Marge Monday: Tropical Getaway

Marge and Homer need time away from the kids.  They heard about a clothing-optional resort for couples, and decided it was just what they needed. 

An Ode To Hairy Female Armpits

One of the best articles to have been written on the subject, which seems to be getting more attention these days. Or, as the author points out, no wonder there is a "backlash" against the draconian shaving standards of today.

Here are a few excellent quotes:

"...whether armpit hair is lauded or loathed at any particular moment is just a matter of social mores, rather than anything deep-seated."

"...the hairless trend is a very recent phenomenon, a cultural construction that’s more about peer pressure than considered decision-making."

I believe the original article is here. But here is the article in full, for your reading pleasure:

AN ODE TO FEMALE ARMPITS

by Martin Robinson

I am not a pervert or a hippy or a serial killer, but I recently discovered that I find women’s armpit hair sexy.

Here’s what happened: over Christmas, my girlfriend and I took the opportunity to slob it up. Barely left the house, rarely changed clothes, drank anything displaying surface tension. One morning, my other half lifted up her arm, and said, with a filmy glint in her eye, “Check this out.” There it was: a smooth dark rug.

She did it to deliberately repulse me, just as I will sometimes show her the odd testicle while she is eating. Yet – hah! – it didn’t repulse. No sir. It may have been the way she was so cocky about it, but I dug it. “I dig it,” I said, unsure why I was slipping into beatnik speak, possibly because her armpit resembled Bob Dylan.

I felt compelled to touch her pit-fro, and tentatively did so. It didn’t bite me. It was velvety and not at all unpleasant. Disregarding what could have been seen as a feminist triumph, my girlfriend called me a pervert, and further access was denied. But the incident made me think.

Is armpit hair on women really so bad? I’d never truly encountered it before, and just assumed I’d be appalled. Having discovered it’s actually all right, you have to ask why it’s such a taboo. In 2012, a Swedish woman accidentally revealed a hairy armpit on live TV, and a screen-grab of it went viral on social media under the general theme ‘Laugh at the freak’. Why do we see it as so disgusting? Why have girls I’ve spoken to suggested they’d rather sport a swastika tattoo under their arms than a bush? Why has ShortList’s art editor been gagging as he’s been laying out this very feature? Why should we even care?

Well, from Armpits4August (‘Movember for chicks‘) to Cameron Diaz’s body hair-promoting book, the ultimate female taboo is cracking and hairy pits are coming your way…

HAIRY HISTORY

So what’s wrong with women’s axillary hair, to give it its medical term? Some religions reject body hair on both men and women altogether, but for Western secular types, the problem is less clear. Is it unhygienic? No, in fact it helps prevent bacteria breeding on the skin. OK, removal lessons the risk of pubic lice, but who’s still sleeping with 17th-century prostitutes anyway?

Is it simply so bloody ugly it’s just a basic human urge to hack the stuff off? Well, no, many areas in the world don’t mind it; South-east Asia, China, Latin countries, Grimsby…

Is it an accepted standard of beauty from the dawn of time? No, it’s gone in and out of favour throughout history. Total hairlessness was prevalent in Ancient Rome and the Renaissance and reflected in public art from those times, but that worked the other way too: female body hair was a private sight, a forbidden secret. And therefore pretty goddamn sexy. Michelangelo couldn’t put hair on the nudes in the Sistine Chapel as they tend to frown upon masturbating in church. When Goya broke the rules with his proudly pubic ‘Nude Maja’ in 1800, the Spanish Inquisition locked it away for being obscene (ie too friggin’ hot, señor).

OK, so is armpit hair off-putting in a primal way, given the fact that hairiness is more associated with men? Well, you’d think it would be in our primal instincts to be actively attracted to female armpit hair, since it signifies sexual maturity.

“Hair would suggest that our mating would be profitable,” says evolutionary science writer Professor Jesse Bering. “So why would something that signals sexual maturity actually be seen today as unattractive? Well, we do have an attraction to youth, so a combination of other sexual characteristics, like obviously developed breasts, coinciding with hairless armpits, might create the overall impression of youth, but relative youth that’s not indicative of reproductive immaturity entirely.”

OK, so a desire for youthfulness may overwhelm a desire towards armpits, but that doesn’t explain the deep modern repulsion for them. Bering says their biological role is just not significant enough anymore to withstand fashion. “Armpit hair would serve as a primitive odour trap which would help to perpetuate the wafting of pheromones. But the role of pheromones in human sexual behaviour is small, or at least unknown, so it’s maybe not enough of a biological force to have any cultural effect. Culture can prevail.”

There you have it. It’s an evolutionary leftover, so whether armpit hair is lauded or loathed at any particular moment is just a matter of social mores, rather than anything deep-seated.

Taboo-busting comedian Lenny Bruce put it perfectly during a bit on female armpit hair at his Carnegie Hall concert in 1961: “Why is it in bad taste? Is it from a theological point of view? Is it blasphemous? No. Is it hygiene? No, it doesn’t relate to hygiene at all, if it related to hygiene then you’d have to be consistent and shave the eyebrows, the head, the schmushka, the whole bit. So it does not relate to hygiene at all. What does it relate to? Style, that’s all. It only relates to fashion…”

Bruce was anticipating the late-Sixties hippies here, and indeed female armpit hair was perfectly acceptable into the Seventies. Mark Tungate, Paris-based author of Branded Beauty: How Marketing Changed The Way We Look, says, “I remember when I first came to Paris in 1979 as a schoolboy.

There were a lot of dark-haired French girls on the Metro in sleeveless dresses. Some of them had hairy armpits, which provoked pangs of pre-pubescent lust. It’s not difficult to work out why – it was like seeing pubic hair on public display. But this was the tail-end of the Seventies, when feminists displayed body hair as a protest against male oppression and the ‘norms’ of beauty.

“Actually women have been shaving for centuries,” continues Tungate. “For aesthetic and hygienic reasons. However, it will come as no surprise to learn that in the Western world, mass shaving of armpits by women was provoked by the beauty industry. Short-sleeved dresses became fashionable around 1915, which is when Gillette created its first razor for women – the Milady Décolleté – and ran a massive ad campaign to support it. The beauty industry has been encouraging hair removal ever since.” In this case, all it would take is for Kate Moss to weave daisies through her armpit hair at Glastonbury and within days every woman would have permed pits.



GROWING SUPPORT

A 2005 study of UK women showed 90 per cent removed hair from their underarms and legs, and 80 per cent from their pubic areas. A recent university study in Australia showed 76 per cent of young women undergraduates were shaving off everything. There are reports of young men growing up unaware that women are even capable of growing body hair.

It’s getting absurd, so no wonder a backlash is underway.

Armpits4August is a charity event drawing attention to polycystic ovary syndrome, a symptom of which is hirsutism. They say, “We believe the shame people feel about body hair is a consequence of a society [with] narrow beauty standards … there is no ‘normal’ pattern of body hair for men or women.”

Then there’s Cameron Diaz, who recently put her body hair in the public forum, declaring in her new Body Book that “pubes keep the goods private” and are “pretty draping”. Well, she’s Cameron Diaz, she could have Brian Blessed’s entire head down there and it’d still be sexy, but she makes valid points that the hairless trend is a very recent phenomenon, a cultural construction that’s more about peer pressure than considered decision-making. Naked vaginas are the Emperor’s New Clothes.

You can also blame porn. In that world, you shave off hair to reveal more to the camera, but porn is so all-pervasive today, its style has gone mainstream. A new generation are following its aesthetic standards. This also explains the return of the mullet. Some experts, like Professor Gordon Gallup from the University Of New York, have said this shaved ideal suggests latent paedophilia. That seems a stretch. I believe it’s just a fad being followed, and one we should question. Is it really that sexy? Doesn’t an overly-groomed woman seem a bit professional, a bit uptight. Surely sexiness is a lack of self-consciousness, about not giving a sh*t what anyone thinks?

A chemical-scrubbed and cut-back mound may look like an invitation to porn heaven, but the amount

of prep required hardly suggests wild abandon. The famously banned author Henry Miller – often unfairly branded a misogynist just because he slept with anything that blinked – wrote something that stuck in my mind: “I want a woman who sh*ts.”

Nice. But his point was he wanted honesty, not pampered people pretending the mucky realities of being a human being don’t exist. We may all soon be sporting Google Glass, but we’ll still have to nudge it to one side to pick our noses.

If we can see that hairlessness is mere fashion, not a deep-rooted taboo, then it can be changed. If you’ll agree with me that this porn ideal is a bit weird and, if it continues, sex will resemble two manatees wrestling, then it may be liberating to try something different.


PRAISE THE PITS

I’m not saying you should force your missus into growing some – it’s her choice, yeah – but if this backlash is happening, then men should support it. After all, how long before we’re shaving our armpits, too? Male hairlessness is no longer restricted to gay culture – everybody is hacking back now, and it’s only a matter of time before it all goes. And then we’ll be spending 20 per cent of our days shaving and the remaining 80 per cent itching.

No, let’s not run away from our animal sides. Encourage your partners, and let’s get some growth out there. I look forward to a time when a man and a woman can take off their clothes and not be nude. Free to fall into a hairy embrace and be stuck together forever in a Velcroish predicament.

That’s my vision. Who’s with me?

Certainly not my girlfriend:

“You can stop writing that piece, I’ve shaved them. It was disgusting.”

Cheers.

Spring Fashion

One of the best parts of Spring is getting to wear less and less. Right up to the point of revealing.

Laundry Day

This reminds me of doing laundry at my old apartment. The machines were down in the basement. It was a shared basement, but if I was doing laundry late at night, it was deserted. Usually, I'd put of doing laundry until the very last possible moment. That usually meant to the point where I no longer had anything clean to wear. 

If I was fast, I could strip down and wash everything at once. And I never got caught. 

Sometimes, though, I kind of hoped I would have gotten caught.

Tiny Bikini

Would you dare to wear this on the beach or by the pool?

Motorcycle Monday: Daring Bare Dare

A pretty bold move to whip off her dress and pose by his motorcycle, right there on the sidewalk in the middle of the city.

The Harvest, The Bare Breast, And Art History

Here is a really interesting series by Ukrainian photographer David Dubnitskiy. In this series, he depicts models in a moment of old-fashioned agrarian work: picking grapes, laundering clothes in a creek, and harvesting wheat. There is nothing modern within the frame. Although created in the 21st Century, they seem to deliberately evoke a pre-Modern, pre-Industrial time.

Although each image is carefully posed and composed, they still feel somewhat spontaneous, even voyeuristic, as if the young women are so focused on the toil of their chores, that they don't notice, or care, that their breasts are bared. In this sense, there's a simple physicality to the work. Anyone who has labored on a farm knows this; when you use your body to work in nature, there is little energy for modesty. Blisters reorient the brain's priorities, and the safe-garding of the body seems like the prissy privilege of the urban upper-class. 

In a similar vein, women workers of the field, or indigenous tribes in Africa, South America, and the Pacific Islands regularly worked topless. They had no idea they were being "uncivilized"until European missionaries took it upon themselves to point it out. 

But speaking of Europeans, in Art History, there's the tradition of the heroic "woman of the nation." Think of the French paintings like "Liberty Leading the People"(1830) of the woman of Liberty holding up the French Tri-colors in the midst of a raging battle field. She has one breast bared. This symbol of woman of strength and patriotism seems to work in these images by Dubnitskiy. The young women are healthy, hard-working, and the very salt of the "Mother Country." On this level, the images feel not only patriotic, but almost propagandict. It's the same concept the Nazis and Early Soviets used; the message was, "our future is in the pure strength of our past," and symbols used became the idealize young, healthy men and women of an idealized past. The symbol of the USSR was, after all, a hammer and a sickle--just like the sickle held in the right hand of Dubnitskiy's wheat harvester.

On the broadest level, these women at work in the field relate to the ripeness of agriculture--especially in the images of the plump grapes, the golden wheat--wine and bread--the very essence of Western Civilization. But even broader than that, the combination of the harvest and the naked female breast dates back to our earliest human memory. The oldest nude in civilization, after all, is the Fertility Goddess.  In this regard, the women themselves in these photographs, and particularly their ripe breasts, become symbolic of the fecundity of land, the very Earth itself. 

But regardless of how these images are interpreted and laden with symbolism and interpretation, they also act purely on an aesthetic level: they are beautiful. 

Wife Plays Pool

A good way to spice up an otherwise boring night in a boring town--go to the local pool hall or tavern. After a few games, a few rounds, she slips off her underwear.

Marge Monday: Marge Topless in Parking Lot

Why is Marge topless in the paring lot? Why indeed.

Marge looks a little distressed, but Homer isn't complaining.

Tribute to L'Origine du Monde

Dear Readers may recall one of my favorite articles thaI wrote on the classic French painting L'Origine du Monde.

Gustave Courbet's 1866 work is arguably one of the most popular and pornographic paintings in Art History. As I researched and wrote about, It has a long and fascinating history of ownership, starting with a Turkish diplomat, crossing Europe, and finally returning to Paris, where it is enjoyed by millions of visitors to the Mussee d'Orsay.

Art inspires art, and here the lovely Lucasta takes a self-portrait in tribute to the original masterpiece.

Woman looks at the original painting at Musse d'Orsay

Tribute to L'Origine du monde by Lucasta

Big Bang Theory

A fun spoof on the popular TV show, The Big Bang Theory. 

Somehow it's perfect--the tension between Sheldon and Penny. He's annoyed at her, as well as condesending. And she annoyed at him, and sees him so asexually, that she doesn't even bother to close her robe.

Changing In The Car

Always sort of sexy to change in the car, hoping passerby's won't see, but then again, not really caring if they do.

Life Drawing Class, 1961

There is so much to love about this image. Just as a composition and moment of captured life, it's a master work. But that's not surprising. It was made by Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, who is best remembered for his iconic image of V-Day at the end of WWII. He photographed the famous, like Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, and before is death in 1995, the first family Clintons. This image is from Life magazine. But as interesting as the photographer's fame and talent, what I love is the model. 

I love how beautiful she is, of course. So pretty, but in a natural way. With a slender, but not skinny, figure, round hips, petit breasts, and her hair back in a simple bun, like a ballerina. She looks so very much like the Girl Next Door. The "All American" girl. And maybe she was. She looks to be college-age. And this image is taken at a college. Maybe she was a student here, at University of Iowa. The Heartland. 

Today, it would take guts to be a student in Iowa, and volunteer to pose nude before an art class. But what makes this photo even more powerful is the year that this was taken: 1961.

On the radio might have played Bobby Vee, Patsy Cline, Del Shannon, or the Shirells. Or the radio news may have reported the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, or that the new president has created a new government-sponsored organize called the Peace Corps, or that he has vowed to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, or that he has sent the first of American "advisors" to Vietnam.

Somewhere in the cold snow-swept fields of the mid-west, a young, small, scruffy baby-faced kid named Robert Zimmerman, was packing an acoustic guitar to New York, where he hoped to meet his musical idol, a nearly-forgotten folk singer of the Great Depression, who had silently suffering in a state hospital from Hutchinson's disease. 

And deep in the South, a bus filled with Civil Rights protesters is firebombed. 

In this picture is America, on the teetering point of a new and tumultuous decade. 

A young woman in Iowa sits naked, on a wooden chair, before the intent eyes of sketching art students.

Window Show

At night, when it is bright in a room and dark outside, windows appear like mirrors, reflecting the room back on itself. It's easy, then, to think only of the room and the actions that are happening in the room, without any thought of the outside world. Especially in a room above ground level. Humans always seem to look eye-level, not as often up or down. 

A second-story bedroom, or a hotel room on an upper floor. At night. The glass of the window a mirror. It's easy to imagine that this couple hasn't even considered that someone could be watching.

Then again... maybe that's exactly what they considered...

Ski Nude

The exquisite feeling of flying through the air. Naked.

Nostalgia For The Most Perfect Ski Day Ever

These images are by Gramm Dunn and published in Vice magazine. The photo series "Hardgoods" features a man and woman in a retro ski day, circa late 70s-early 80s--the golden era of skiing. 

It pretty much summarizes either everything perfect I remember of my youth, or the exact golden nostalgia I always wanted.

To give credit where credit is due:

Producer: I Heart Reps, Sara Siegel Productions
Stylist’s Assistant: Alex Schmidt
Hair and Makeup: Tami Shirey
Models: Chelsea Schuchman, Luke Ditella at Photogenics

Star Bra On Summer Rooftop

It was a bra, but from a distance it could pass as a bikini top. 

In summer, she'd strip off her t-shirt and catch some sun on the roof of her apartment. 

Motorcycle Monday: FU

New York Times Reports: "Return to a more natural state."

As editor of My Sexy Spot Blog, I strive to bring the best, most accurate, and most historically relevant stories about our understanding and appreciation (and acceptance) of human sexuality. As many long-time Dear Readers know, I have been following and reporting on what seems to be a grassroots cultural shift back toward a more normal (and in my opinion healthy) acceptance and appreciation of pubic hair.

I've noted it in amateur blogs, in the emerging works of Fine Art photographers, and even in the porn industry.

For so long I've seen hope peeking out like the stray untamed hairs from a bikini line. I'm amazed, and thrilled that finally a publication with a lot wider viewership than this humble DIY blog is finally taking note.

Last december, The New York Times blog ran "On Beauty For Women, a New Look Down Under."

Only once before in our history have we reprinted an article verbatim and in its entirety. We felt this article well worth it.
--Annie O.

On Beauty For Women, a New Look Down Under

by Amanda Hess

After years of razors, wax and lasers reducing pubic hair to the bare minimum — or nothing at all — there’s a return to a more natural state.

Marilyn Monroe’s maid claimed she once walked in on the actress naked and splayed-legged, bottle and toothbrush in hand, meticulously bleaching the hair between her legs a perfectly matching platinum. When Monroe danced onto a breezy New York City subway grate in that billowing ivory dress in “The Seven Year Itch,” she layered two pairs of underwear to ensure that her bountiful crop was obscured from gawkers’ sightlines. And when the studio photographer snapped on-set publicity shots of the scene, they were meticulously airbrushed to smooth out the unmistakable texture visible beneath her pleated skirt.

For women of Monroe’s generation, pubic hair was a game of peekaboo — on full display in the privacy of the bungalow, but carefully hidden from popular view. In recent years, the bombshell bush has essentially disappeared. Wax-wielding estheticians and permanent lasers have whittled it down or erased it entirely. Pornography has served up a new degree of bareness. When the paparazzi shoot pantyless pop stars exiting limousines, their cameras zoom in on a barren landscape.

It wasn’t always this way. For centuries of artistic tradition, the absence of pubic hair was merely an illusion. Renaissance artists depicted the female pelvis in smoothed stone or oil-painted shadow. Although a few artists made bids for erotic realism — notably Gustave Courbet in 1866 with the furry black patch in his painting “L’Origine du Monde”— the taboo persisted. The story goes that the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin was so shocked by the discrepancy between the renderings he’d studied and his wife’s naked body that he annulled the marriage. “Though her face was beautiful,” he wrote, “there were certain circumstances in her person” that left him unable to proceed. When the photographer Alfred Stieglitz exhibited 45 portraits, several of them nudes, of his muse Georgia O’Keeffe in 1921, they caused a sensation.

The explosion of the bikini on 1960s beaches changed everything, bringing with it the “bikini line,” which required a precise shave. The beauty industry graciously homed in on this new terrain, first with razors and depilatory creams, then waxes, electrolysis and lasers. Peruse popular nudes over the past decades and you can practically carbon-date the photo by the area’s dwindling dimensions. In the 1960s, the fashion designer Mary Quant got hers trimmed into a heart. Helmut Newton’s 1981 “Big Nudes” series of photographs featured towering heels and equally imposing pubic hair; by the 1990s, Playboy centerfolds had transitioned from a full growth to a teensy landing strip; by the 21st century, the “Brazilian” was established as the new standard.

Did it go too far? Today, the Helmut Newton nude makes for a more aspirational ideal than an unfortunate celebrity crotch shot. The New York waxing emporium J. Sisters displays a 1990s head shot of Gwyneth Paltrow signed, “You changed my life!!” But these days, Paltrow laughingly told Ellen DeGeneres, “I work a ’70s vibe.” Mert & Marcus photographed Daria Werbowy and Naomi Campbell with full, frank pubic hair in a 2010 Love magazine spread, and they look assertive, real, even rebellious.

Even young porn stars are “bringing the ’80s back,” says Nina Hartley, a doyenne of the scene. Stoya, one of the highest-profile porn actresses of the moment, has also posed for the fashion photographer Steven Klein with grown-out pelvis and armpits. “I’ve had all sorts of pubic hair,” she says. “I’ve been completely bald, I’ve had my entire natural bush grown out, and I usually have an arrangement somewhere in between.” It’s worth noting that this look isn’t completely untamed, of course. Many women still attend to the sides and underneath. But there’s something refreshingly retro, delightfully expressive and confidently grown-up in getting back to nature. And Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde”? It now resides at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where — judging by the sale of postcards — it is one of the most popular paintings of all.

Here's the original link to the full article.

Surf's Up!

How about a little nostalgia for summer?