The Conversation
Source: theconversation.com
#woman
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A strategy is to return the gaze, to say, ‘I see you seeing me.’ This is an act of defiance.
Tyler Payne
© Tyler Payne 2016
DSLR video, 4:47
© Tyler Payne 2016
DSLR video, 18:40
© Tyler Payne 2016
DSLR video, 4:27
The Brazilian wax has become an everyday grooming practice for many younger women, and an expectation from many male partners in heterosexual relationships. The image of a waxed vagina is widely disseminated, whether in something like bathing suit commercials for teenagers, or hard core pornography, and has become the norm. In fact, that expectation has morphed into disgust or derision toward women who fail to depilate their pubic mound. But the pain involved in waxing is suppressed in advertisements for waxing and ignored or not discussed by men for whom a bald vagina is expected. Entry into sexual adulthood, for women, is now gated by a painful ritual, and the natural female body, before the wax, is an object of sexual exclusion. The fetishizing of the bald vagina is both a kind of sexual objectification and an attempt to transform women’s pain into men’s pleasure. To foreground the pain of the wax, by showing the suffering on the woman’s face as she is being waxed, is also to foreground the humanness of women who undergo waxing, it is to challenge the sexual objectification that the Brazilian wax entails. The tight framing on the face resists the urge for the male gaze to objectify by focusing on the de-personalised body part (the bald vagina).