Oh hey everybody this week's Ask Cristen is coming to you live...from HowStuffWorks.com
the office which means that this shark is going to be answering all of your questions.
DunDunDunDunDunDunDunDunDun.
Thanks to everybody who commented on last week's Ask Cristen video all about consent
and saying no to sex in long term relationships. Anna Banana said for instance, Anna Banana.
I like that user name. 'As far as turning down sex in a committed relationship I think
it's helpful to also at least loosely set a future time that you would most likely be
down after politely explaining that you're not up to it at the moment. Like 'babe so
sorry, I'm not up for it right now but I'm wide open tomorrow afternoon'. The winks were
all mine. Also seems like a lot of commenters had women's body hair and specifically pubic
hair on the brain which is what I want to tackle on this week's Ask Cristen. BigEd1013
wants to know, 'I think you should do a video on why women shave their vaginal areas. I
(a full grown man) do not like this trend. I prefer a natural look. Also do women prefer
a man to shave that area?' Mike Lanthrus asks, 'I know it's a bit difficult to find info
on this but can you take a look at historical trends in pubic hair?' Zarko Cekovski wants
to know, 'Hey Cristen can you do a video on body hair?' Finally we have Ivana Radojevic
who says, 'I feel like body hair is my worst enemy. I have it everywhere literally. I would
like to hear something about woman's body hair and why it is not acceptable.' I did
a video about this with Professor Boyfriend a while back about women shaving their underarm
hair so somewhere on this screen you can click to watch that video now. When all the sudden
did women start waxing or removing their pubic hair and the knee-jerk answer to this is that
it is porn. If you look at PlayBoy magazines and the centerfolds in there, in the eighties
you'll see that women's pubic hair is neatly trimmed but pretty much in tact. In the nineties
it mysteriously starts to do this disappearing act. In the twenty-first century, huzzah,
women, we uhh, it's like a barbie. There is nothing down there. It's not just porn to
blame for the now more common habit of women waxing or shaving or depilating in one or
another their pubic region. According to a 2002 study published in the Journal of Communication
Inquiry, it actually was the eighteen-seventies when this preoccupation with something called
hypertrichosis, or the idea of excessive hair, particularly on females, began to grab the
attention of all of these American dermatologists and then trickle out to the American public.
From the period of nineteen fifteen to nineteen forty-five, you have this intensive messaging
to the American female public, particularly the white American female public telling them
that in order to be feminine, attractive, stylish, they needed to be as hairless as
possible. This is when you have the rise of women starting to shave their underarms because
they had sleeveless dresses that were coming into vogue. Women starting to shave their
legs because hemlines were shortening. During World War II, some women would get what were
called back alley x-ray epilation treatments. Think about electrolysis today except with
really old technology and in a back alley kind of setting. If you look at studies at
why women remove their hair, sexiness actually isn't the number one thing we're going for,
it's more this idea of cleanliness. And I could go on and on and on about more of these
finer points of the history of women's hair removal because today it's something that
we take so much for granted, it's fascinating to look back in time and see just how long
we've been sold these ideas that particularly as women our body hair is not at all feminine
and is something that should be taken off in order for us to be clean and appropriate
and pretty. So if you want more videos like that, let me know, I can totally do them and
if there's a specific type of body hair that you're interested in me zeroing in on, male
or female. And let me know what you think about this whole women's pubic hair removal
thing. You think it's awful, do you think it's fine, do you think it's sexy, do you
think it's not? Let me know as always and let me know your questions as well so I can
give you some answers.