Guestblog: Why I Will Not Be Waxing Private Bits

Can it really be ten years since Mel Gibson starred, with Helen Hunt, as the machismo advertising executive Nick Marshall in the film ‘What Women Want’?

It has been even more years since the photographer Helmut Newton took a series of pictures of Hanna Schygulla, in the role of Lili Marlene that were rejected by Vogue.

Newton is something of an enigma. His pictures are loved by men, and many women too, but he has been savaged by feminists for his ballsy images of big women clad only in high heeled shoes.

Images of women wearing high heels are to be found on murals dating from 3500 BC in Egypt, and big women were in fashion long before that.

In 1553 Queen Catherine de’ Medici commissioned a pair of high heeled shoes.

The high heel was worn by fashionable men in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and still finds favour with cowboys today. The reason is not so much that it makes the wearers seem taller but that it forces the hips to swing provocatively, which is essential to the image of a gun-slinger, or court rake.

It is women though who have always been the main supporters of the high heel shoe industry. In Massachusetts it was once the case that women were banned from wearing high heels because they could ensnare a man. Wearers were tried as a witches.

You see a high heel has effect of placing tension on the calf muscles, as any sales assistant will tell you after a long day in the store, with the result that the lower leg mimics the line of the buttocks adding to the wearer’s sex-appeal. Remember high heels also force the ‘derriere’ to swing more provocatively!

What I most admire about Newton’s nudes, though, is that he took them during a time when the cult of anorexia was at its highest within the fashion industry. His images may have been surreal but the women were certainly beings of the flesh.

Incidentally, Newton also took the definitive portrait of Margaret Thatcher during her time as prime minister. She hated it even though it is the one used today on her web site.

Nick Marshall, played by Gibson in ‘What Women Want’, is given the job of attempting to market products aimed at women. The fashion industry in the USA turned over 1,348.9 million dollars last year. What’s more several new markets are emerging notably China. The 4.6 billion dollars spent in South Africa is considered chicken feed by those in the know.

The problem with all this consumption is not that women don’t deserve to be beautiful, or clad, but rather that most of this buying is unnecessary.

Gentle feminist reader, feel free at this point to jump to the bottom of the page and leave an impassioned comment berating men for their desire to possess dozens of power tools, usually electric drills, which lay unused in cupboards for years on end.

And what about your man’s collection of ‘World of Warcraft’ and other violent video games, or the Terminator movies, hidden with less wholesome materials in his den? Go on scroll down and comment about those too.

I can offer no defence for such peccadilloes, but this article is about me and my private bits rather than what might, or might not be, hidden in your closets.

The late Anita Roddick, who made a fortune selling beauty products wrote: “There is no cream in the world that will restore youth to a 50-year old woman. But for some reason we let the beauty industry sell us that hope.”

How wise. I miss her.

You see most of the ideas women have about what makes fashion, or beauty, are manufactured by the like of Anna Wintour and her colleagues at Vogue, New York. If you doubt this simply buy the DVD of ‘The September Issue’ which follows Ms. Wintour and her crew as she launches the fashion trend for the coming year.

Newton was working on a commission for Vogue in 1971 when he suffered a near fatal heart attack. It left him maimed for the rest of his life, He created some of his best work in the following thirty years, including the ‘Big Nudes’. Love, or hate, his work you must admire his zest for life!

He writes of presenting his images of Hanna Scygulla to German Vogue in 1980: ‘After the showing there was dead silence. None of the editors uttered a word-I was perplexed: the photos were good, Sygulla looked great. Then the editor in chief broke the silence: “The underarm hair,” she uttered.

In 1979 Christopher Lasch wrote a book called ‘The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations‘. In it he argued that we are being driven by market forces, and in turn are driving those forces, to consume in order to augment our self-images rather than out of necessity. The need to do being rooted in a sense of self-hatred born out of inadequacy that propels us into projecting grandiose self images. He would have hated self-branding!

Despite what politicians may assure you, our planet is in a state of emergency. The narcissm that Lasch and others have written about is fuelling industries that have little to do with garments, beauty, or even entertainment yet are for some as addictive as cocaine.

Instead of being self-worshiping we could instead be using our resources to acknowledge the talents and beauty of our family, friends and neighbours. Not for the self-serving reason of winning friends and influencing people but because, when you get beyond the mind chatter fuelled by the media of our sick society, people really are worth it.

Of course we must also support research into alternative ways of obtaining drinking water, and generating energy, if you have any aspirations for our grandchildren

So right here and now, on this web site, in full public view, I solemnly declare that as a token of solidarity with my ecologically minded feminist brethren, I will not be waxing my private bits.

Stephen Bray
Stephen wrote this in response to a chat on twitter about should men wax their chests?

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