position:lecturer in italian renaissance art history

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Did renaissance women remove their body hair? -
Jill Burke’s Blog
►http://renresearch.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/did-renaissance-women-remove-their-body-hair

http://renresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/titian-pubes-det.jpg

Sandra Cavallo has noted an “explosion in treatments for facial appearance” in the sixteenth century, as propagated by the proliferation of household recipe books – often titled “books of secrets”. These books are full of all sorts of recipes that might be useful for the household including many for what we’d consider cosmetic use. Alongside the reams of advice on creating the perfect complexion – recipes for A cheap easy liquor which can be used to keep your skin smooth, soft and shiny, or a lotion To remove every kind of mark from the face and …keep the skin looking lovely, or Waters to make one look twenty or twenty-five years old, there is indeed advice on how to remove hair from every part of the body in all of these books I have consulted. The renewed interest in facial cosmetics was, then, matched by an explosion in treatments for body hair removal. The Renaissance could, indeed be called a golden age of depilation.

Cette remarque à la fin me parle beaucoup :

Terry Eagleton, in his After Theory of 2001 said “not all students of culture are blind to the Western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world’s population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than 2 dollars a day”.

As several outraged pubic hair specialists have noted (and yes, they do exist), research into women’s personal grooming habits is, in many ways the study of systems of inequality – particularly the internalisation of the notion that a woman’s body is imperfect unless it is somehow modified.

« particularly the internalisation of the notion that a woman’s body is imperfect unless it is somehow modified »
La bonne nouvelle c’est que désormais cette notion s’étend aux hommes aussi (cf témoignage Agnès Maillard sur les rugbymen épilés..) , on ne pourra plus parler d’inégalité du coup.. :-)

Je rigole, mais ça me désespère...
Barbie et Ken ont façonné en profondeur notre vision de l’humain : ne pas assumer notre appartenance au règne animal, se distinguer sur la forme, mais pas sur le fond. Distinction sexiste, physiologique, mythe de la pureté, volonté de s’émanciper de la nature peut être... Sauf que nos instincts prédateurs, pour ne pas dire anthropophages, tels qu’ils se manifestent dans la sphère économique, bizarrement on cherche moins à s’en débarrasser que de nos poils..