Femininity (20 page)

Zola’s Nana had thrilled a Parisian audience in the 1860s when she raised her white
arms to reveal a nest of golden hairs. Loretta Young epitomized the new American bathing
beauty when she posed for
Vogue
in 1930 like a vertical odalisque with the hollows of her armpits as perfectly hairfree
as her shapely bare legs. When a friend of mine tried to read
Nana
during the 1950s, she put the book down in confusion when she came to the vivid picture
of Nana on stage. Underarm hair was vile—how could Zola write such a distasteful scene?
she wondered. To a young American girl in the Fifties, sexuality and underarm hair
were mutually exclusive.

Americans frequently have been accused of a Puritan attitude toward sex. If the removal
of body hair is an indication of an unnaturally fastidious, overly refined and repressed
sexuality, then Americans deserve their reputation. Influenced by Hollywood’s sexpot
starlets, only in the last twenty years have European women followed the American
lead and begun to denude their underarm and legs. In her autobiography, Shelley Winters
recalled her mortification in Rome during the Fifties when she realized that in a
roomful of women wearing formal, strapless gowns, she was the only one whose underarms
were pink and hairless. Today at a similar event a woman who neglected to shave would
probably be mortified by her conspicuous breach of good taste and grooming.

A hairy armpit casually exposed by a sleeveless blouse, a bathing suit or the barest
of summer dresses remains an indecorous violation of airbrushed feminine glamour.
The natural hair seems oddly out of place in the context of artful fragility, and
its unfamiliar presence calls attention to certain unpleasant facts of life concerning
armpits—that they have a normal but unfeminine tendency to sweat and smell.

“Horses sweat, men perspire, but ladies glow.” Biologically a woman has fewer functional
sweat glands than a man and she also has a slightly higher sweating threshold except
when
pregnant. So women as a rule do perspire less than men, but this minor difference
has not been deemed large enough to distinguish the sexes. A lady is not supposed
to sweat at all.

Telltale beads of moisture that form on the palms, forehead, the upper lip, the soles
of the feet, the underarms and elsewhere are normal expressions of intense physical
effort and emotional stress, as well as a regulatory response to heat. A sweaty palm
(which in the history of evolution may once have been an aid to arboreal gripping)
may be an embarrassing indicator of inner turmoil and social anxiety for both of the
sexes, but rivulets of dampness that soak the shirt and mat the hair are honorable
emblems in a man of action who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow. If a man
perspires in the course of hard work or sport, or in response to physical danger from
which he emerges triumphant, he may sweat profusely without a loss to his masculine
image. On the contrary, his sweat is proof of heroic exertion: every pore announces
that he is giving his all. To work up a good sweat at the gym is a vigorous, manly
goal. Only if the sweat runs freely without grueling effort or a victorious outcome—e.g.,
the sweating coward—it is a distasteful sign of the weak.

But there is no situation in which perspiration enhances the feminine aura, despite
the obvious model of biological femaleness presented by the woman in labor who sweats
to give birth. Strenuous endeavor in which every pore is utilized in a meaningful
struggle is thought of in strictly masculine terms. Sweat on the brow defeats the
attempt to look untouched and untroubled. Beaded moisture on the lip does not give
the impression of sweet, quiet grace. A patch of wetness spreading under the arms
is incompatible with genteel refinement, with fresh spring-flower loveliness that
is calm, cool and collected. Compounding the problem, perspiration causes ugly fissures
in the polished and perishable feminine veneer: caked makeup, the fallen hairdo, a
ruinously expensive dress with a permanent underarm stain. Bring on the moisture-proof
eyeshadow, the extra-hold hair spray. Sew in a dress shield, don’t raise your arms.
A sweating woman is a wrecked illusion. In her wildly successful Broadway comeback
Lena Home brought the house down with a monologue about sweat while she wrung out
her hair and pointed with
satisfaction to the drenching wetness that discolored her white gown in the course
of a demanding performance. The humor derived from its being such an outrageous subject
for an elegant star whose name has been synonymous with impeccable glamour during
a long and admirable career.

Eccrine sweat glands secrete the watery substance that evaporates on the skin to regulate
heat. The other type of sweat gland, the apocrine, is more problematic. Located under
the arms with the eccrines (and also around the pubic zone and the areola of the nipples),
the apocrines release a sticky fluid during excitement and stress that mixes with
local bacteria to produce the characteristic, stale body odor that society abhors.
Because the apocrines lie dormant until puberty, their link to sexual attraction has
been speculated on, but if the glands once performed some pheromone function, it is
now emphatically vestigial. To judge by the deodorant market, no one, male or female,
cares to be known by an unmistakable pungency under the arms. As it happens, the feminine
convention of shaving does act to inhibit the development of odor, as hair is a retainer
of sweat. In obsessively odor-conscious America, home of the vaginal deodorant spray
and the little mint mouth freshener before kissing, women are given an olfactory as
well as a visual reason for keeping their underarms bare.

Beyond the fairly universal agreement that roses smell sweet and the defecation of
others may be personally offensive, the entire question of pleasant and unpleasant
odor is tempered by familiar likes and aversion to the unfamiliar that is affected
by sanitary customs, food habits and the oils and greases that may be used on the
hair and skin in a particular culture. Unpleasant odor is an accusation that is leveled
against other races, and given as a reason for avoidance—Japanese have claimed that
whites “smell bad”; whites have claimed that blacks “smell bad”—and it lurks behind
the belief shared by large numbers of both sexes that women are more attractive to
men when they mask their human scent with the fragrance of flowers.

During that time in Western history when bathing was rare and contagion-ridden towns
and cities smelled of horse manure, raw human sewage, the unwashed laboring masses
and the
pervasive stench of death, the solution of the upper classes to health care, offensive
odors and sensual refinement was to carry a scented handkerchief, a perfumed glove
or a pomander ball wherever they went. Today, when none of the above applies, a woman
is persuaded not only to scrupulously rid her body of all natural smells, but even
to replace the fresh, clean smell of soap and water with a brand-name perfume. That
it is considered feminine and erotic for a woman to smell like a bouquet of flowers
while a fragrant man is considered decadent and foppish presents a marketing problem
to those who sell men’s perfumes, but the serious issue remains an acculturated aversion
to the natural odors of femaleness and sexual arousal.

Left to stew in their own juices, adult males and females do give off different odors.
Mixed sweat and semen is appreciably distinct from the odor of sweat mixed with vaginal
secretions, and menstrual blood has its own unique scent. Furthermore, body odors
in others strike us more sharply than our own. Animals routinely sniff each other
to ascertain a sexual message, but the true biochemical signals among humans are at
once too vague, too intimate, too closely related to animal behavior, and altogether
too funky, in the original meaning of the word, to have retained much sex appeal in
a sanitized world imbued with upper-class aspirations.

A primitive tribe that reeks of cow dung is convinced that its odors are pleasantly
tolerable to others. Similarly, most men are not self-conscious about giving off too
strong an impression when they engage in activity that is certified as manly. A man’s
aroma can accommodate fresh sweat, beer, horses, leather, pipe tobacco and cigar smoke
with no detriment to his masculine image, and some of these odors are thought to enhance
his virile status, but he is probably of the opinion that the opposite sex is best
served by a dab of perfume behind the ears. “The girl that I marry,” sings the all-American
cowpoke, “will smell of cologne,” even if she spends her days changing diapers, chopping
onions and feeding slop to the pigs. No work that a woman does, even cooking, can
enhance her aroma, for femininity exists on a plane of enchantment where the air is
rarefied and sweet.

The narrow range of scent that is acceptably feminine does
not seem so limited or lacking in imagination when it is sold by the ounce in a brilliant
array of crystal bottles that promise to release the voluptuous powers of love and
desire in an atomized mist of fine French elegance or an exotic cloud of oriental
sophistication. Despite my uneducated nostrils, I cannot ignore the claims of my women
friends that not only can they discern an expensive scent as distinct from a cheap
imitation, but their pleasure is heightened when they indulge their senses in a whiff
of their favorite fragrance. Nor would I make light of the sacred act of anointment,
solemn and joyous in one graceful gesture, a moment akin to the last rites in the
feminine ritual of preparing body and soul to meet the unknown.

“Why shouldn’t a woman want to smell good?” a friend of mine asks, and I would like
to answer: If you think that perfume makes you smell good, and you feel more feminine
when you put it on, then wear it. A bottle of Chanel plays no direct part in the subjugation
of women; it merely extends the prescription of sweetness to the olfactory senses,
where pretense is easier than in matters of character and disposition, at least on
first impression.

Yet I can never quite convince myself that perfume is just a harmless pleasure. I’ve
heard too many nasty jokes, I suppose, like the one about the blind man who tips his
hat and says “Good morning, ladies,” when he passes a fish market. Dread that the
female scent needs a mask for sexual confidence is frankly exploited in commercials
for vaginal deodorants, or feminine-hygiene sprays as they are called euphemistically.
(Perhaps not so euphemistically. Hygiene refers to the practice of health and cleanliness;
in the context of a douchelike product, the word conveys the age-old charge against
women, “Unclean, unclean.”)

As for the dab behind the earlobes—why, if perfume is such a universal delight to
the senses, do men prefer to indulge themselves at one remove, and why is the gift
of perfume from a man considered such a tribute to the soul of womankind? I have never
been delighted to receive a bottle of perfume. On the contrary, I have always felt
mildly affronted, as if the human distance had been pointedly increased. Oh, I know
that was not the giver’s intention—he was complimenting my sexual nature by catering
to the charming enigma of my feminine affinity for luxury and froth. Women are supposed
to adore good perfume and be touched by a gift that pays homage to their alluring
vanities and trifling desires.

Efforts by the perfume companies to penetrate a resistant male market have been nothing
short of astonishing in recent years. Are men being sissified in a decadent plot of
capitalist expansion? Is the pursuit of sybaritic leisure in economically uncertain
times a significant factor? Or are there now sufficient numbers of men no longer morbidly
afraid of overstepping the bounds of masculinity who will venture to buy a cosmetic
product that supposedly will enhance their physical appeal? And to whom is the sweet-smelling,
newly liberated man appealing? I suspect that he wants to appeal to another man in
the competitive scramble of the gay community, but no doubt there has been some fragrant
spillover to straight men who also wish to spruce up their grooming now that the male
sex is being assured by judicious advertising that “a man’s cologne” surrounded by
images of polo, karate, the great outdoors, a Stetson hat, riding boots, gray flannel
suits, etcetera, is a safe world apart from the stuff in the other bottle that belongs
to women.

In an age devoted to personal gratification and self-improvement, the boundaries of
masculine-feminine can shift with ease to permit an equality in artificial scent.
Perfume is, after all, a gloss that requires little time or effort, that is rarely
noticed in its absence, and that does not inhibit the capacity to function. For these
reasons its usefulness as a delineator of the feminine may be on the wane. Body hair,
or the tireless elimination of it, is another matter, for here the tradition rests
on a true biological difference in gradation and on the lofty esthetic of high art.

Before the dawn of twentieth-century modernism, the female nude in Western art was
never blemished by pubic hair any more than she was by underarm hair, leg hair, a
spotted complexion or wrinkles. Seamless perfection was the artist’s goal. It is not
possible to say with authority whether actual custom influenced this shorn-lamb vision
of feminine beauty. Although conscientious plucking of the pubic region was practiced
by Roman courtesans and highborn ladies, and Moslem women
diligently plucked themselves bare and still do, body depilation has been inconsistent
in other cultures. Not so, however, in art. Historian Anne Hollander has written,
“From classical times onward, the harmony of the female body seemed to require the
absence of pubic hair whereas the opposite seems to have been true for male beauty.”

So while Michelangelo graced his David with sculptured curlecues in marble, honoring
the golden age of Greece and Rome as well as his own predilections, Botticelli’s Venus
rises from the sea with a hairless crotch demurely obscured by a hank of her golden
tresses. The fleshy nudes of Titian, Raphael and Rubens seem baldly plucked or oddly
sparse in the context of their languorous thighs and indolent bellies. Ambiguous shading,
a pallid stroke, the strategic cover of a hand, a thigh, a drape of cloth—by these
devices the natural look of a realistic woman never confronts the charmed observer.
Ingres did a study for Perseus and Andromeda with full pubic hair, but in the finished
oil it was absent. Courbet, notes Hollander, “did specifically pornographic paintings
showing very thick pubic hair, but these were for private patrons.”