the phenomenon of male>female age gaps being normative in het relationships is also probably worthy of analysis...
Not to be a genetic determinist or anything, but it's easy to argue that that has more to do with different aging/life cycles in men and women than anything else. We're all driven at a genetic level to mate and produce offspring. Basically, women who plan on having children (and statistically most women do end up having a child or two in their lives) really need to start getting on that sometime in their twenties or early thirties, because after that point . Men have longer, and the need to settle down is less pressing. Thus, in long-term hetero relationships, older men tend to end up with younger women.
If you want to get all pop evolutionary psychology on it, it can be argued that males and females have different criteria for mate suitability. From an evolutionary psych perspective, females are evaluated by males primarily in terms of their genetic suitability for producing healthy and successful offspring, and most of the visual cues for that have fed into our standards of beauty. Males, however, are evaluated by females according to their ability and willingness to provide resources for their potential offspring.
The short form of this is that women and men have different kinds of currency in the dating marketplace, and while women derive theirs from physical attractiveness, men derive theirs from making money. Female "evolutionary spending power" peaks early, since women are generally considered most attractive in their early to mid-twenties, and so that's when they're most likely to find a desirable mate. Male "evolutionary spending power," however, grows over time, with their actual spending power. Few men make less money at 35 than they did at 21, but few women are generally understood to be as physically attractive at 35 as they were at 21.
However, I do believe you're missing one very important reason for pube-shaving, which is the age-old problem of pubes on the tongue/in the teeth
I don't really mind getting them caught in my teeth or anything like that, but when you get that one stray that sticks to the inside of your throat, and you can't seem to wash it down with anything, and it just kind of tickles.... madness.
However, it's not worth the trade-off to me. I prefer the natural or gently-trimmed look aesthetically myself, and I'm willing to put up with the occasional curly hair in my throat. I don't especially dislike the shaved look, but it doesn't really do anything for me, and I hate when a partner unveils their shaved genitals like I'm supposed to be driven wild and I have to either react honestly and kill the moment or feign arousal, which I really think is just an awful thing to do.
I think that your partner should have a say in your pube-length, as they are the person that spends the most time down there. If they want it short, take it short. It's polite.
I can definitely get behind that idea.
Though this may be neither here nor there, I am heartily sick of sneering, Army-surplus clad Dream Theatre fans slagging off women in the street for the crime of wearing pink or having blonde hair etc etc.
I think I may just be sick of Dream Theatre fans in general. But, yes, I loathe the puritanical reactions of people who condemn hair dye, shaving, tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery, etc., for any reason. Whatever your argument against any kind of body manipulation or alteration as willingly performed by adults, I can't see that your concerns trump the importance of the presumption of the sovereignty of individuals over their own bodies.
I would probably link it to the aesthetics of porn becoming more desirable, particularly for young people (the 16-30 age group, roughly).
But porn didn't used to be such a hair free zone. Neither did strip clubs - I remember a friend of mine who had been shaved being forced to grow a landing strip* (aka racing stripe) in order to get a job stripping. I would say that 15-20 years ago, it was much more common to see women in porn with a landing strip than totally shaved, though the racing stripe seemed to be more common in porn than in real life at the time**. I only really started noticing shaved pussies as the norm in porn around the same time it seemed to be becoming the norm outside of porn.
There's some kind of co-evolution thing going on here, maybe, where the women in porn started off as being more tightly groomed than women outside of porn, then as porn became mainstreamed, especially in the dramatic way it's mainstreamed for hetero women in the past decade, there was a sort of "arms race" of genital shaving, until shaved bald became the norm both inside and out of porn.
* There's a strip club in Austin, TX called the Landing Strip, and it's right next to the airport. Classic.
** Admittedly, my sample for "real life" at the time was much more limited, seeing as how I was between 11-16 years old in the time period in question. |
