Luckily, I didn't have to watch the cloth strips being torn off her skin in a merciless fashion. The bride's body was largely obscured by a curtain, but our conversation was routinely interrupted by her quiet whimpering and cursing, quickly followed by unsympathetic scolding from the aesthetician and another angry-sounding rrrrrrip.

It is standard practice in most of MENA (as well as other regions with a high proportion of Muslims) to remove all body hair just prior to marriage. In fact, it is fairly common for Muslim women to keep their sensitive bits completely bare once they are married (or even before, depending on preference and local custom). Having a hairless or extensively "manicured" genital area is de rigeur for many Muslims, Arab or otherwise, regardless of gender (actually, I wasn't aware that the same rules applied to males, but I have since been educated).

In Western countries (or at least North America, where I have direct expertise), full pubic waxing has only just become fashionable among the celebrity/socialite set and is known as the "Brazilian" bikini wax. So named, according to my fashion magazines, because the procedure was first offered in the US by an upscale Manhattan salon run by 7 Brazilian-born sisters (ignoring for a moment the hundreds of private Iranian/Lebanese/Indian aestheticians who have been waxing or threading everything off for at least a few decades).

Obviously a bare or nearly-bare pubic area has other connotations in the West, when compared to the East. A ghoulish demonstration of this difference might still be available on a message board where US soldiers posted photos of Iraqi carnage in exchange for porn. The discussion around one photo, an Iraqi woman naked from the waist down with her lower leg blown off, was particularly memorable for me. Commenters were wondering why her pubic area was completely bare and "deduced" that she must be a prostitute, based on their very Western reading of waxed/shaved genitals. A sickening example, but it illustrates the difference in a most profound way.

Now that I've made this fluffy entry irreparably serious, we can further explore the Western view of "Brazilian" bikini waxing. A clear trend appeared sometime in the late 90s, as shown by two stories in Salon.com: Wax On (1998) and Faster Pussycat, Wax! Wax! (1999). The reason I bring up these articles in particular is that I remember reading them when they were first published and finding the whole issue rather mystifying.

Regarding the general practice of bikini waxing, the first writer noted the following:

...creating the illusion of a hairless pubis seemed like one more example of how we glorify the sexless child's body over what's womanly, a step in the direction of kiddie porn.

Then, while on vacation with her girlfriends, she was shamed into reconsidering her position on pubic hair removal:

...while we were lying by a lake in Wisconsin drinking beer, they glimpsed the thicket of brown hair peaking out from my swimsuit, and they were appalled. "That's gross," they told me. Suddenly it seemed gross to me, too. I had to admit, I liked the look of their creamy inner thighs.

Her aesthetician later remarked on unsavoury requests made by certain clients:

Susan asked if I wanted a wider line inside my "bikini." She seemed relieved when I said no. "Some women come in -- sometimes they're 'dancers,' sometimes not -- and they want what we used to call a 'Playboy strip.' Now they call it a 'landing strip' -- I call it the Hitler look. You can imagine it."

One year later, Salon published the other article, which glorified Brazilian waxing as a fashion craze with many celebrity devotees. Advocates explained that full pubic waxing made women feel more sensual and made sex better. In 2000, the beauty editor of Self magazine estimated that "40 percent of the female population in New York between the ages of 20 and 30 has a Brazilian wax".

Five years later, full bikini waxing is standard practice for the fashion-conscious in North America. However, there is now a movement that claims Brazilian waxing, among other things, is evidence of a wider "pornification" of North American society. New York journalist and author Ariel Levy describes this phenomenon in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (which I'm not terribly interested in reading because it seems slightly overdone). Her work generated significant buzz in the media, with useful spinoff discussions about young women and "raunch culture" in North America:

Hot has replaced beautiful as the ultimate compliment and hot, according to Levy, means "f--kable" even when you're not -- legally, or inclined to. One of the strangest things about the rise of raunch, she argues, is the separation between how young women look today -- sporting more cleavage at family functions than most Hollywood stars of yore did at the Oscars -- and their actual desires or sexual activity. Women today, Levy says, are not more in touch with their sexuality as a result of all this display, and in fact they may even be less so. "It's about inauthenticity and the idea that women should be constantly exploding in little bursts of exhibitionism. It's an idea that female sexuality should be about performance and not about pleasure"...

And forget about blaming guys for this travesty, argues Levy: "Men no longer have the hegemony they once had. It's transcended that -- we've internalized it all together." In other words, to borrow a phrase from Aretha Franklin's liberation anthem, "sisters are doing it to themselves."

What this all boils down to is freedom of choice versus the pervasive, often intense, internal group pressure to conform to potentially uncomfortable standards. The reason I chose to discuss bikini waxing is that it turns the traditional "conservative Muslim vs. liberal Westerner" paradigm on its head. Muslim women have no hangups about full pubic waxing, but the practice was positively scandalous for North American women up until a few years ago, and even today is met with some skepticism. Applying this logic to the tedious hijab argument, it's clear that Western women have no hangups about showing their hair and thus have a hard time understanding the concerns of Muslim women who choose to cover it up. Many Westerners see the hijab as a form of oppression that is so deeply internalized that Muslim women don't even notice it. Conversely, many Muslims observe the trend towards self-objectification (e.g. Girls Gone Wild) and wonder if Western women truly believe they are "liberated". For both groups, it is hard to discern where free choice ends and pressure to conform begins.

[cross-posted to 'Aqoul]