Femininity (19 page)

Reduction of body hair follows reduction of facial hair, for here again, there is
no absolute difference in the distribution of hair between the sexes, there is only
a difference in amount or degree. Males and females grow a coarser type of hair at
puberty because of target-tissue sensitivity to the normal amounts of androgen we
routinely produce. As with hair on the face, the gradation is significant enough to
be called sexually dimorphic, like muscularity and height. Body hair on men usually
is more profuse and it covers a wider area, and that is a basic hormonal fact. Body
hair on women is subjected to the closest esthetic scrutiny, and most normal manifestations
are thought to be at odds with feminine appeal.

According to an electrologist’s chart, there are nine
common areas where the presence of hair may be cosmetically superfluous or indelicately
offensive on a woman’s body: underarm, lower arm, between the breasts, around the
nipples, lower back, abdomen, pubic zone, thigh and leg. Since femininity in all respects
is a matter of containment, a woman whose hair exceeds the esthetic limits of her
culture probably will employ some depilatory procedure to bring her body into line.

I remember when the fine, downy hair on my legs began to darken over a summer vacation.
I was startled and not altogether pleased with what was happening, but I knew what
to do. Remove it. I purloined a razor and hurriedly shaved the emergent fuzz off my
legs as fast as it appeared—even faster, so entranced was I with this grownup rite
of passage—and begged my mother for a pair of nylon stockings. Smooth, shaved legs
were sexy. Now I could be a pinup girl, Betty Grable. The hair under my arms got scraped
away too, even though that hurt, and putting on deodorant, a finishing touch to the
careful procedure, caused a nasty sting.

Newly vigilant, I embarked on the classic American-feminine mopping-up. operation
that soon ceased to be an exciting ritual of glamour and became a time-consuming,
repetitive chore very similar to housework. No matter how well I performed the required
scouring, within a few days the telltale signs of embarrassing neglect showed through.
During the many years I dutifully trimmed and clipped my natural landscape, I couldn’t
help but feel that the insistent new growth was some sort of repudiation of my work,
and also that the work itself was patently hypocritical, an elaborate ruse to pretend
that the skin on my legs was naturally smooth and that no dark shadow ever fell across
my pale underarm. If the evidence had to be wiped out on sight, a proper female body
shouldn’t be growing the stuff at all. Why did I need to lock myself in an esthetic
convention that denied my physical reality? There was nothing wrong or unnatural about
the hair that grew back in the places where I tried to will it away. It had a perfect
biological right to be there. It had a perfect female right to be there. What it did
not have, however, was a feminine right.

Thought to be a vestigial remnant left over from a time
when humans or our precursors were completely furry, body hair in modern times has
lost whatever protective function it once may have had. Since the coarse patches that
appear under the arms and about the genitals are synchronized hormonally to puberty,
they boldly signify sexual maturation and once may have served as a mating signal.
J. M. Tanner, a British authority on anatomical development, has theorized that the
so-called sexual hair may have provided a handy clutch for an infant when carried
under its mother’s body, as apes and monkeys carry their young. Perhaps. We know for
a fact that pubic and underarm patches require only small amounts of androgen at adolescence,
and all normal adults have some hair in these places, even the least hairy ethnic
groups whose leg hair, especially on women, is sparse. We also know that body hair
in both sexes diminishes with age, while hair on the face increases. Tanner’s intriguing
theory of the parental function of body hair, which I’ll admit a fondness for, is
at odds with other anthropological speculation which fixates on the relative hairlessness
of females in comparison to males.

Darwin once claimed, and others continue to echo in abysmal ignorance of modern endocrine
research, that hairless skin in females has been an evolutionary end product of sexual
selection because of its keen attractiveness to males. In other words, men preferred
to mate with less hairy females and chose them over the hairier types, and eventually
hairlessness became the genetic norm. Darwin was surely a genius, but he was wrong
about many things, and why females have less hair than males was one of them; yet
this specious teleological reasoning lives on. In
The Naked Ape,
Desmond Morris proposed that females may have lost their body hair “to make sex sexier”
by revealing their shapely outlines and by enhancing the gratification of touch, ultimately
tightening the pair-bond by intensifying copulatory rewards.

We don’t require a Charles Darwin or a Desmond Morris to tell us that men may be put
off by a hairy woman. Centuries before these gentlemen gave us a clue to their own
personal preference, Ovid the love poet had jauntily compared the hair on a woman’s
legs and under her arms to that of a rude goat. As it happens, hairlessness in newborn
babies and puppies does look
innocent, vulnerable and nonthreatening, while unkempt hairiness in werewolves, witches,
barbarians and madmen appears uncontrolled and fierce. The animal-like aspect of body
hair, to a very refined sensibility, and the fact that women under detention were
denied their razors, undoubtedly led a pioneer criminologist of the nineteenth century
named Cesare Lombroso to propose that the body type of the female offender was characteristically
hirsute. A similar claim was made for female schizophrenics, nymphomaniacs and prostitutes.
Under these hairbrained theories, Mediterranean women ranked high in all categories:
oversexed, violent and mentally unstable.

The biological truth that males are hairier than females, and that a lack of hair
is sometimes connected with faulty maturation, gives credence to the myth that vigorous
growth, especially on the chest, is evidence in men of superior virility and courage.
Phrases like “This’ll put some hair on your chest” are not without effect, and many
a smooth-chested teenage boy has been hauled off to a doctor by his overanxious parents.
Genetic propensity, however, does not unfailingly cooperate with cultural myth. Given
the ethnic diversity and individual differences among American men, a smooth or hairy
chest is evidence of nothing at all. As for women, the presence of hair around the
nipples is also related to ethnic stock (a study conducted in Wales reported an incidence
of 17 percent; this would be high for other ethnic groupings), but all prevailing
images of the beautiful, bountiful breast are so faultlessly smooth that a “normal”
feminine appearance cannot tolerate the existence of a solitary speck.

Ballet dancers of both sexes customarily shave their body hair and wear flesh-colored
tights, for hair does obscure and detract from the purity of shape and design. Black
net stockings and pink tights were essential to the suggestive cancan costume in an
age when women did not shave their legs and were fleshier than today. Without the
mesmerizing apparition of near-nudity in synchronized motion (thanks to the tights
there would also be no jiggle in the thighs), the high-kicking chorus line would never
have gotten off the ground. To think of “Swan Lake,” a Busby Berkeley routine or the
Rockettes’ precision drill with leg hair is
a ludicrous notion. When a leg is shaggy, who can tell if the knee is dimpled, the
calf is shapely and the ankle well turned? Unshaven it remains a utilitarian limb,
not a heightened, artistic vision of feminine flesh on erotic display.

Leg hair was not a problem to American women before the 1920s because the legs of
most women were never on public view. When a change in attitude toward recreation,
fashion and female emancipation during the prosperous, post-war Jazz Age made it socially
acceptable for women of all ages and classes to expose their limbs, modesty regarding
the propriety of showing legs was transformed with astonishing rapidity into a dainty
self-consciousness regarding “unsightly” hair. As depilatory advertisements reminded
their audience in the women’s magazines, the classic Greek ideal of feminine beauty
appeared hairless in sculptured white marble. More to the point, perhaps, the showgirl’s
smooth, leggy glamour, the sleek, hairless models in the fashion illustrations, and
the changing rules of etiquette at the beach had upped the ante of feminine competition.

Before the Great War, voluminous, skirted and bloomered bathing costumes for ladies
desirous of a refreshing dip were modestly worn with long, dark stockings. A woman
did not swim; she bathed. Not until the Twenties, notes costume historian Claudia
Kidwell, did social attitudes permit women the same full use of water as men. Inspired
by the advanced ideas of Annette Kellerman, Gertrude Ederle and other aquatic celebrities,
when women did take up swimming, a brief, functional swimsuit gradually came into
vogue. Alert to a trend, one depilatory ad took notice that “Women who love swimming
for the sake of sport find stockings a great hindrance to their enjoyment.” The new
craze for sunbathing, pursued with passionate interest on the Riviera by the smart
set of international socialites in beachwear designed by Patou and Schiaparelli, had
a trickle-down effect on brevity in and near the water. Unable to resist the tide,
public beaches in the United States began to ease their long-stocking regulations.
At the decade’s close, an abbreviated swim-suit with knitted trunks that bared the
thighs had won popular acceptance and was being mass-produced by the new ready-to-wear
trade.

Short dresses for street wear and the national craze for dancing also encouraged a
sleekly groomed leg. Abandoning her corset, the flapper rolled her stockings with
a circular garter when she did the Charleston, cutely exposing a flash of bare knee.
While the spunky flapper was perpetual grist for the Hollywood mill, the moviemakers
threw back at her a winning image of femininity that was even more daring, glamorous
and exacting in its cosmetic demands. Film historian Marjorie Rosen records that from
1920 to 1930 Hollywood memorialized the prancing, leggy chorus girl in more than one
hundred movies. There wasn’t a trace of “superfluous” hair in sight.

With the unprecedented exposure given the feminine leg, the stocking trade went through
a revolution of its own. At the turn of the century, when skirts touched the floor,
88 percent of women’s hosiery had been woven of durable cotton typically embellished
with clockwork, embroidery, lace insets and colorful patterns. Eleven percent of the
market was in heavier, serviceable wool. A lasting image from the Gay Nineties remains
the multiple white petticoat and the opaque striped stocking. Perishable silk in brilliant
colors, which represented only 1 percent of all hosiery sales, was reserved for the
upper class, for Sunday best, and for hussies. But with the vogue for short skirts
and the popularization of bare legs at the beach, the stocking of choice in the Twenties
was silk, flesh-colored and as sheer as the looms could make it, to give the illusion
of nudity in an impeccable, luxurious casing.

By the end of the Twenties, silk stockings in service weights and sheers had taken
over the women’s hosiery market. The silk stocking era with its dependence on Japanese
imports, its symbolism of prosperity and glamour (even through the Great Depression)
and its aggravating crooked seams and costly, frustrating holes and runs, lasted until
the shrewdly orchestrated introduction of nylon on May 15, 1940, a date that is famous
in hosiery annals for consumer mob scenes in the department stores and other retail
outlets. After a wartime hiatus when those without access to a black-market supply
were forced to make do with inferior rayon or leg paint and an eyebrow-pencil seam,
the triumphant reappearance of the nylon stocking at the nation’s
hosiery counters and on the feminine leg was welcomed with all attendant hoopla as
one of the sweet fruits of peace.

Although nylon was sheerer than silk and without the imperfections of the natural
fiber, the new technology did not resolve the problem of snags and runs; but it did
eliminate the embarrassment of a crooked line up the back of the leg, with a seamless
stocking that held shape through a couple of washings and was less prone to wrinkling
at the ankles. Still, the subtle tyranny of the nylon stocking over the minds and
actions of women for the next twenty years—until it was partially overthrown by the
anti-bourgeois fashion revolution of the Sixties—should not be forgotten. Sheer, see-through
nylons were the
only
legwear that met the test of both sex appeal and conservative refinement in rain,
snow, bitterly cold or brutally hot weather. Not only did their exquisite transparency
serve to remind a woman that she needed to shave every couple of days in order to
wear her stockings, but their fragility dictated a certain cautiousness and restricted
movement that the girdle with garter tabs compounded. The illusion of satiny skin
and impeccable chic that a pair of nylons engendered could be destroyed in an instant
by an ugly snag, and stockings could snag on the most innocent of objects, such as
an office desk. One could even have the depressing experience of seeing—and feeling—a
run while putting on a new pair fresh from the box. The imposition of a special cosmetic
vulnerability that did not exist in nature was the price that had to be paid for a
pair of acceptable feminine legs.

Hair under the arms was confronted by depilatory companies in the 1920s as though
they were missionaries to a leprous population. “Perhaps, because of an old-fashioned
scruple, you have hesitated to rid yourself of the disfigurement of underarm hair,”
ran the copy for Neet in
The Delineator,
a popular magazine for middle-class women, in October 1924. “Are your arms constantly
pinned to your sides? Or do you scorn to wear the filmy or sleeveless frocks that
the vogue of the day decrees? In either case,
He
is apt to think you lifeless and behind the times. He will notice you holding yourself
aloof from the swing of convention …” Ads for Zip had already employed a similar message:
“When you go to the beach this summer, are you going
to be afraid to raise your arms? Are you going to shrink from the scrutinizing glance
of your friends?” Alas for Zip and Neet, the swing of convention was toward the use
of a safety razor, fashioned to a smaller, “more feminine” size.