair
and deepening voice — are
celebrated, girls are told that
womanhood is a tangle of tripwires
into bottomless shame.
Eggerue also interviews men about
their preferences. Most don’t mind
what they find down below, men
being far more sexually omnivorous
than women are led to believe. But
those who do prefer shaven parts cite
pornography: they prefer the bare
pudendum because you can observe
the action more easily. Sex for them
isn’t about two humans making love,
but replicating what you watch alone.
These hair-phobic men remind me
of the artist John Ruskin who
reportedly didn’t consummate his
marriage because, as his wife, Effie,
writes, “he had imagined women
were quite different to what he saw I
was, and that the reason he did not
make me his Wife was because hethonged bikinis that contestants must
wear at all times are cut so high it’s
obligatory to have a Hollywood wax,
where hair is ripped not just from the
front but from your tenderest
underparts, too. Odd that this process
to “look sexy” makes you resemble a
child. Or that it produces sore skin,
even ingrown hairs and rashes, so
sex at least temporarily is less fun.
But the imperative here is public
perfection not private pleasure.
In her new book Intact: A Defence
of the Unmodified Body, the
philosophy professor ClareChambers argues that social media
and selfie culture have generated
intolerable pressure to pimp the
human form into something both
unique, in its tattoos and piercings,
but also utterly compliant with
cultural norms. (Sad to think that 50
years ago Germaine Greer’s The
Female Eunuch argued the same.)
Chambers coins “shametenance”
to describe the never-ending
grooming that women, and
increasingly men, must perform so
their bodies are acceptable. Chief
among these tasks is ensuring genital
regions are hair-free, since theW
hen the great beard
revival began circa
2009, granting men
freedom from the
daily face-scrape plus
stubbly cover for weak or multiple
chins, I wondered if this shift to the
“natural” might benefit women, too.
Because lately beauty duties had
multiplied. Make-up meant not just a
dash of lippy but mastering elaborate
“contouring” techniques, while
professional maintenance was now
mandatory for eyebrows and nails.
Surely young women deserved
that extra 20 minutes in bed gained
by non-shaving male peers? Instead
the equivalent “natural” trend for
girls turned out to be long hair,
which requires more work, in
conditioning, colouring, extensions
etc, rather than less.
What I’d hoped for, indeed
expected, from a blistering feminist
revival, was the death of depilation,
the idea that the female body must
be painfully plucked and waxed until
it’s as shinily smooth as fibreglass.
Because like Emma Thompson,
interviewed this week by Emma
Barnett on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour,
I, too, “greatly regret the demise of
the full bush”.
In her new film, Good Luck to You,
Leo Grande, Thompson, playing a
widow discovering sexual pleasure
after a passionless marriage, appears
fully naked for the first time. Now 63,
Thompson says she has never much
liked her body. Yet growing up in the
1970s, at least our beauty role models
were dollybirds, bunny girls and
beauty queens, just somewhat
prettier versions of ourselves and, in
trying to emulate them, there was a
limit to the pain, effort and expense
we were expected to endure.
Now the ideal is a Love Island
contestant, sculpted, starved, worked
out, surgically enhanced, injected and
lip-filled into the ultimate beach-
ready body, more avatar than human.
Odd, given our new national concern
for mental health, that a reality show
that has clocked up three suicides —
including the presenter Caroline
Flack — and whose contestants are
offered post-transmission therapy, is
given a free pass. But it’s back, the
nation’s TV knocking-shop and many
young feminists’ guilty viewing
pleasure, rejecting any fashionable
notions of body positivity or
inclusivity in favour of the porn
industry’s international ideal.
On Love Island you won’t find a
pubic hair, let alone a full bush. TheThe natural state is
seen as dirty, lazy and
sexually repugnant
Janice
Turner@victoriapeckham