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CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
The way that humans attend to the body on a traditional, experimental, or comparative
basis is direct symbolism of a culture at work (Bordo, 2003). Men and women throughout
history have spent time, energy, and resources to manipulate their bodies with the hope of
achieving a desired effect. Humans mentally and physically grow, their surroundings change,
and the experiences they have with their bodies change as well. A person‟s grooming practices
can play two opposing roles; they serve the purpose of portraying a sense-of-self, and yet they
are also used to divide the individuals who follow societal conventions from the ones who do
not, creating a platform of repressed self-expression. In other words, humans can bring
themselves closer to a culture through a visual, unified identity but using the same visual effect
can concurrently set themselves apart. Only in the past forty years has literature been devoted to
the discussion of supplementations/modifications to the pubic region from a historical
standpoint, recognizing different cultures use of it in daily life and art, as well as the modern
trend and its influences.
Historical Evidence
Possibly the most in-depth historical evaluation of pubic hair depilation is found in
Wendy Cooper‟s Hair, Sex, and Symbolism (1971). The author begins with the Egyptian
civilization, stating that both men and women thought of body hair as “ugly” and “unhygienic,”
causing their daily grooming to include complete body hair removal (Cooper, 1971).
Archeologists have unearthed a variety of Egyptian depilatory devices, which supports the idea
that Egyptians regarded hair as impure and held a strong distaste for it. Historical evidence of
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