Hair in SFF?

Alessandra Kelley

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I think this is a deficiency in me, but I don't think it's unique. Notice how the characters in A Game of Thrones TV show (often lauded for being so realistically "medieval" in its presentation of a society) have hair styles that more or less fit in with modern sensibilities. The women (unless they're disguising themselves as boys/men or living as swordswomen) have long, flowing hair that's usually worn down and uncovered (unless they're being portrayed as old and frumpy), and the young, reasonably attractive men have short to medium length hair. No strange caps or bonnets, strangely plucked eyebrows, or wimples or odd hairpieces for the most part. Even the naked scenes even tend to show women with rather "modern" approaches to pubic hair, um, maintenance (i.e. shaved or a narrow "landing strip" and nary a mirken in sight).

I have a book called "Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film" which basically tells a history of costume through movies. One of the fascinating things is how much movies are solidly anchored exactly into their moment in time by hairstyles and makeup (and to a lesser extent fashions in underwear shape, stars being more comfortable in familiar undergarments than in the very different ones of the past).

No matter how committed moviemakers are to historic authenticity (or at least how much they say they are committed), almost none have been able to break themselves of using only the latest, most fashionable hairstyles and makeup styles for their stars. It is as though they truly believe that today's haircuts are beautiful, neutral, natural and universal as opposed to those ugly, weird artifices of older fashions.

Thus we get courtiers at Queen Elizabeth's court who look like flappers in the 1920s movies and Rosie the Riveter in the 1940s movies and teased bouffant girls in the 1960s movies and long-haired hippies in the 1970s movies and ironed-straight Grrrl Power women in the 1990s movies. And the audiences of the day don't seem to notice because all those things look everyday to them.
 

Reziac

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Keeping one's hair up makes total sense if it's long, but I was wondering why common women, in the pre-industrial era, would bother with long hair at all.

There's a common misconception that pre-industrial hair was a greasy mess due to the lack of shampoo, and was therefore hell to maintain. This is actually the opposite of reality. The invention of modern soap and shampoo has caused the greasy messes of modern hair, that then needs to be shampoo'd all the time.

If you switch to the medieval method of washing your hair in nothing but plain water, you'll soon discover that it no longer becomes an oily mess, ever, no matter how long between washings (again, only in plain water).

My college roommates were from Ukraine. They had the most beautiful silky hair. I didn't believe them when they told me all they used on it was water.

Well, this past fall I made the switch myself, and I'll never use shampoo again. No more greasy hair, no more scalp itch. Fact is, shampoo dries the scalp, which then tries to protect itself by producing extra oil (which can also irritate the scalp, causing flaking skin) and pretty soon it's a vicious cycle.

Protip: first time you use plain water, make it an hour-long soak in cold water. That will avoid the six weeks of having an oil well on your scalp as it adjusts back to what's actually normal (minimal) oil production. -- It may seem stiff and weird while it's wet, but that will brush away after it dries.

I've known very few men who prefer short hair on women.

Back to the health thing -- it's probably the instinct to choose a healthy mate at work. A female with an obviously-nice pelt is a better reproductive choice than a female whose hair has been falling out and is therefore short. (And the flipside... a lot of women prefer bald men. What causes baldness? testosterone.)
 

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Thus we get courtiers at Queen Elizabeth's court who look like flappers in the 1920s movies and Rosie the Riveter in the 1940s movies and teased bouffant girls in the 1960s movies and long-haired hippies in the 1970s movies and ironed-straight Grrrl Power women in the 1990s movies. And the audiences of the day don't seem to notice because all those things look everyday to them.

Absolutely, and I confess that I tend to see my characters walking around with hair that's nebulously late 20th and early 21st century also.

I remember seeing a movie set in historical Japan (may have been Ran) where the women all had shaved eyebrows and fake ones drawn in much higher on their foreheads. It did make it hard for me to relate to the characters, because it looked so strange to me.

The makeup is definitely another thing that stands out. For instance, all those historical movies made in the 60s where women (even medieval peasants or cavewomen) wore false eyelashes.

With writing, of course, we don't have to show the hairstyles, clothing, and makeup of every character in miniscule detail. I don't think I ever read a fantasy novel written in the 60s where women were described as having false eyelashes or beehive hairdos or whatever. In fact we're encouraged to drop hints without too much detail. So we may mention tears dripping from someone's thick eyelashes or something, leaving the reader to imagine "thick" in whichever way he or she interprets that. So it's really easy for the reader to fill in the mental blanks and imagine the characters looking more or less familiar in most ways.

So do you think that emphasizing radical differences in things like hair, clothes, cosmetics and so on could create a barrier between readers and the characters in our books? And if we spend a lot of time describing someone from a culture that's foreign to the pov character (and probably the reader too) having a really elaborate or unusual hairdo, at what point is is appropriating a real world culture's personal style (or exoticizing it) versus adding depth and reality to one's world building?

I asked something like this earlier, but what if I had a culture in my world where men wore (say) turbans for practical reasons, yet they otherwise had little resemblance to any real-world culture that wears them. Could this be seen as stealing or copying and pasting cultural elements that are important to some people?

Even after reading Nisi Shawl's excellent book, I'm still a bit lost on how to make things up from scratch without subconsciously (at least) integrating things from real cultures in a way that might be intentionally disrespectful.
 
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Even after reading Nisi Shawl's excellent book, I'm still a bit lost on how to make things up from scratch without subconsciously (at least) integrating things from real cultures in a way that might be intentionally disrespectful.

Assuming you mean *un*intentionally, then no I think this becomes ridiculously difficult. Existing human culture is so wide and diverse than unless you're going to have characters walking round with giant ants on their heads or something equally bonkers then whatever nuance of dress and personal presentation you can come up with is probably already practiced by someone somewhere.
 

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There's a common misconception that pre-industrial hair was a greasy mess due to the lack of shampoo, and was therefore hell to maintain. This is actually the opposite of reality. The invention of modern soap and shampoo has caused the greasy messes of modern hair, that then needs to be shampoo'd all the time.

I'm sure this is true, since it works for animals just fine. But I wasn't thinking about the greasy mess thing so much as why bother having pretty hair at all if it's going to be covered all the time (under a kerchief, headscarf, cap, wimple, bonnet etc, as adult or married women did in many cultures historically, and still do in some).

In Early modern Europe, women's (and men's) coiffeures often became quite elaborate, and the convention of a married woman hiding her hair from sight died out in the upper classes (at most, a cap or head covering became part of an elaborate hairdo that did not hide the hair at all). But common women tended to keep their hair completely covered still, presumably because elaborate hairdos took leisure time (and servants) to maintain, and the notion of just cutting it to, say, shoulder length and wearing it down or pulling it back into a ponytail for women did not compute until fairly recently in western culture.

But maybe it's something married women still enjoyed sharing with their husbands are something.

Assuming you mean *un*intentionally, then no I think this becomes ridiculously difficult. Existing human culture is so wide and diverse than unless you're going to have characters walking round with giant ants on their heads or something equally bonkers then whatever nuance of dress and personal presentation you can come up with is probably already practiced by someone somewhere.

OMG an ant hat. Scribbles furiously.

Seriously, though, I have a critting buddy who is good at creating societies from scratch that bear no resemblance to anything in the real world. Of course, there are still things that creep in, but he goes for the kind of fantasy that's more like Kameron Hurley's latest books--the setting and magic is quite unusual, and it's pushed the cultures that exist in the story in very different directions than what we've seen in our world. I don't know if I'll ever be imaginative enough to write something like that, as most of the stories running through my head right now are set in worlds that are a bit more like ours.
 
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Reziac

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...why bother having pretty hair at all if it's going to be covered all the time (under a kerchief, headscarf, cap, wimple, bonnet etc, as adult or married women did in many cultures historically, and still do in some).

Far as I'm aware, in Europe and the Middle East this was largely religious in origin:

http://www.torah.org/advanced/weekly-halacha/5763/naso.html
"According to Torah law, married women must cover their hair(1) whenever they are outside their home..."

-- which carried over to Judaism's various descendants.

Jewish law tends to be thoroughly practical, but I can't quite see this one, unless it's that a bearing woman (at the time a reasonable assumption for any married woman) might have greater susceptibility to sunstroke?? thus making head protection a durn good idea.

In Early modern Europe, women's (and men's) coiffeures often became quite elaborate, and the convention of a married woman hiding her hair from sight died out in the upper classes (at most, a cap or head covering became part of an elaborate hairdo that did not hide the hair at all).

Well, the upper classes were more likely to ignore conventions, so that makes sense.

And aren't some of those 'dos in the old paintings marvelous? (Tho I wonder how many were actually wigs.)
 

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Well, this all gets back to what's realistic or practical in a fantasy society that may not be, strictly speaking, based on any real world culture, yet has at least a little of the flavor of one of these times and places.

The fantasy world for the novel I'm shopping right now does not have any of our real-world religions, and in fact, there are many different religions and cultures interacting within it, and the issue of head coverings does come up, as one of my characters comes from a place where both genders are expected to wear hats or caps in public, and he now lives in a place where almost no one does,except when practicality dictates. That quickly becomes the least of his problems, and he finds himself needing to adopt the customs of his new home, but I wonder if I created enough dissonance in the character sometimes. One of the things I'm exploring is the difference between people who are more comfortable with change and people who aren't, but it's a pretty subtle theme.

I've wondered in retrospect if I shouldn't have spent more time on hair for both sexes. I was sort of envisioning a society with modern sensibilities re hair, sort of like all those moviemaking people who assumed that cavewomen wore false eyelashes, or the people in Game of Thrones should have hair and makeup that look like what we consider normal now.

That's the lack of imagination in myself I'm getting at.

Ah well, what can one do? Already rewritten the thing a kajillion times, each time adding a layer to the story, cultures, or characters, but at some point I'd have to just strip it down and start over if I wanted to make the culture nothing at all like Early Modern Europe (or our popular fantasy world perceptions of it).

One thing this thread has done is make me notice people's hairdos more out in the world :) I saw a really cool one today--fairly short, what I think Lillith might call pen curls (very small ringlets, smaller than pencil curls), and dyed a purplish red. It suited the woman wearing it very well. Not sure how I'd describe such a style in my fantasy world, though, as neither pens nor pencils exist as such (they have quill pens and string-wrapped, graphite writing styluses)
 
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Reziac

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...as one of my characters comes from a place where both genders are expected to wear hats or caps in public, and he now lives in a place where almost no one does,except when practicality dictates.

I always wear a hat. I feel naked without it. Can I buy your guy a beer? :)



...sort of like all those moviemaking people who assumed that cavewomen wore false eyelashes...

That came from the limitations of early movie cameras. Without false eyelashes, people often looked like they had NO eyelashes, especially outdoors. Makeup was troweled on for the same reason -- otherwise faces looked flat and lacked detail.

Not sure how I'd describe such a style in my fantasy world, though, as neither pens nor pencils exist as such (they have quill pens and string-wrapped, graphite writing styluses)

Twigs??
 

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That came from the limitations of early movie cameras. Without false eyelashes, people often looked like they had NO eyelashes, especially outdoors. Makeup was troweled on for the same reason -- otherwise faces looked flat and lacked detail.

Well, I'm thinking more of those Raquel Welch movies made in the 70s, where she had falsies that did far more than just make it look like she had normal eyelashes.

I think the Game of Thrones example is just one of many where movie or television producers from a given era will present hair, makeup and so on from a different era in a way that's not too uncomfortable for the current one.

I remember when I was a teeny kid in school, we'd have to watch those 50s and earlier 60s era educational films where all the guys had horned-rimmed glasses and flattops. We'd giggle because they looked so strange to us. In college, we giggled at movies made in the 70s, with the sideburns and bell bottoms. Then in the 2000s, my students would giggle at the films with the people from the 80s.

And so on.

Come to think of it, since fashion has been a thing in various cultures for a while too, it would be a nice touch in fiction if a pov character isn't just marveling or cringing at some strange fashion or hair style worn by someone from a different culture, but maybe laughing at paintings of people in outmoded fashions, or even at older courtiers who might be wearing hairstyles that's passe as far as the younger set is concerned? This would probably be more of an upper-class thing, though, as commoners wouldn't have had the luxury of abandoning perfectly usable clothes every few years.

One thing I ran across while researching European fashions and how it changed in the 1600s is that different countries in Europe adopted new hair and clothing styles at different rates. In Spain, for instance, women wore those ghastly panniers under their skirts for far longer than elsewhere.
 

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I'm glad this has opened you to noticing things like hair more, Roxx! As for the description, I would say describe the curls as the same size as the graphite stylus or quilpen. I happen to have a turkey feather, and it is approx. the same size as a standard no.2 pencil. You could also describe curly-kinky hair as being the size of a really small twig from a native plant, just as long as you let us know how small that actually is. There's a myriad of ways to do this really, if you want to try.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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Far as I'm aware, in Europe and the Middle East this was largely religious in origin:

http://www.torah.org/advanced/weekly-halacha/5763/naso.html
"According to Torah law, married women must cover their hair(1) whenever they are outside their home..."

-- which carried over to Judaism's various descendants.

Jewish law tends to be thoroughly practical, but I can't quite see this one, unless it's that a bearing woman (at the time a reasonable assumption for any married woman) might have greater susceptibility to sunstroke?? thus making head protection a durn good idea.

It does not have to be all that rational or reasonable.

It could be as simple as "I find that hawt, so you ladies cover it up so I won't be distracted by smutty thoughts."

It's not like there isn't any tradition of that.
 
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Alessandra Kelley

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Not sure how I'd describe such a style in my fantasy world, though, as neither pens nor pencils exist as such (they have quill pens and string-wrapped, graphite writing styluses)

In the real world when paint brushes and pens used to be made with bird quills, they were sold by the size of the bird with the quill needed. So duck quill, crow quill, goose quill ("Croquill" is still a kind of steel pen nib). I think swan was the biggest. I'm not sure what was the smallest.

But you could describe things that way, loose swanquill curls or tight sparrowquill curls, say.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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One thing I ran across while researching European fashions and how it changed in the 1600s is that different countries in Europe adopted new hair and clothing styles at different rates. In Spain, for instance, women wore those ghastly panniers under their skirts for far longer than elsewhere.

That was almost a patriotic thing, though. The Spanish invented the hoop skirt in the late fifteenth century. It was introduced to the English court by Catherine of Aragon when she married Henry VIII. They clearly liked the style and hung onto it longer than others.

Possibly it had to do with the Spanish heat and air circulation. But maybe not. There never has to be a practical explanation for fashion.

My favorite hoop skirt story is from 200 years later, at the end of the eighteenth century when the fashion had returned and vanished again.

With the French Revolution the panniers (side hoops like baskets on each hip) collapsed as the women of Europe stopped wearing colored embroidered silks and started wearing tight neo-Greek style white cotton cylindrical robes with the waist tucked up high under the bosom. Gone were the hugely wide, squared-off skirts of the eigteenth century.

Except at the English court.

I guess he queen liked her panniers, so they stayed as part of official court dress. Or maybe they were still associated with luxury and wide swathes of fabric.

Except now they were crammed under tight white neo-Greek dresses and they were placed at the new fashionable waistline, high and just under the bosom.

I have a fashion plate that shows some poor lady presented at court around 1800. In every respect her dress is the new fashion, except it looks like she has a bathtub strapped on under her armpits under her dress.
 

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It could be as simple as "I find that hawt, so you ladies cover it up so I won't be distracted by smutty thoughts."

It's not like there isn't any tradition of that.


What starts off reasonable doesn't always stay that way, especially once the reason it came about has been forgotten, or submerged into 'fashion' (which then eclipses the original practical reason for whatever).

Trouble is, the notion that something is 'hawt' and 'distracting' to males tends to come from it being routinely not visible. Cover the hair long enough and it eventually becomes an object of desire, even if it wasn't before. Little kids aren't the only people who most want what they can't have.
 

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The problem with washing really long hair is getting it dry afterward. Especially in different technological conditions where the options were mostly wring it out and sit next to fire or in the sun. So, I would think there was an element of keeping it covered to keep it from getting dirty because washing and drying was just a pain in the ass. (Plus superstitions about having a wet head leading to colds or other respiratory illness.)

Long hair also snags on stuff when one is working or gets tangled if it's not braided. So wearing it up under a cap becomes an issue of practicality if one is actually working in during the day. (Again, perhaps a reason upper class women were more likely to develop fashions that allowed them to wear their hair down. They weren't going to be out in a field planting or harvesting and didn't need to worry about getting their hair snarled in something.)
 

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It's definitely true that impractical fashions were most likely to take hold in the upper classes.

The thing about long hair being in the way in various situations (plus open flames were more common in pre-industrial times) is definitely true, though that didn't necessarily stop men from wearing theirs mostly uncovered. Sometimes they pulled it back in what we'd call a ponytail today. Ponytails and barrettes are pretty ubiquitous for women with long hair today, especially when they're working in places where they want their hair out of their faces or doing sports or something. But they seemed to take a long time to catch on for women, at least in western Europe.

As an aside--there were two things that infuriated my dad about the "younger" generation when I was a kid: bare feet, and women wearing long, unbound hair. He was always telling us we were going to step on a nail re the feet, and he was always telling me I was going to get my hair caught in something or catch it on fire if I didn't pull it back. I think he just disliked bare feet and long, unbound hair on a visceral level because he associated the former with the lower classes (he lived in a place where the farm kids didn't wear shoes except in winter, and they got hookworm and stuff), and for the latter, because women just didn't wear their hair that way when he was a young man.

But the generations thing re hairstyles and fashion are often ignored in fantasy.

Interesting thought about coverings for keeping hair from getting dirty. In the modern era, we tend to think of dirty hair as arising from our own sweat and oils, not the external environment. But of course, they worked in the fields and didn't always have paved roads back then. And they burned wood, peat and coal and so on, So things would have been pretty dusty/sooty.

And men did wear hats a lot of the time too, though they didn't necessarily cover their entire heads/all their hair.
 
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It's missing underwear and socks that baffle me. Do people not wear them in the future. Do aliens never wear them at all?

Even shoes, for that matter. You'd think all an intelligent alien centipede could talk about would be shoes, but near as I can tell, they must all go barefoot. Or bare whatever those things are on the end of their legs.

But hair? Nope, I see too much weird hair in SF movies. I don't miss it at all in the books. My characters have whatever kind of hair your imagination says they have.
 

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I think he just disliked bare feet and long, unbound hair on a visceral level because he associated the former with the lower classes (he lived in a place where the farm kids didn't wear shoes except in winter, and they got hookworm and stuff), and for the latter, because women just didn't wear their hair that way when he was a young man.
Like how my mom hated it when the style became to wear a bra with pretty straps underneath your tank top. :)

She didn't mind tank tops; she minded the idea of someone letting their underwear show. It had been drilled into her that having anyone glimpse your underwear was an abject public humiliation. She couldn't get her brain around the idea that someone might consider their bra strap a harmless bit of fabric to put on display.
 

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I have to admit to struggling with that one for a long time, and I'm only 22. Because of my private Christian school upbringing, I used to only feel comfortable when the straps were wide enough to cover the bra. (Tank tops were a no-no, but my mom assured me it was fine outside of school. :tongue) I'm basically okay with wearing spaghetti strap tank + bra now, but the first few times I did it I felt SO trampy.
 
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Alessandra Kelley

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Like how my mom hated it when the style became to wear a bra with pretty straps underneath your tank top. :)

She didn't mind tank tops; she minded the idea of someone letting their underwear show. It had been drilled into her that having anyone glimpse your underwear was an abject public humiliation. She couldn't get her brain around the idea that someone might consider their bra strap a harmless bit of fabric to put on display.

I have to admit to struggling with that one for a long time, and I'm only 22. Because of my private Christian school upbringing, I used to only feel comfortable when the straps were wide enough to cover the bra. (Tank tops were a no-no, but my mom assured me it was fine outside of school. :tongue) I'm basically okay with wearing spaghetti strap tank + bra now, but the first few times I did it I felt SO trampy.

I found it such a relief. My entire adolescence was spent in agony trying to keep bra straps lined up under tank top straps.

Do you know some tops had little ribbons which snapped on just to keep your bra straps lined up with them?

To heck with that forever, I say.
 

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That's actually reminded me of another hair issue: underarm hair.

Women in the US haven't been able to let it grow for a full hundred years now (O thank you, Gillette advertisers, grr!).

I don't know if any cultures made anything special out of it, but I can bet our current baby-naked underarm look would be considered as weird to medievals as that bizarre naked pubes fashion.
 

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It's missing underwear and socks that baffle me. Do people not wear them in the future. Do aliens never wear them at all?

Neither are necessary.

And are rarely cultural expressions as important as hair is.

Even shoes, for that matter. You'd think all an intelligent alien centipede could talk about would be shoes, but near as I can tell, they must all go barefoot. Or bare whatever those things are on the end of their legs.

I prefer to go barefoot whenever possible.

Shoes are unnatural.
 
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kuwisdelu

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I don't know if any cultures made anything special out of it, but I can bet our current baby-naked underarm look would be considered as weird to medievals as that bizarre naked pubes fashion.

I would love to hear about a culture that styles their pubic hair.
 

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It's missing underwear and socks that baffle me. Do people not wear them in the future. Do aliens never wear them at all?

Even shoes, for that matter. You'd think all an intelligent alien centipede could talk about would be shoes, but near as I can tell, they must all go barefoot. Or bare whatever those things are on the end of their legs.

Well, if I had 100 feet, the daily chore of putting on and taking off shoes might be too much unless I had several servants to help me. ;) I tend to time my work, errands and dog walking and so on so I only have to put the stupid things on once a day, and when they're off they're off for good.

And I really hope our alien centipedes don't have feet that are as sweaty and stinky as some humans'. I came of age in the era of vans tennies and top siders sans socks, and still have some jr. high flashbacks about people sitting behind me in class with their sweat-impregnated shoes up on the bar underneath my chair.

But yeah, even bipedal aliens are often sans shoes, which might make sense on a spaceship or space station (but then it would for humans too), but not for the surface of a planet with thorns and toxic wildlife.

I would love to hear about a culture that styles their pubic hair.

Lol, I'm afraid that might be in the realm of TMI for me in a book. I remember being very freaked out the first time I heard what a Brazillian wax was, not only because it sounded painful and embarassing to get, but because of the underlying expectation that people should worry about how they look "down there"? My reaction was, "Oh great, another body part I have to be self conscious about now!"

Like how my mom hated it when the style became to wear a bra with pretty straps underneath your tank top. :)

Ha. I may be your mom's age. I always assumed, though, that the gals walking around with their bra straps showing under their tanks just weren't aware they were showing or didn't care that much. No idea they were doing it on purpose. The closest I can bring myself to doing that is to wear a sports bra under a tank.
 
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Reziac

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Women in the US haven't been able to let it grow for a full hundred years now (O thank you, Gillette advertisers, grr!).

I dunno... I know plenty of women who leave it grow. Imagine it braided. (Does it ever get that long??) Or dyed bright colors. Maybe color-coordinated with the nicely-styled pubic hair.

It exists!

http://www.bettybeauty.com/

I once met a guy who shaved ALL his body hair (and he was naturally fairly hairy), cuz his ladyfriend was Blackfeet and she found hair anywhere on the body to be unnatural.