The Short and Curly History of Pubic Hair

To celebrate the release of Kate's new History Hit documentary, Beating Around The Bush: The History of Pubic Hair https://access.historyhit.com/videos/beating-around-the-bush, we're revisiting a favourite episode about exactly that. Watch the documentary here: https://access.historyhit.com/videos/beating-around-the-bush Find out about the history of pubic hair removal from ancient Greece and Islamic bath cultures through Renaissance Italy and Victorian England to today's porn-influenced trends. Joining Kate is Professor Jill Burke, author of How to be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity, to help us uncover this history. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov and Stuart Beckwith. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producers were Freddy Chick and Charlotte Long. Subscribe to the new Betwixt The Sheets YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BetwixtTheSheetsPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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• 2:21Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here once again with your favoritest of favorite podcasts, Betwixt the Sheets. And probably one of the reasons it is your favorite is because we do stray into the saucier areas of history. And because of that, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects. And you should be an adult too. And if you're not an adult too, be off with you. And if you are an adult and you're hanging around, well, fair dues. We have now told you that this podcast might get a little bit spicy. So if you hang around and you end up clutching your pearls, well, tough [BLEEP], quite frankly, we did let you know. For the rest of you, on with the show.

• 3:08Kate Lister?

  Here in the Islamic bathing houses of the 11th century, some fantastic work is going on. I am here with my fellow European travelers. And guys, it's seriously rude to stare. The body hair of both men and women is being very carefully removed. Not from us Europeans, we're a right hairy bunch, but they are having the whole lot off. Not even a tuft left. They look like eels. Why are they doing this? Well, dear listener, in today's episode, we are finally going to find out about the history of pubic hair and its removal and the keeping thereof. And to do that, we will be traveling back to Europe, where a culture of sharing beauty tips and secrets is blossoming. This is one of our most requested episodes.

• 3:53Kate Lister?

  You lot are pub crazy. So to find out more, who else could we possibly talk to other than Professor Jill Burke, who is an expert on Renaissance beauty? And she knows an awful lot about pubic hair as well. So on with the show.

• 4:36Kate Lister?

  Whether you wax, pluck, shave, or just leave it alone to do its thing, what you want to do with your pubic hair is entirely your call. But here's an interesting question. How have we thought about managed and styled pubic hair throughout history? Well, to coincide with the release of a new History Hit documentary that I've made called Beating Around the Bush, I'm really proud of that title. Sorry, focus, focus. We're revisiting an episode on the history of pubic hair from a couple of years ago. In this episode, I am joined by the magnificent author and historian Professor Jill Burke, who is also in the documentary. And speaking of which, it is out today and you can watch me on this historical pubic adventure at historyhit.com. Wax and strips at the ready, everybody. Let's do it.

• 5:26Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Jill Burke. How are you doing?

• 5:32Speaker 03

  I'm, as always, delighted to be talking to you about a subject close to our hearts.

• 5:37Kate Lister?

  And apparently close to a lot of other people's hearts, because this is one of our most requested episodes, history of pubic hair. It just, like, people just want to know.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  It's an important topic.

• 5:50Kate Lister?

  It's deceptively important, actually.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  It is, actually, yeah. I mean, we joke about it, but actually, it's very fascinating when you get, you delve into the history. It's going to be so many cons, when you delve into the history of it. Because it's really about how people change their bodies in the light of things that are happening around them and the culture that's around them, but in a way that it's really hard to find out about as a historian. So it's a really good topic for history, I think.

• 6:16Kate Lister?

  And change their bodies in a way that isn't visible to most people. Unless I'm wrong about that, unless you have uncovered cultures where pubic hair was on full display 24/7 and it was like a really big deal.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Well, there might be.

• 6:30Kate Lister?

  I haven't heard of any of them.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  You know, this is disclaimer. You know, my expertise is mainly in European cultures and certainly I'd say in most of European history, that's not been the case. And so a lot of the kind of history and the delving into this, you keep using the word delve, yeah, delve into this subject that me and other historians have had to do. You've got to be a bit kind of creative about the kind of sources that you're using. And also aware that sometimes quite small sources, you have to use quite small sources to make quite a big story with subjects like this. But I've checked, I've double-checked everything. I'm going to try, honestly. And everything that I've been looking at is based on this primary information.

• 7:13Kate Lister?

  Because we think of pubic hair fashion as being something that dates from the 90s. It's very easy to think that with the advent of the Brazilian wax and Sex and the City making us all think about pubes. And there's a sort of temptation to think that from day dot until about 1997, everyone was just full bush, a thicket, just rocking that 70s, that 70s vibe.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Letting themselves go wild.

• 7:40Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  And beautiful. And yeah, no, that's not true at all.

• 7:44Kate Lister?

  No.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  So there's evidence of pubic hair removal from very ancient times. So probably ancient Egypt.

• 7:51Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Certainly ancient Greece. And it's a fashion that comes and goes through history. People sometimes tell this story, like, there's a straight line that goes from no hair removal to complete hair removal, but that's not how it works. And different cultures and different historical periods have fashions for this. So it's got history, it's thousands of years old, with particular points in history where it becomes more fashionable and more possible for women to move their pubic hair and where people start to discuss it in sources.

• 8:25Kate Lister?

  And has men's pubic hair been subject to as many changes as women's have?

• 8:31Speaker 03

  That is a good question. I think in ancient, I've come across discussions of men's pubic hair all the time. It tends to be in many societies, and again, this is Western societies, masculinity and hairiness are associated with each other.

• 8:48Kate Lister?

  Yes, they are.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  And so although there's a bit of evidence for men shaping their pubic hair in ancient Greece, for example, there's less discussion of men's pubic hair generally.

• 9:02Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  There's ancient texts that say that pubic hair in both men and women kind of adorns the body. It's there to adorn the genitals.

• 9:10Kate Lister?

  Well, I like that.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is nice. I think that's a really nice way of looking at it, but there's probably less discussion of men's pubic hair. It just tends to hang around, men's pubic hair.

• 9:20Kate Lister?

  It does, doesn't it? I hope that they've trimmed it, though, throughout history. I think that that's important.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  I mean, certainly if you look at the sculpture, like ancient Greek sculpture looks very grude.

• 9:30Kate Lister?

  Which, doesn't it?

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:31Kate Lister?

  It does.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  So, and this probably does react, you know, it might well be late to practice.

• 9:35Kate Lister?

  Ah, so in Islamic history and custom, hair removal was incredibly common.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yes. There's two separate histories, really. So you get this classical history where people sometimes remove their hair, there's less patchy evidence for it, and then you, from the early, middle, sorry.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 9:59Kate Lister?

  Keep myself to be a child.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Around the early Middle Ages.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  You get, you know, the start of Islamic bathing practices.

• 10:06Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  So when the bath plays a really important role in many different Islamic cultures. And certainly you start to get European travellers from the Middle Ages, from the 10th, 11th centuries, saying, what are they doing? These people in their baths are completely removing all their body hair for both men and women. And that kind of feeds into European practices in Spain. Because Islamic cultures in Spain, right up to the 15th century, and Jewish and Christian and Islamic women are sharing beauty recipes. Sharing recipes for medicine, sharing recipes for all sorts of cosmetics as well, and also sharing recipes for hair removal.

• 10:45Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  And so then when you get the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492, a lot of these women come to Italy. Italy's the centre of printing in the later 15th, 16th centuries. And so then you get these recipes for hair removal start to be spread all around Europe. So I think that, again, we're talking about evidence, it's really difficult to get secure evidence for this, but that seems to be probably how Islamic mixtures for hair removal spread around the rest of Europe. But stop, but it's mainly the Mediterranean, there's different kind of, in Germany and England, they're a bit suspicious of hair removal.

• 11:21Kate Lister?

  That sounds about right for us, to be completely honest. There's lots of accounts of British people and Celtic people being very confused by what they saw during the Crusades, which was mostly people cleaning themselves. They seem to have been really baffled by it.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  I mean, you get that a lot in Northern Europe, like, why?

• 11:42Kate Lister?

  What's happening here?

• 11:46Kate Lister?

  God almighty.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  I mean, I suppose that a lot of the hair removal, particularly in hotter places, is to do with hygiene.

• 11:52Kate Lister?

  Oh, it probably is, isn't it?

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, certainly some of it, I reckon, because if you know the, you know, how common lice were.

• 12:01Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Scabies, that kind of thing, it's really common as well all over the place. And so presumably removing all your body hair would have prevented some of that contact, particularly for little insects like lice would have prevented.

• 12:16Kate Lister?

  And in Islamic traditions and Jewish tradition, body hair removal is also about being clean. And you see this idea repeating and changing and other people reacting to it. The idea that taking the hair away somehow makes you cleaner.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this is something that you get repeated, right? Up to now, right?

• 12:35Kate Lister?

  Up to now, yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so that's, you know, it's part of what was happening in baths. You know, a lot of these rituals and what was happening in baths wasn't just to do with what we would think of as washing. With them soap or whatever, you know, they're scraping the skin as well. And what we might think of as exfoliation. So there's a big range of bathing practices that go on, but it is associated with cleanliness, the idea of hair removal. But yeah, mainly in these Mediterranean cultures, which makes sense because they're hotter. And maybe, certainly there's pictures from the 16th century, the European pictures, so they're quite, you know, orientalising and they're kind of fetishised. What's going, they really do fetishise in Europe what goes on in Islamic women's baths, particularly Turkish baths and baths in North Africa and Egypt.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  And there's pictures of women with like see-through gowns on, when you can see that they've got no body hair. So yeah, it's associated with cleanliness, both ritually, but also probably in practical terms as well.

• 13:33Kate Lister?

  I just got back from a week in Pompeii and I was lucky enough to talk to the head curator of the site, Sophie Hay there. And she showed me around the brothel and it was amazing. But one of the things she said did stay with me, because I knew I was going to be talking to you. And she said, when the brothel in Pompeii was excavated, they found evidence of razors. And there was a lot of washing and hygiene equipment, as you might expect, but they found lots of razors there, which has sort of led to this discussion around, would that have been the people that were working there shaving the clients, like shits and giggles? Or as I suspect it might have been, is they're removing their own body hair?

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's quite possible, or each other's body hair.

• 14:18Kate Lister?

  Or each other's body hair, yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Because there's a lot of associations between sex work and body hair removal.

• 14:26Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Historically, you know, some of it is, it's really hard to, sometimes to extricate historical insults, right? Oh, you know, this is associated with sex workers and therefore it's sinful on what actually happened in practice. But certainly in the sources that I know the best, there's a connection between sex work, hair removal and immigration.

• 14:48Kate Lister?

  Oh, I wasn't expecting it to go there. Wow, okay.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  And a lot of these Jewish immigrants who came to Italy did work in this kind of world where women didn't have much money, were more likely to do sex work and were also more likely to do the kind of jobs like hair removal.

• 15:04Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Beauty and stuff, so it might have been the same. It's very difficult because it's thousands of years different, because I'm looking at 1500, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was kind of similar if poorer women were also the women who were more likely to do the kind of beautician work, that hair removal work. And that's, that's also what happened in baths later on as well. Baths also become the centre for hair removal, but are also the centre for sex work.

• 15:28Kate Lister?

  What that shows in Pompeii is clearly someone was having their hair removed.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:32Kate Lister?

  In the brothel. So that suggests some kind of fashion.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so.

• 15:37Kate Lister?

  When do we kind of get to the point where we've got any more kind of concrete evidence that we can get our fingers into and be like, this was a definite thing that was happening?

• 15:48Speaker 03

  There's a great text that I probably touched on before last time called La Lotzana and the Lucia, which is a funny play about an immigrant from Spain who comes to Italy and sets up like this beautician. And they talk about removing pubic hair, that women come to them and they say, we want to get our pubic hair removed because that's how our husbands like it. Or they say, we want to get our pubic hair removed, most of the Roman women don't do this. And it's, you know, it's better for us to get so that, you know, we stand out from the crowd. This is like 1524, so there's evidence there now. That gives a good amount of evidence that people are starting to think about this as a fashion.

• 16:24Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  And that men are starting to expect it. And it's interesting with classical art, if you look at like sculptures of Venus, they never have pubic hair.

• 16:31Kate Lister?

  They never have pubes, do they?

• 16:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 16:33Kate Lister?

  Do you think that that is like related to the fact why so many of the statues have tiny little willies? With the women, they just don't have any detail there at all. It's like a Barbie doll.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  It's interesting that there's no pubic hair on statues of Venus in the Middle Ages. In the 14th century, 15th century, you do get pubic hair.

• 16:51Kate Lister?

  Who put pubes on Venus?

• 16:52Speaker 03

  On many images of Venus, yeah, particularly in Northern Europe and in Germany, but also in Spain. So this fashion, when you get the interest in, you know, in classical sculpture in the Renaissance, then they start removing all the body hair from all their nudes. But before then, you do get depictions of pubic hair. So I think they go hand in hand.

• 17:12Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  I think this, you know, what's happening in the visual record probably both reflects and affects the way that women think their bodies should look and that men are expecting to see in women. Because, you know, there's that famous story of the art critic John Busken, who was allegedly, anyway. Yeah, really shocked by his wife's, if he grazed pubic hair, because he was expecting her to be, you know, like a classical sculpture. But I think that's one of the, also one of the fascinating things, this difference between expectation

• 17:46Kate Lister?

  and the reality.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  And what people's bodies, bodies look like under clothes and what visual culture tells people to expect. Yeah, actual real living bodies.

• 17:55Kate Lister?

  By the time you get to the Renaissance, and this is your area of study, and I don't know the Italian texts that well, but I do know that British texts, there's quite a few of them, by which I mean four or five, but in historical terms, that's like in this, in this particular subject of clothes.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 18:12Kate Lister?

  And they talk about pubic hair removal as being the Italian custom, that it's something Italian women do, the Italian wenches do it. And there's quite a lot of, again, confusion and bafflement from the Brits about this.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, the reason why they associate with Italians is that a lot of the makeup texts, the recipe texts that get published in the 16th century are Italian. So you get things like Alessia Piermonte's Book of Secrets.

• 18:40Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  And that is first published in Italian in 1558, I think. And then it's translated, it goes all over Europe and there's several editions in English. And the English editions, the first, the earliest ones, change the text about hair removal.

• 18:56Kate Lister?

  Really?

• 18:56Speaker 03

  And they say, yeah, they say, oh, this is to remove the hair from the, the chins of young men.

• 19:03Kate Lister?

  No, it's not.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  And it's like, no, it's not. That is not what it's for. Like, whereas the Italian texts quite explicitly say it's to remove hair from anywhere on the body. And then, so you get those books and things like Giovanni Marianello's On Amenti, which I wrote about in my, in my book, that has a whole section on body hair and says, if you don't remove your body hair, especially if you're going around looking like a wild beast, you can't blame your husband for leaving you and going off with another woman. And so it's like, by the 1560s in Italy, if you don't remove your body hair, you're not the norm. And it looks like that, again, you know, with this abundance of texts about, you know, five. But in England, yeah, it's, it just doesn't translate that, yeah.

• 19:48Kate Lister?

  The ones that I've looked at, there's a real sense that like Bush is lush. Like, I often think of it as, when I was teaching to students, I was like, the way that the Italians and us today look at it is like this kind of super smooth, like, you know, it's like a baby bird, there's no hair on it at all. Whereas the Brits seem to have this idea of like, it's almost like a big, thick, full thatch of lusciousness, like, like a cat with a silky coat. And their view in the Italians is like a balding, mangy cat with, and they look at it with the same kind of, ew.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so interesting, this cultural difference, same Merkins, which, you know, I haven't come across those in Italian texts at all.

• 20:30Kate Lister?

  No.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Whereas, so this idea that you could actually have a pubic wig would be like, why? In Italy, because they, they do kind of fetishize, they're really strict about what you should look like in Italian texts. And they've got such an amount of visual culture, you know, nudes, female nudes really saturate their visual culture from the 16th century on, would I get you? They just kind of pop up everywhere, all over the place. And so I think accustomed to seeing women without any pubic hair. So that's, I think that's what they expect.

• 20:59Kate Lister?

  That's what they expect. Whereas the Brits, they wanted like this kind of lush pelt. And you can find like odd insults turning up of, who was it? Was it John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, who talks about having sex with someone and it was like rustling because the merkin was, was moving. And he's like really revolted by this patchy pubic hair thing. And

• 21:22Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 21:23Kate Lister?

  For anyone who's listening, doesn't know what a merkin is, can you just explain that? And why on earth you would use such a thing?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Well, a merkin is a wig, but for your pubic area. And so they're just like furry triangles, aren't they?

• 21:36Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  It's almost got a mythical status, a merkin, really, because again, it's really hard to find very much out about them. But certainly they're not used, I haven't come across them in Southern Europe.

• 21:47Kate Lister?

  No, they wouldn't be.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  They seem to be just talked about in England.

• 21:50Kate Lister?

  And we haven't, I don't think we've actually found any of them. We've got like references.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Replicas, yeah.

• 21:55Kate Lister?

  Replicas, references. I think it was John Wilmot again, who talks about somebody using fat, like goose fat or something, and then like putting hair on top of that and trying to like, like, so that kind

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Lovely.

• 22:07Kate Lister?

  This sounds delicious, doesn't it? It sounds absolutely yummy. But why would you do this? Why would somebody not have all their pubic hair to the point where they needed a wig? And they, you know, to create this luscious pelt thing?

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, that's something that's is interesting because there's like smallpox epidemics.

• 22:26Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  And smallpox causes you to lose your hair, both on your head, but in other places too. And there's just a lot of skin problems.

• 22:34Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Skin disease that they don't really have many options for getting rid of. So I'm talking about things like scabies particularly, or various pox, there's a lot of different kind of lice. And I suppose if, it'd be interesting to find out in the English context, if you're removing pubic hair to get rid of lice, for example, pubic lice.

• 22:53Kate Lister?

  Probably were, weren't they?

• 22:55Speaker 03

  Your merkin would come in handy.

• 22:58Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  Because it would suggest you don't have pubic lice.

• 23:01Kate Lister?

  But syphilis as well, that's knocking around, isn't it?

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Quite a lot of syphilis, particularly obviously if you're a sex worker or just married to a guy.

• 23:11Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Unfortunately. So yeah. And, and again, and you know, there's treatments as well. So they're using things like mercury and arsenic as treatments for these things as well. So maybe again, it's part of treatment that you move and body hair, even in an English context, I can imagine that would be something that you might want to do.

• 23:28Kate Lister?

  It's, there is a link between patchy pubes and illness. You can see that, like where it crops up in the, in the English texts.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Because when we read all these beauty texts, you, you imagine people's having bodies that are similar to our bodies today. But actually, they're just afflicted by all these illnesses that thankfully we can normally get rid of if you have them nowadays.

• 24:00Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Jill after this short break.

• 24:06Kate Lister?

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• 27:27Kate Lister?

  If you were a lady in Italy who needed to take your pubes off because that's just what your husband expects because he saw it on a statue and it looked nice. How, how would you do that? I mean, because I'm thinking like now you can nip down the shop and get a disposable razor, but they, the razors they had at the time were those cutthroat razors. And I would feel very cautious about putting that near my chuff, wouldn't you?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  This is ancient Greece. They didn't use razors in the Renaissance, but there's an ancient Greek image from a vase of someone using one of those razors.

• 28:00Kate Lister?

  Oh my god.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  On the pubic area. Yes, there is. But there's another one with someone burning them off, burning their pubic hair off with a lamp.

• 28:08Kate Lister?

  All right, yeah, I'll take the razor.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  I know. Given the choice.

• 28:12Kate Lister?

  My god.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  So in the Middle Ages, so this again, it comes probably from Islamic bath culture, spread in through Europe. They used a paste made out of arsenic and quicklime.

• 28:25Kate Lister?

  Of course they did.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you'd make this paste. You'd often use it in a bath because there's not a lot of running water, remember in this period? So you go to the public baths.

• 28:34Kate Lister?

  Imagine being next to the person who's decided to put that, smear that on themselves.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  You're smearing that all over your body.

• 28:41Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  And then you have to, it's like Veet, right? It's like these, these are the paste. And you have to time it. And of course they don't have watches. There's clocks, but not in baths. And so they say things like, say the Lord's prayer twice.

• 28:55Kate Lister?

  Holy god. Oh, wow. Okay. Nice. Nice.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  So you say, you say the Lord's prayer twice, or whatever they do. And then you start to try and take it off your skin. And if you don't take it off quickly enough, it starts to burn.

• 29:10Kate Lister?

  I bet it does.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's all about timing. And then it says, and get your bath attendant or the maid to kind of pour water all over you really quickly. So you take it off with a cloth and then you pour water all over yourself to get rid of it.

• 29:23Kate Lister?

  Does it work?

• 29:24Speaker 03

  You know, they won't let me try it.

• 29:26Kate Lister?

  No, I bet they won't. I know you've done some experiments.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Health and safety gone mad.

• 29:32Kate Lister?

  All right. Yeah. Okay. Let's, let's not try that one.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  I think it would work because it's very highly alkaline and that's how feet works. It just burns.

• 29:39Kate Lister?

  Those modern day depilatory creams, other brands are available. They're shit. They're shit. They don't work and they stink.

• 29:48Kate Lister?

  They're crap.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  And you also, you, you time, time to leave them on for long enough before they start.

• 29:53Kate Lister?

  They still burn. They still burn. They smell terrible and they don't get rid of all hair.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  It's like, lots of, lots of hair that didn't come out.

• 30:01Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  It's really rubbish.

• 30:03Kate Lister?

  It's like hundreds of years on and it's still kind of shit.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  I wonder though, if the really hard stuff, you know, that quick lime, if we were allowed to try it.

• 30:14Kate Lister?

  People would as well. We should, we should probably say, please for fuck's sake, don't try it.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Absolutely don't try it.

• 30:21Kate Lister?

  Please. But how about something like waxing or sugaring or threading? Surely someone must have worked. I don't know the history of waxing if they, cause I know that they use like, you can't just get a candle and do it. That would be awful. And like you sort of melt it on you. You had to have special wax. But was there any evidence for that?

• 30:40Speaker 03

  I'm being very strict with myself here, but the only references I've heard for pubic hair removal is this mixture with quick lime and other things that definitely don't work, like ants eggs and cat dung, things like that, that probably I don't, I just don't see how they could possibly work. But they do have waxing. They use things like tree gums. So like pine resin that's really, really sticky. You put it on, you leave it to dry and then you rip it off.

• 31:04Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  They use that. They use sugaring and some, sugar's quite expensive.

• 31:08Kate Lister?

  Oh God, it is, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Probably wouldn't use sugaring.

• 31:12Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Probably later on in, in, you know, when you get into the, when it gets cheaper in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I don't see why they wouldn't use sugar. And they definitely use things like, you know, waxing with sheets of cotton. They do exactly the same thing as we did. It's a quite a simple process, really, really waxing.

• 31:28Kate Lister?

  I wonder if, if they were using it on pubic hair. It seems very strange that you, we would have evidence that they would opt for like this quick lime stuff over like waxing. Would that to me sort of suggests that they hadn't put two and two together because why on earth would you use that over waxing?

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Unless they think there's other reasons for it. So for example, arsenic was often used to get rid of lice and as an insecticide generally. It also whitens skin a little bit. So it might have been that there were other reasons to use this paste.

• 32:00Kate Lister?

  That could be.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  They did thread eyebrows, but I think that might be a bit complicated in pubic hair.

• 32:04Kate Lister?

  There's, there's mention about in, in Roman texts about men in baths having their hair plucked, their body hair plucked with tweezers presumably.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, with tweezers. Yeah, there's definitely, but that would take a long time.

• 32:17Kate Lister?

  That would be horrible.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  And yeah, it'd be really painful.

• 32:20Kate Lister?

  Yeah. Like your whole bush just plucked out. Oh no.

• 32:28Kate Lister?

  It would have grown back by the time.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  So you got it out of the back.

• 32:34Kate Lister?

  Yeah. All right. So that one's not going to work. That's kind of crap.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  I think the main way they did it was this paste and razors. I did say in the sources, you shouldn't use razors because the hair grows back thicker.

• 32:44Kate Lister?

  That's true. That's true.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. It kind of grows back coarser, doesn't it? Cause you chop the kind of fine ends of it. So yeah, they do say not to use razors. And also, yeah, the cut throat, you know, maybe it would, given they've not got any safety razors, that wouldn't be.

• 32:58Kate Lister?

  Am I right in thinking that there's a witchy association between pubic hair and?

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's quite a sad.

• 33:06Kate Lister?

  I hadn't seen this one come in at all. It's very sad and very, there's a straggled route to this one. But what's the link between pubic hair and witchcraft?

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Well, people, when they were accused of witchcraft, the inquisitors would have them completely shaved from top, you know, below then in the neck downwards. And sometimes their head as well, in order to check to see if they have hidden signs or amulets or magic implements that the devil has put there. So there's evidence for this in witch trials in Northern Italy. Near Lake Como in fourteen eighty five, in which somewhere a hundred and twenty women were killed. And it's like a shame in ritual, but it's also like a kind of humiliation, you know, to have that done in front of men.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  And so in Germany, in the fifteen twenties and thirties, justice of witch craze is starting. It's before you get this massive swag of people just chasing down witches. They do have this obsession with pictures of people staring into pubic hair. There's a few, there's people staring at pubic hair as if there's something secret hidden there.

• 34:14Kate Lister?

  I'm not familiar with the trials in Germany and Italy, but I know a few about the ones in, in the UK. And were they doing what the inquisitors here were doing, which was, yeah, they're looking for like bite marks or but like something

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:28Kate Lister?

  that the devil left his mark.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 34:30Kate Lister?

  There.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Or sometimes just like kind of tokens or amulets that could be kind of concealed.

• 34:35Kate Lister?

  Hidden in your pubic hair and the devil's left an amulet in your pubic hair.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's like an excuse, isn't it? To just degrade women as much as possible.

• 34:47Kate Lister?

  Do you know what? The shaving women has a really long history as

• 34:51Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 34:52Kate Lister?

  a shaming thing. And it's usually the head that is shaved and you see that like right up until, I probably still see it today, I suppose. But certainly after the second world war, when in France, when women were being accused being Nazi collaborators, they'd be paraded in the street and have their head shaved. Pubic hair removal is kind of, I, I think that it sort of plays into that as well in these witch trials.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And also in a man's space, because when we're talking about pubic hair removal, normally in, in say bath houses or at home, you'd be in a female only space.

• 35:26Kate Lister?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  So what you're doing is, is taking that kind of very intimate female only experience and putting it out and exposing it in front of a bunch of men who were on you on trial. It's really awful. Even the inquisitors who were writing about this, they talk about this in the Malius Malafakaran, which is this really famous witch hunting manual that comes out, that's in Betty Germans in the late fifteenth century. Even they say it's a really shameful thing.

• 35:53Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  And we don't actually do this in Germany because it's too shameful.

• 35:56Kate Lister?

  I mean, and that comes to something if the fucking Malius Malafakaran is going, that's a bit too far.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you can imagine how, how much stigma there is, even to expose women like that, to expose their nakedness like that. It's awful. Yeah.

• 36:09Kate Lister?

  There's an undeniable sexual undertone to a lot of these trials across Europe, like this insistent on searching in women's genitals to the point where they're going to

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 36:18Kate Lister?

  shave them and it's horrible.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really awful. And, you know, you see all these, and it's like this, thousands of thousands of women are involved. And it's, you know, because of the way that people talk about witches and it's kind of funny and all this kind of thing. We kind of forget the actual horror of these witch trials sometimes. But this kind of invasion of almost intimate parts of the body is, is part of this history as well.

• 36:42Kate Lister?

  Do you think that that kind of leaked out into a sort of a wider narrative around pubic hair and maybe witchcraft? I was going to, maybe not completely witchcraft, but the idea that there's something subversive about not having pubic hair.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. Not having pubic hair has often been associated with people who are on the edges of like, of society. We've talked about sex workers. We've talked about

• 37:07Kate Lister?

  People with syphilis.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  witches, people with syphilis. Yeah. It's kind of not respectable.

• 37:12Kate Lister?

  Yeah. And of course, the people who definitely don't have pubic hair that we often don't talk about in these things are kids.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:18Kate Lister?

  It's a strange signifier that as an adult, you would remove this sort of marker of you are fully pubescent and you are no longer a child, isn't it?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's a disturbing thing. That is actually a disturbing thing about what it suggests. Does it suggest, say, you know, girls were getting married often at fourteen to sixteen, you know, what does it suggest about male taste in?

• 37:43Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  In women's bodies. So there's also this undercurrent of things, you know, it's like everything to do with like altering the body. Sometimes you could say, oh, this is to do with women's agency and it's to do with women doing what they want with their own bodies and using their bodies to kind of get ahead in society, whatever. And then sometimes it's about men's taste and taking away women's agency and treating them, wanting them to be more childlike. So it's always like all these things. It's complicated. Yeah.

• 38:19Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Jill after this short break.

• 38:27Speaker 01

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• 38:56Speaker 02

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• 40:04Kate Lister?

  I spoke to Professor Helen King a while ago, who is the expert on all things Greek and gynecological. And I put the small willy question to her. I was just interested. I was just interested to what she would say. And I've never heard anyone give this response before. I was like, oh, okay. She thought that the tiny willies was actually a marker of childhood because they worship the boy, the boy body in Greek history and in Roman history and right up to the Renaissance, this idea of like boy love, the young, the young man. And then suddenly, like, the conversation wasn't funny anymore. I was like, wow, okay, Helen. But I thought that's interesting. And then maybe like what you were just saying there about the women not having pubic hair

• 40:48Kate Lister?

  on those statues, those images, maybe that's a hark back to childhood, too.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. Certainly in the early part of the Renaissance in Italy, you do get this real interest in young boys. You think of this sculpture by Donatello called the David, as in David and Goliath, the bronze David. And he's not got any pubic hair and he's definitely meant to be kind of younger. But also there's kind of uncomfortable, whether it's kind of fetishization, sexualization or not, or whether it's, you know, whether that's not an appropriate question, that's a big debate amongst art historians still. But then you get the things like Michelangelo's David, who's definitely a man.

• 41:29Kate Lister?

  It's definitely, it's definitely a man. He's got manly stuff going on, but he does have a little boy's willy. Just does.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  There was actually, in some of the texts on sculpture, they're very into proportion in the Renaissance bodily proportion, and they do talk about the ideal proportion of a penis. Yeah.

• 41:46Kate Lister?

  Well, do they? And do they say it should be a little one?

• 41:49Speaker 03

  I'll have to measure it out and see, because I haven't done that yet. Next time, next time I can tell you about that.

• 41:55Kate Lister?

  I'm getting us off topic now. We should get back to pubic hair. By the time you get to the Victorians, like through the 18th century into Victorians, we're now getting like photographic evidence and sort of some of the earliest pornography. And it looks like there is pubic hair removal being practiced around here, too.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  I think so. And actually, these books, you know, that recipe for quick line goes right through to the 19th century.

• 42:18Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  So people are constantly using it. They're using it in America, they're using it in, you know, with printing gays all over the world. So they're using it everywhere and people are one and against it for good reasons. And so, you know, you'd be better off shaving and things like that. But it looks like people are still, still using it and still removing there. But obviously, again, the edges of society, it's presumably not particularly respectable women who are having themselves photographed naked. So it speaks to this kind of maybe unconventional world of women who conflate sexuality.

• 42:50Kate Lister?

  It does, doesn't it? When do pubes become political? Because pubic hair is a feminist issue now, like the arguments about going back again to that childhood thing about like, why would you want to remove your hair so you can just look like a little girl? And the fact that like even today in 2024, there is no real way of removing your hair that isn't either results, if you shave it, you'll end up with like loads of little ingrown hairs and it'll, it's just shit and it's tops itchy as hell. You can go to a waxer, but even the best waxer, who can do it really quick, it still fucking hurts.

• 43:23Kate Lister?

  So there is a kind of like, why are we doing this? But when did that start to happen, that feminists decided, pubic hair, this is what we're going to talk about now?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think this is, this debate used to be massive.

• 43:35Kate Lister?

  Huge.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  A few years ago, that you shouldn't remove your pubic hair because it's really anti-feminist to do so, or armpit hair, armpit hair as well. And do you remember that time when celebrities like Julia Roberts?

• 43:45Kate Lister?

  Julia Roberts.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Came and she had armpit hair and everyone was like, ah!

• 43:49Kate Lister?

  On the red carpet and that was front page news. God knows what they were doing if she got her pubes out, but she had armpit hair and that stopped the world's press.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  It really did. And so I think it's calmed down a little bit now, that debate. But it's certainly in the seventies, you know, second wave feminism, people were really vehement about, you know, almost betraying feminist ideals if we remove their body hair. Because, you know, you were bending to male ideas of what women's body should look like. So that it was a key kind of matter for debate, this kind of what you did personally became very political. And, you know, last time I talked about this a few years ago, when I first started working this subject and people were like expecting me to get really angry about other people removing their pubic hair. It's just face that and face that, yeah, I don't mind.

• 44:42Kate Lister?

  You can cut off the energy. Put dreadlocks in it if you like.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Exactly. But, you know.

• 44:49Kate Lister?

  Macaroni, pasta and sparkles, whatever you want.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  I'd like to go on record, I don't mind what people do with their pubic hair. But at the same time, it's very interesting how politicized that debate got in the seventies, how it represented this kind of years of oppression. And I can understand why, because it is work, you know, it is body work. But a lot of that body work, I'm not just talking about hair removal, but it can be pleasing as well. You know, it's not, it's not just painful. There's also good things about it as well. So it's always a bit more nuanced, I think, than just saying, it's the patriarchy.

• 45:20Kate Lister?

  And of course, the proliferation of porn, which we've always had. Like you've spoken about the nude statues and the nude. So it's always influenced us, although, you know, it's not porn, it's erotic, whatever you want to say, but images of nude bodies. But the fact that we can now access porn as easily as we can. I mean, you might remember as I do, that really the only way you were going to see porn as a kid was if you found it in a hedge.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  Yes, other side of a railway.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  You could look at it in a new section.

• 45:48Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I remember that. You'd find like stashes and like rips and bits and maybe someone at your school would have a video that they were sending around and everything. But now, if you've got a mobile device, you can see anything that you want. And that's got to have had an impact on.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah. Because there's some evidence that pubic hair removal is much more common now. It started to go up, you know, with the advent of the internet and it's age-related as well. So people who were between 18 and 30 are much more likely to remove their pubic hair than people who are older. So it's definitely a cultural thing. It's completely related to the availability of internet porn and because it's normal. Again, it's what's normal.

• 46:30Kate Lister?

  Yeah, that's, that's become visually normal.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  So that makes people think it's normal to remove their body hair and also for women to remove their body hair, because men, it's more mixed.

• 46:41Kate Lister?

  They've never really had to deal with this crap, have they? Maybe just a bit of a quick trim and they are on their way.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Because it's what men are expecting as well, even more than women, maybe because a lot of men might not have had much experience of seeing women's bodies.

• 46:55Kate Lister?

  No, no.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  So that's the way that this encounters women's naked bodies is mainly via porn.

• 47:01Kate Lister?

  Through porn.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. So frankly, anybody should be very grateful for people showing them their bodies.

• 47:06Kate Lister?

  Just quietly grateful, I think.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  Whatever state they happen to be in.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  Just say thank you.

• 47:13Kate Lister?

  It's kind, it's sort of a weird one anyway, because I don't know the history on this, but I'd be willing to bet that nowhere in the history of men, straight men having sex with women, has there been a man that's gone, well, it was a bit untidy, so I thought I should just go home.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  If they do, they should go home.

• 47:28Kate Lister?

  They should go home, quite frankly.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  That's unacceptable.

• 47:31Kate Lister?

  That's, that's unacceptable. He's going to be a shit shag, quite frankly.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  I think a lot of these pressures are not to do with individuals and not to do with like individual that you might meet and whatever, but it's more to do with the sense of pressure, the sense of we're guessing what other people, what people are going to be expecting.

• 47:48Kate Lister?

  We're guessing what we're going to expect, absolutely. And as a final question to you, I know that you're a lecturer at the university and I was too, which means that we have regular access to Gen Z and their conversations. And it does seem that there is something afoot with the youngsters when it comes to body hair. They're bringing it back, Jill. I have noticed this.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's great. No, I mean, again, people should do whatever they want, but I think it's great that, you know, a big fan of Gen Z generally, big fan of 18 to 22-year-olds, love it. And they're just really feisty.

• 48:24Kate Lister?

  And they don't give a shit about body hair. Like, like we've got like Julia Roberts, when that was absolute front page news, like, oh my God. And now it's like a whole classroom full of Gen Z and all the women have got hairy pits and nobody really gives. It's not even a statement.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  No, it's not a statement. It's like, I couldn't be bothered or I just don't want to.

• 48:40Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  And that's absolutely fine. I'm too right.

• 48:43Kate Lister?

  So I think they're going to come through and possibly save us all. But then eventually, eventually there'll be another pushback against it.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Because all this stuff, if history teaches us anything about this, it's that it comes and waves and it goes, comes and goes again.

• 48:56Kate Lister?

  Well, as long as they're not using arse.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Yes. I hope they haven't inadvertently brought that into fashion.

• 49:02Kate Lister?

  No, let's not bring that one back. Oh, Jill, you have been wonderful to talk to. You always are. And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you?

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Well, I am at the University of Edinburgh in the History Department and you can always buy my book. It's called How to Be a Renaissance Woman.

• 49:19Kate Lister?

  Very good.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  It's out with preference and paperback, so it's not massively pricey and it, you know, it's quite good. I like it.

• 49:25Kate Lister?

  Very good. Thank you so much for talking to me today. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for knowing so much about pubic hair. It's so great to talk to another pubic hair aficionado.

• 49:39Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Jill for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And of course, you can go and watch my new film, Beating Around the Bush, on historyhit.com if you want to know even more about pubic hair history. Coming up, we have got episodes on the murders that inspired Sherlock Holmes and the sex life of Fidel Castro all coming your way. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producers were Charlotte Long and Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheets, History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  You know you don't have to wait to shop Black Friday at Lowe's, right? Save up to $150 now on select power tools, equipment and accessories. Got gifts to get? We've got plenty under $50. Plus, MyLowe's Rewards members get same-day delivery for free. Shop Black Friday deals before the rush at Lowe's. Valid through 11/18, $25 minimum and loyalty membership required. Order eligible items by 2pm. Subject to weight and size restrictions and availability. Terms at lowe's.com/shippingterms.

• 51:01Speaker 02

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