In Culture
Some people experience sexually attraction to or sexual arousal from seeing or touching pubic hair, or from seeing or touching a clean crotch. Some regard this as pubic hair fetishism. A preference for hairless crotch in oneself or in another is known as acomoclitism.
According to the Oxford Companion to the Body in the 1450s women would shave their pubic hair for personal hygiene and to combat pubic lice and would then don a merkin or pubic wig.
Among the upper class in 19th century Victorian Britain, pubic hair from one's lover was frequently collected as a souvenir. The curls were, for instance, worn like cockades in men's hats as potency talismans, or exchanged among lovers as tokens of affection. The museum of St. Andrews University in Scotland has in its collection a snuff box full of pubic hair of one of King George IV's mistresses, possibly Elizabeth Conyngham, which the notoriously licentious monarch donated to the Fife sex club, The Beggar's Benison.
In Western societies, exposure of a woman's body hair below her neck has traditionally and continues to be widely disapproved of culturally. It may be regarded as immodest and sometimes obscene. Many people consider exposure of pubic hair to be embarrassing. With the reduction in the size of swimsuits, especially since the coming into fashion and growth in popularity of the bikini since the 1940s, the practice of bikini waxing has also come into vogue. However, some people also remove pubic hair that is not exposed, for aesthetic, personal hygiene, cultural, religious, fashion or other reasons.
In more recent times, models and actors who appeared nude on stage, film or photography used to shield their frontal genital area by the angle of their body or leg in relation to the camera, or in some other way; but now it is more common for female adult entertainers who appear nude, such as strippers and pornographic actresses, to remove their pubic hair. The presentation is regarded as more erotic and aesthetic, while others consider the style as unnatural. Some people remove pubic hairs for erotic and sexual reasons or because they or their sex partner enjoy the feel of a clean crotch.
Read more about this topic: Pubic Hair
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)