How much is too much?
SOUTH AFRICA is a highly
textile-conscious country. Most people find the idea of being naked outside
their bathrooms strange, at the very least, if not abhorrent.
But once an opportunity is found for discussing the subject, people are often willing to discuss nakedness and naturism. However, they soon run into reservations.
A neighbour of mine, mother of two teenaged boys, expressed the concern that she would be revealing too much if she walked or sat around the house in the altogether.
She explained (or perhaps I interpreted) that she was concerned that if she didn’t keep her thighs stuck together like glue, she would be giving her sons a sex show.
It certainly is a most unusual thing in South Africa for young boys to see the vagina of any adult woman, and frequently when they do, it is an unpleasant thing because of the circumstances.
Another woman of my acquaintance, also the mother of teenaged boys, had to bar from her home visits by a woman who had a sexual obsession and who had somehow got the idea into her head that she was a welcome friend. The visitor would arrive at the house over weekends wearing a dress but no underwear, and would attempt to inveigle one or other of the boys to notice the fact that they could see her nipples if she leaned forward, or her vagina if she sat a certain way.
Clearly in circumstances like these, the sight of ordinarily concealed body parts is disgusting.
But it has nothing whatever to do with naturism, or even with normal nakedness in the home context.
My neighbour need not have worried. Nature has provided women with a very effective shield for the beautiful but very private part of the body called the vagina, namely public hair.
Naturist women have no qualms about revealing their vaginas – indeed, in many places they don’t even use that Latin-derived name for this body part, and use the ordinary English four-letter word that starts with a C. Personally I find this word perfectly acceptable, but because Christian society does not accept it, it will not appear on these pages.
In most cases, the reason behind their lack of shame over their vaginas is that the bush of hair on the pubis is perfectly adequate to conceal the folds of the vagina’s outer lips, and what lies inside, should the lips be parted.
Small girls, of course, do not have such hair. But again Nature has provided. Little girls’ outer vaginal lips have fat in them that ensures that the lips stay closed, even when their legs are quite wide open, as they would be when running, jumping or doing other gymnastic or athletic exercises.
This is also why in small girls the lips – which are of the type of skin also found around the scrotum and penis in males, and in the perineum (the area between the pubis and the anus; such skin is called perineal skin) – lack the characteristic folds and wrinkles which become evident in the perineal skin of adults, both men and women.
Pubescent girls start losing this fat as they start growing hair on the pubis, and so decency is maintained. The fat now becomes concentrated under the skin covering the pubic bone itself – the part above the vaginal opening, which is covered by the broadest patch of pubic hair, also called the pubic escutcheon.
This area of concentrated fat is called the mound of Venus,[1] and it is an important measure of a woman’s health. When it is absent, it is an indication that there is insufficient fat generally in the woman’s body.
Fashionable young women nowadays have the idea that they have to be lean – a misconception ruthlessly pushed by trendy publications and fashion houses, which lay immense emphasis on waif-like models who have figures like small children. A typical model with this body conformation is Kate Moss.
The result is that diseases like bulimia and anorexia nervosa are frighteningly common among teenagers and adult women. A famous example is Princess Diana.
Medical science has established that women are meant to be plump. A woman is not healthy unless she has no less than 15% to 20% more fat in her system than a man of comparable size and age.
What’s more, when body fat drops below a given level, a woman is usually incapable of conceiving.
In this day and age, when pregnancy is seen by many as a threat and a great many married couples proclaim themselves “child-free”, this might be seen as a positive situation. But this inability to conceive is accompanied by a slew of other indicators of poor health, and probably also by severe discomfort in some areas.
Female athletes, gymnasts and body-builders, who need to have muscular bodies, often find that they cannot conceive unless they take a break from their disciplines and put on a bit of body fat.
The mound of Venus is nowadays something more spoken of in the abstract, in private, or among men when they discuss women lewdly, because (away from naturist venues) it is something visible only in skimpy clothing – swimming costumes or the clothing worn by athletes, gymnasts
and many dancers. People are also reluctant to mention it because it is thought
indecent to do so.
But it needs to be emphasised how important the mound of Venus is as an indicator of physical health.
In traditional societies where nakedness is, or used to be, more ordinary, close attention was paid to it.
Especially in Africa, a man would not consider marriage, or a sexual relationship, with a woman who did not have enough body fat to survive the next drought or famine – and nobody knew when one would strike next, so plumpness was a valuable indicator of marriageability.
Indeed, it still is in many African societies.
A woman lacking in body fat might still be seen as attractive, but if she had no fat on her pubis, she was not worth considering.
But most people reading this will be living in a Western society where clothing and slender figures are important, and where it is fashionable not to show body hair, yet desirable to reveal as much flesh as possible in a bikini.
The girl who wants to attract as many guys as possible at the beach or the swimming pool will wear a skimpy bikini, perhaps with bare buttocks and a narrow strip of cloth in front and behind. But this exposes pubic hair unless she removes it, so it’s out with the razor or the depilator and she whips away Nature’s provision for her modesty – in the name of a different (and, to my mind, highly perverted) – kind of modesty.
There are various styles in this action – partly, it would seem, dictated by the style of the bikini the girl chooses to wear.
When such girls go to nudist facilities it can be seen that some remove the hair from the mons veneris, leaving some growing on the vaginal lips, while others attack from the sides, leaving a thin stripe down the middle that resembles nothing more vividly than the style of moustache favoured by Adolf Hitler.
Such “Hitler moustaches” vary in width from an inch to a couple of millimetres – the thinner the line of hair, the shorter the hair necessarily is, too. Some girls prefer a slightly different cut, favouring a Y-shape rather than a single vertical stripe.
Others either feel the need to imitate guys who grow five o’clock stubble on their faces, and either shave the entire pubis and let the hair grow out a little, or use a hair clipper to clip it to a fixed length.
Either way the result is most unattractive when exposed to daylight – and once more, since the hair is not at its natural length, it is unable to perform its proper protective function.
The extreme of hair removal results, logically, in the phenomenon of the smoothie nudist, who is obsessed with the Classical Greek idea[2] that all hair below the neck is indecent and frantically removes it all.
What the smoothie woman, especially, fails to appreciate is that, being hairless, she now exposes, for all the world to see, every fold of her vaginal lips. If they are slightly parted (something that would not clearly be visible behind pubic hair), the interior is exposed.
Somehow they fail to see this as indecent.
The smoothie, having rid him- or herself of hair, then feels naked, and likes to adorn the body with rings, and other insertions, or to hang chains around the waist or ankles. Smoothie women are especially fond of rings in the vaginal lips. What purpose they actually serve is beyond my imagining, but they draw even more attention to the vagina than naked perineal skin would.
To return to my neighbour’s dilemma: if she followed this route, she would certainly be giving her sons a sex show, as she feared.
But Nature has provided her with pubic hair that more than adequately provides for her modesty. As long as neither she nor her sons are sucked into the perverted modern thinking that sees the hair itself as being indecent, there is no problem.
It will not present itself should they walk in on her naked in her bedroom or bathroom, nor will it arise should she take the brave step of swimming in the nude with them.
My discussions with her about naturism never went further than theory, and there has been no occasion on which we were in nude company with each other. For this reason I have no knowledge of her appearance when nude.
But since she has mouse-blonde hair which bleaches a little in the sun, she is very likely to have very attractive brown or pale brown pubic hair. It might even bleach a little after exposure to the sun. But even if it is pitch-black (even natural blondes can have black pubic hair) it will not be ugly. She also has a little visible hair on her upper lip, which usually indicates a very adequate pubic escutcheon.
Her only worry, when she finally does take the plunge, will be that her skin will be rather pale around the pubis. But a little bit of tanning (perhaps on a sun-bed) should soon fix that.
– Strandloper
