Bush

In the novel Innocent, Scott Turow’s best-selling sequel to his début, Presumed Innocent, the protagonist, Rusty Sabich, just turned 60, is having an affair with a young lawyer who has clerked for him. “Physically,” he describes her, “she is glorious, a power Anna enjoys and works hard to hold on to—manicures and pedicures, hair appointments, facials, ‘routine maintenance,’ as she calls it. Her breasts are perfect, large, beautifully belled, with a broad, dark aureole and long nipples. And I am fascinated by her female parts, where her youth somehow seems centered. She’s waxed there, ‘a full Brazilian,’ is her term. It’s a first for me, and the smooth feel provokes my lust like a lightning bolt.”

A “full Brazilian” isn’t just Anna’s term. As most women know, it’s the latest fashion in depilation, the removal by wax of all the hair around your genital area, in a procedure that causes intense pain and can lead to staph infections. According to one legend of the term’s origin, sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers in Brazil discovered females whose genitalia “were so exposed, so healthy and so hairless, that looking upon them we felt no shame.”

Why didn’t the explorers feel shame? I have been thinking about this subject in more than a casually political way since a close friend and his 20-month-old daughter, Cissy, spent a long weekend with my fiancé and me. I reared two sons; my image of a baby includes a little rubbery penis that arcs pee onto the far wall while you’re trying to diaper. Cissy is not quite two. Her mound of Venus and the crevice that passes from it through her legs form a lovely creased pillow that I was able to contemplate in a way that had heretofore eluded me. My looking on it, my fiancé’s looking on it, evoked no shame: we were looking at a baby. Our feelings were of nurture and not of desire.

And that’s what a full Brazilian aims at—a look, and a feel, reminiscent of a girl baby. You can’t recapture that precious plumpness, and the soft structures tucked inside the cleft have grown complicated. But insofar as the heterosexual gaze involves lust—and insofar as that lust, experienced outside whatever norms you accept, provokes shame—it’s reasonable to assert that a male gaze devoid of shame is a male gaze devoid of lust. It would be gross naiveté to impute purity to the Portuguese who raped and pillaged their way through South America; clearly those men forced themselves on native women without conscience or remorse. Moreover, it’s possible that calling a certain wax job “Brazilian” has given it an edge of so-called spiciness that reeks of European attitudes toward dark exoticism. But the original pronouncement still carries weight: these were Catholic men, reared in a culture where shame meant something, describing the sight of women who were hairless below the navel, and that hairlessness momentarily arrested shameful impulses. They felt, or claimed to feel, the way my fiancé and our young friend feel when they are looking at Cissy.

But what about Rusty Sabich? Let’s go back to Anna and those “female parts” on which her youth “somehow seems centered.” (And where might her “male parts” lie? Just asking.) I’d venture that the mysterious “somehow” question is answered by the next couple of lines. The very hairlessness, the little-girlishness, of Anna’s mons veneris is what turns Rusty on. Rusty feels no shame at being hit by a “lightning bolt” of lust on viewing Anna’s depilated genitalia because he is without a sense of shame. His shamelessness, in fact, is part of the point—he may have reached three score years, but he still gets off on breaking a taboo.

That taboo, of course, is being broken at this very moment in thousands of bedrooms across America. Or is it a taboo? Other cultures not only condone sex between adult men and young girls (menarche sometimes being a token requirement), but frame depilation as a religious act...