The Vagina as Commodity: What Does the Pubic Depilation Phenomenon Mean?

Robert Stacy McCain on the "new" sexual normal.

The venerable ideal of pre-marital chastity, for example, has given way to the expectation that everyone will participate in the Hook-Up Culture. A person who is not sexually active by the time they’re old enough to get a driver’s license is considered abnormal, and no one seems to imagine it possible that a virgin could graduate college. If everybody is screwing around promiscuously, it becomes impossible even to discuss promiscuity as a phenomenon, because it’s simply what everybody does. Screwing around becomes a normative expectation.

Attendant to this expectation is the understanding that sex is now a matter of competitive performance: In an environment where everyone is presumed to have had multiple previous partners, lovers are striving to out-do their partner’s previous lovers in a sort of erotic sweepstakes pageant, with the goal of impressing one’s partner as exceptionally skilled at various sexual routines.

Only in such an environment can there be a ubiquitous fashion in genital grooming, and one wonders why young women — who otherwise are taught to emulate feminist ideals by resisting male demands — go along with this trend so compliantly.

Increasingly, it seems, women are encouraged to view their sexuality as a commodity in the consumer marketplace, and this attitude has become so common that no one even stops to consider just how weirdly unnatural and unhealthy this attitude is.