A few years ago I painted a series of pictures, based on the cycle of life/desire/death. Each featured the pubic area sampled from an historical representation of a female nude (because of course the way that hetero males are raised we are born from a vagina and spend our teen/ adult years yearning for the same [ I am aware that not every person who is woman born passed through a vagina, thankyou very much Shakespeare scholars]).
It was quite an obvious point, that has often been raised, I wished to be prominent about these works that none of the vaginas had pubic hair. Of course we know about Ruskin’s shock at his wife’s pubes, due to his classical up bringing, but even today, a lady with hair can be shocking. Not so much when it is in her nether regions, but it is seen as horrific to have hairy legs and grotesque o sport hairy pits….
My eyes were opened to this by my partner, who had previously been a habitual remover of body hair, but having questioned her long standing motive for doing so, she decided to stop trimming all over. I confess this did not bother me. I had known her without hair, and now she had some it was…. no issue.
Regarding the grotesque appearance of manly, animalistic, disgusting armpit hair…. again, no issue.
Throughout nature we often see forms repeated, or we are able to interpret forms in such a way that we place humanistic values to them e.g seeing eyes in wood, the suggestion of a phallus in certain flowers etc
These repetitions also apply to the human body. We are aware that the female breasts replicate the appearance of a bottom, as a mating lure, and that advertisers have drawn allusions between vaginas and belly buttons and lips, but look at the armpit….
Initially, what do you see? A fleshy crack, an arm beside the body creates a semblance of cleavage, it also creates a little pubic v at the top of the join.
Here are some armpits painted by Lucian Freud. And below a couple of pubic regions.
The armpit is warm, it is sensitive, it is soft. The hairs that grow here are likewise soft and springy like pubic hairs. There is a tactile similarity to running ones fingers across the pubic region of a woman with hair, and the armpit of a woman with hair.
Yeah, I’m not completely sure where I was going with this, but, it is a womans choice whether she chooses to grow or trim her hair, and she should not be made to feel abnormal whatever route chooses. In fact whatever anyone chooses to do with their body is sexy in its own way, so fuck you if you don’t like it!
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