Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society History of Pubic Hair About this episode We often think of the way we treat pubic hair as a relatively modern thing.
But how did they manage pubic hair in Ancient Greece, or the Middle Ages? Why would someone wear a pubic wig (also known as a merkin)? And why was the pubic hair of suspected witches shaven off?
Joining Kate today is Professor Jill Burke, author of How to be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity https://shop.royalacademy.org.uk/how-to-be-a-renaissance-woman-the-untold-history-of-beauty-and-female-creativity, to help us uncover this history.
This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media.
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.
Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.
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.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate 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.
0:37 Speaker 01 Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near-death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.
1:14 Kate 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, 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 to ****, quite frankly, we did let you know. For the rest of you, on with the show.
2:01 Kate Lister? Here in the Islamic bathing houses of the 11th century, some fantastic work is going on. I am here with my fellow European travellers, 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 gonna find out about the history of pubic hair and its removal, and the keeping thereof. And to do that, we will be travelling back to Europe, where a culture of sharing beauty tips and secrets is blossoming.
2:44 Kate Lister? This is one of our most requested episodes, you lot are pub crazy. So to find out more, who else could we possibly talk to other than Professor Jill Berg, who is an expert on Renaissance beauty, and she knows an awful lot about pubic hair as well. So, on with the show.
3:10 Speaker 02 What are you calling a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
3:15 Speaker 03 I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning him off and putting the button.
3:27 Speaker 02 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
3:30 Speaker 04 Goodness, my beautiful dam, goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry.
3:38 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. Do you want the classic bikini wax, a Brazilian wax, the Californian wax, or the Hollywood wax? Or perhaps you just prefer an entire Brazilian blowout and just go, oh, natural. The way we treat and think about pubic hair is something that most of us are probably familiar with, and there are plenty of options available. But how was it approached throughout history? From the ancient Egyptians and Grecians to Italian women in the Renaissance, they all had fashions for pubic hair.
4:13 Kate Lister? I told you that this has been a very, very heavily requested episode. And one of the many people to request it is Sista, who works at a waxing salon in the Netherlands. And who better, quite frankly, to ask about this one?
4:27 Speaker 05 Hi Kate, it's Sista from the Netherlands. I really enjoy the podcast. I love history and I like a good fun fact. I work in a waxing salon and I'm often chatting to customers about those weird facts. Sometimes I talk about how the history of body hair and what we like or dislike about it has really changed a lot. But I'm a bit low on the fun facts and I want or two. So maybe you can do an episode? Thank you. Bye.
4:59 Kate Lister? Well, we would be thrilled to supply you and your customers with some historical pubic hair facts. So get your tweezers at the ready, Betwixters. Me and Professor Jill Burke are gonna get pubic.
5:17 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwix the Sheets. It's only Jill Burke. How are you doing?
5:23 Speaker 05 I'm, as always, delighted to be talking to you about a subject close to our hearts.
5:28 Kate 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.
5:40 Speaker 05 It's an important topic.
5:41 Kate Lister? It's deceptively important, actually.
5:44 Speaker 05 Actually, yeah. I mean, we joke about it, but actually it's very fascinating when you get, you delve into the history. It's gonna be so many puns, when you delve into the history of it.
5:54 Speaker 05 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, it's a really good topic for history, I think.
6:07 Kate 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.
6:20 Speaker 05 Well, there might be.
6:21 Kate Lister? I haven't heard of any of them.
6:22 Speaker 03 You know, this is disclaimer. You know, my expertise is mainly in 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, do you keep using the word delve? Yeah, delve into the 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 gonna try, honestly. And everything that I've been looking at is based on this primary information.
7:04 Kate Lister? Because we think of pubic hair fashion as being something that dates from the nineties. 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 nineteen ninety seven, everyone was just full bush, a thicket, just rocking that seventies, that seventies vibe.
7:29 Speaker 03 Letting themselves go wild.
7:31 Kate Lister? Yeah.
7:32 Speaker 03 And beautiful. And yeah, no, that's not true at all. So there's evidence of pubic hair removal from very ancient times, so probably ancient Egypt.
7:42 Kate Lister? Yeah.
7:42 Speaker 03 Certainly ancient Greece. And it's a fashion that comes and goes through history. People sometimes tell this this story, like there's a straight line that goes 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 a history that's thousands of years old with particular points in history where it becomes more fashionable and more possible for women to remove their pubic hair and where people start to discuss it in sources.
8:16 Kate Lister? And has men's pubic hair been subject to as many changes as women's have?
8:22 Speaker 03 That is a good question. I think in ancient, I've come across discussions of men's pubic hair. Uh, some of the time, it tends to be in many societies, and again, this is western societies. Masculinity and hairiness are associated with each other.
8:39 Kate Lister? Yes, they are.
8:40 Speaker 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.
8:53 Kate Lister? Hmm.
8:53 Speaker 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.
9:01 Kate Lister? I like that.
9:02 Speaker 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, just tends to hang around men's pubic hair.
9:11 Kate Lister? It does, doesn't it? I hope that they've trimmed it though throughout history. I think that that's important.
9:17 Speaker 03 I mean, certainly if you look at sculpture, like ancient Greek sculpture looks very groomed.
9:21 Kate Lister? Doesn't it?
9:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:22 Kate Lister? It does.
9:22 Speaker 03 So, and this probably does react, you know, it might well be late to practise.
9:26 Kate Lister? Ah, so in Islamic history and custom, hair removal was incredibly common.
9:33 Speaker 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, I'm sorry.
9:54 Speaker 03 You get, you know, the start of Islamic bathing practices.
9:57 Kate Lister? Yep.
9:57 Speaker 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 fifteenth 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.
10:36 Speaker 03 And so then when you get the Jewish expulsion from Spain in fourteen ninety two, a lot of these women come to Italy. Italy's the centre of printing in the later fifteenth, early sixteenth 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.
11:12 Kate 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.
11:30 Speaker 03 I mean, you get that a lot in Northern Europe, like, why?
11:37 Kate Lister? God almighty.
11:39 Speaker 03 I mean, I suppose that a lot of the hair removal, particularly in hotter places, is to do with hygiene.
11:43 Kate Lister? Oh, it probably is, isn't it?
11:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, certainly some of it, I reckon, because if you know the, you know, how common lice were.
11:52 Kate Lister? Yes.
11:53 Speaker 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. Would have prevented.
12:07 Kate 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.
12:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, this is something that you get repeated, right? Up to now, right?
12:26 Kate Lister? Up to now, yeah.
12:27 Speaker 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.
12:37 Kate Lister? Hmm.
12:37 Speaker 03 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's 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 sixteenth 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. 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.
13:22 Kate Lister? Yeah.
13:22 Speaker 03 But also probably in practical terms as well.
13:24 Kate 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 removing their own body hair?
14:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that's quite possible, or each other's body hair.
14:09 Kate Lister? Or each other's body hair, yeah.
14:11 Speaker 03 Because there's a lot of associations between sex work and body hair removal.
14:17 Kate Lister? Yes.
14:18 Speaker 03 Historically, you know, some of it is, it's really hard to, sometimes to extricate.
14:23 Kate Lister? Hmm.
14:24 Speaker 03 Historical insults, right? Oh, you know, this is so shit 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.
14:39 Kate Lister? Oh, I wasn't expecting it to go there. Wow, okay.
14:42 Speaker 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.
14:55 Kate Lister? Wow.
14:56 Speaker 03 Beauty stuff. So it might have been the same. It's very difficult because it's thousands of years different because I'm looking at fifteen hundred. But it wouldn't surprise me if it was kind of similar if poorer women, but also the women who were more likely to do the kind of
15:10 Kate Lister? Yeah.
15:10 Speaker 03 beautician work, but hair removal work. And that's, and that's also what happened in baths later on as well. Baths also become a centre for hair removal, but are also a centre for sex work.
15:19 Kate Lister? What that shows in Pompeii is clearly someone was having their hair removed.
15:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
15:23 Kate Lister? In the brothel. So that suggests some kind of fashion.
15:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think so.
15:29 Kate 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?
15:39 Speaker 03 There's a great text that I probably talked about before last time called Ela Lotzana and Alucia, 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 fifteen twenty four. So there's evidence then that gives a good amount of evidence that people are starting to think about this as a fashion.
16:15 Kate Lister? Yeah.
16:15 Speaker 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.
16:22 Kate Lister? They never have pubes, do they?
16:24 Speaker 03 No.
16:24 Kate 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.
16:34 Speaker 03 It's interesting that there's no pubic hair on statues of Venus in the Middle Ages, in the fourteenth century, fifteenth century, you do get pubic hair.
16:42 Kate Lister? Who put pubes on Venus?
16:43 Speaker 03 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 and 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. 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 Ruskin, who
17:22 Speaker 03 allegedly anyway, yeah, really shocked by his wife's heavy grey 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
17:37 Kate Lister? And the reality.
17:38 Speaker 03 Of what people's bodies bodies look like under clothes and what visual culture tells people to expect.
17:43 Kate Lister? Hmm.
17:43 Speaker 03 And your actual, real, living bodies.
17:46 Kate 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 in this particular subject of clothes.
18:02 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
18:03 Kate 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.
18:16 Speaker 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 Piamontes's Book of Secrets.
18:31 Kate Lister? Yes.
18:32 Speaker 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.
18:47 Kate Lister? Really?
18:47 Speaker 03 And they say, yeah, they say, oh, this is to remove the hair from the, the chins of young men.
18:54 Kate Lister? No, it's not.
18:57 Speaker 03 It's 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 Monalison and Nenti, 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.
19:39 Kate 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 the 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, they look at it with the same kind of, ew.
20:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's so interesting, this cultural difference. Say merkins, which, you know, I haven't come across those in Italian texts at all. 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, there's 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 onwards. 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.
20:50 Kate 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
21:13 Speaker 03 That's amazing.
21:14 Kate 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?
21:21 Speaker 03 Well, a merkin is a wig, but for your pubic area. And so they're just like furry triangles, aren't they?
21:27 Kate Lister? Yeah.
21:27 Speaker 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.
21:38 Kate Lister? No, they wouldn't be.
21:39 Speaker 03 They're tuned to be just talked about in England.
21:41 Kate Lister? We haven't, I don't think we've actually found any of them. We've got like references.
21:46 Speaker 03 Replicas, yeah.
21:47 Kate 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.
21:58 Speaker 03 Sounds lovely.
21:58 Kate Lister? It 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 pelting.
22:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, that's something that is interesting because there's like smallpox epidemics.
22:17 Kate Lister? Yep.
22:17 Speaker 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.
22:25 Kate Lister? Yeah.
22:26 Speaker 03 And 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, 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.
22:44 Kate Lister? Probably were, weren't they?
22:46 Speaker 03 Your merkin would come in handy.
22:49 Kate Lister? Yeah.
22:49 Speaker 03 Because it would suggest you don't have pubic lice.
22:52 Kate Lister? I suppose syphilis as well, that's knocking around, isn't it?
22:55 Speaker 03 Quite a lot of syphilis, particularly obviously if you're a sex worker or just married to a guy.
23:02 Kate Lister? Yeah.
23:03 Speaker 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 remove body hair, even in an English context, I can imagine that would be something that you might want to do.
23:19 Kate 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.
23:28 Speaker 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.
23:50 Speaker 03 I'll be back with Jill after this short break.
24:06 Kate Lister? Autumn is underway at last, which means the nights are closing in and everything in nature feels like it's just slowing down, except us, of course. For most of us, me included, the world still has a lot of demands on us that can feel like a lot to deal with. There will be a time in all of our lives when we could use therapy, but often when you try to do that, it's still way harder than it should be. Finding a therapist is hard enough, but finding one who actually takes your insurance? That's where most online therapy platforms fall short. Many don't work with insurance at all, which means you're stuck paying the full cost out of pocket or paying for an expensive monthly subscription.
24:50 Kate Lister? Ruler does things differently. They partner with over 100 insurance plans, making the average co-pay just $15 per session. That's real therapy from licensed professionals at a price that actually makes sense. Thousands of people are already using Ruler to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit ruler.com/sheets to get started. That's R-U-L-A dot com forward slash S-H-E-E-T-S, Sheets. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.
25:28 Kate Lister? Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up a camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
25:59 Speaker 01 Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two girls... Girls One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.
26:45 Kate 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?
27:11 Speaker 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.
27:18 Kate Lister? Oh, my God.
27:20 Speaker 03 Pubic area. Yes, there is. But there's another one where someone burning them off, burning their pubic hair off with a lamp.
27:26 Kate Lister? All right, yeah, I'll take the razor.
27:28 Speaker 03 I know. Given the choice.
27:31 Kate Lister? My God.
27:33 Speaker 03 So in the Middle Ages, so this again is comes probably from Islamic bath culture, spreading through Europe. They used a paste made out of arsenic and quicklime.
27:43 Kate Lister? Of course they did.
27:44 Speaker 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.
27:53 Kate Lister? I'm like being next to the person who's decided to put that smear that on themselves.
27:58 Speaker 03 You're smearing that all over your body.
28:00 Kate Lister? Oh.
28:00 Speaker 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. Clocks, but not in baths. And so they say things like, say the Lord's prayer twice.
28:14 Kate Lister? Holy God. Oh, wow. Okay. Nice.
28:17 Speaker 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.
28:29 Kate Lister? I bet it does.
28:30 Speaker 03 Yeah. So it's all about timing. And then it says, and get the 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.
28:42 Kate Lister? Does it work?
28:43 Speaker 03 You know, they won't let me try it.
28:45 Kate Lister? No, I bet they won't. I know you've done some experiment.
28:46 Speaker 03 Health and safety gone mad.
28:51 Kate Lister? All right. Yeah. Okay. Let's, let's not try that one.
28:53 Speaker 03 I think it would work because it's very highly alkaline and that's how feet works. It just burns.
28:58 Kate Lister? Those modern day depilatory creams, other brands are available. They're shit. They're shit. They don't work and they stink.
29:07 Kate Lister? They're crap.
29:07 Speaker 03 And you also, you, you've time, time to leave them on for long enough before they start.
29:12 Kate Lister? They still burn. They still burn. They smell terrible and they don't, they're all hair.
29:17 Speaker 03 It's like lots of, lots of like hairs that don't come out. They're really rubbish.
29:22 Kate Lister? It's like hundreds of years on and it's still all kind of shit.
29:26 Speaker 03 I wonder though, if the really hard stuff, you know, that quick lime, if we were allowed to try it.
29:33 Kate Lister? People would as well. We should, we should probably say, please for fuck's sake, don't try it.
29:38 Speaker 03 Absolutely don't try it.
29:40 Kate 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?
29:58 Speaker 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.
30:22 Kate Lister? Yep.
30:23 Speaker 03 They use that. They use sugaring in some, sugar's quite expensive.
30:27 Kate Lister? Oh God, it is, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
30:29 Speaker 03 Probably wouldn't use sugaring.
30:30 Kate Lister? Yeah.
30:31 Speaker 03 Probably later on in, in, you know, when you get into the, when sugar gets cheaper in the eighteenth and nineteenth. And she's, 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.
30:47 Kate Lister? I wonder if they were using it on pubic hair. It seems very strange that we would have evidence that they would opt for like this quicklime stuff over like wax. 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?
31:03 Speaker 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 there were other reasons to use this paste.
31:18 Kate Lister? That could be.
31:19 Speaker 03 They did just thread eyebrows, but I think that might be a bit complicated in pubic hair.
31:23 Kate 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.
31:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, with tweezers. Yeah, there's definitely, but that would take a long time.
31:35 Kate Lister? That would be horrible.
31:37 Speaker 03 And yeah, it would be really painful.
31:39 Kate Lister? Yeah, like your whole bush just plucked out. Oh, no.
31:45 Speaker 03 That's why it's not nice.
31:47 Kate Lister? It would have grown back by the time.
31:50 Speaker 03 By the time you got out of the bath.
31:53 Kate Lister? Yeah, all right. So that one's not going to work. That's kind of crap.
31:55 Speaker 03 I think the main way they did it was this paste and razors. They did say in the sources, you shouldn't use razors because the hair grays back thicker.
32:03 Kate Lister? That's true. That's true.
32:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, it kind of grows back coarser, doesn't it? Because you've chopped 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.
32:17 Kate Lister? Am I right in thinking that there's a witchy association between pubic hair and?
32:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's quite sad.
32:24 Kate 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?
32:33 Speaker 03 Well, people, when they were accused of witchcraft, the inquisitors would have them completely shaved from top, you know, below them 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 about a hundred and twenty women were killed. And it's like a shaming ritual, but it's also like this kind of humiliation, you know, to have that done in front of men.
33:13 Speaker 03 And so in Germany, in the fifteen twenties and thirties, just as the witch craze is starting, it's before you get this massive swathe 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 just people staring at pubic hair as if there's something secret hidden there.
33:33 Kate Lister? I'm not familiar with the trials in Germany and Italy, but I know a few about the ones in the, in the UK. And were, were they doing what the inquisitors here were doing, which was, yeah, they're looking for like bite marks or but like something that the devil left his mark there.
33:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, or sometimes just like kind of tokens or amulets that could be kind of concealed.
33:54 Kate Lister? Hidden in your pubic hair. The devil's left an amulet in your pubic hair.
33:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's like an excuse, isn't it, to just degrade women as much as possible.
34:06 Kate Lister? Do you know what? The shaving women has a really long history as
34:10 Speaker 03 Yeah.
34:10 Kate Lister? a shaming thing. And it's usually the head that is shaved. And you see that like right up until, I still see it today, I suppose, but certainly after the Second World War, when in France, when women were being accused of 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.
34:34 Speaker 03 Absolutely. And also in a man's space, because when we're talking about pubic hair removal, normally in, in say bathhouses or at home, you'd be in a female only space.
34:44 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah.
34:45 Speaker 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, when you're on trial. It's really awful. Even the inquisitors who are writing about this, they talk about this in the Malia's Malafakaran, which is this really famous witch hunting manual that comes out that's written by the Germans in the late fifteenth century. Even they say it's a really shameful thing.
35:12 Kate Lister? Wow.
35:12 Speaker 03 And that we don't actually do this in Germany because it's too shameful.
35:15 Kate Lister? I mean, and that comes to something if the fucking Malia's Malafakaram is going, that's a bit too far.
35:20 Speaker 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.
35:28 Kate 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
35:35 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
35:36 Kate Lister? shave them and it's horrible.
35:39 Speaker 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 the most intimate parts of the body is, is part of this history as well.
36:01 Kate 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 gonna, maybe not completely witchcraft, but the idea that there's something subversive about not having pubic hair.
36:15 Speaker 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
36:25 Kate Lister? People with syphilis.
36:26 Speaker 03 Witches, people with syphilis, yeah. It's kind of not respectable.
36:31 Kate 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.
36:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:37 Kate 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?
36:46 Speaker 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?
37:01 Kate Lister? Yep.
37:02 Speaker 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 can 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.
37:34 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Jill after this short break.
37:54 Speaker 06 In a world where swords were sharp.
37:57 Kate Lister? And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.
38:02 Speaker 06 Me, Matt Lewis.
38:04 Kate Lister? And me, Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.
38:11 Speaker 06 So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.
38:24 Speaker 01 Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near-death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.
39:11 Kate 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 worshiped 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. Yeah. 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
39:52 Kate Lister? there about the women not having pubic hair on those statues and those images, maybe that's a hark back to childhood, too.
39:59 Speaker 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 the sculpture by Donatello called the David, as in David McGlyth, 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 fetishisation, sexualisation 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 things like Michelangelo's David, who is definitely a man.
40:36 Kate Lister? It's definitely, it's definitely a man. He's got manly stuff going on, but he does have a little boy's holly. Just does.
40:44 Speaker 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.
40:53 Kate Lister? What did they? And do they say it should be a little one?
40:55 Speaker 03 I'll have to measure it out and see, because I haven't done that yet.
41:00 Speaker 03 Next time, next time I can tell you about that.
41:02 Kate 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 the Victorians, we're now getting like photographic evidence and sort of some of the earliest pornography, and it looks like there was pubic hair removal being practised around it.
41:18 Speaker 03 I think so. And actually, these books, you know, that recipe for arsenic and quick lime goes right through to the 19th century.
41:25 Kate Lister? Wow.
41:25 Speaker 03 So people are constantly using it. They're using it in America, they're using it in, you know, because printing goes all over the world. So they're using it everywhere and people are wanting 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 their hair. But obviously, again, with 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.
41:57 Kate Lister? It does, doesn't it? When do pubes become political? Because pubic hair, it is a feminist issue now. Like the arguments about going back again to that childhood thing about like, why would you want to move 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's just fucking hurts.
42:30 Kate 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.
42:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think this is, this debate used to be massive.
42:41 Kate Lister? Huge.
42:42 Speaker 03 A few years ago, that you shouldn't remove your pubic hair because it's really anti feminist to do so, or any body hair, armpit hair as well. And do you remember that time when celebrities like Julia Roberts?
42:52 Kate Lister? Julia Roberts.
42:54 Speaker 03 Came and she had armpit hair and everyone was like, wow.
42:56 Kate Lister? On the red carpet and that was front page. God knows what they would have done if she got her pubes out, but she had armpit hair and that stopped the world's press.
43:06 Speaker 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 bodies should look like. So 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 the subject and people were like expecting me to get really angry about other people removing their pubic hair.
43:47 Speaker 03 I don't mind.
43:49 Kate Lister? You can get up the energy, put dreadlocks in it if you like.
43:53 Speaker 03 Exactly. But, you know.
43:55 Kate Lister? Macaroni pasta and sparkles, whatever you want.
43:58 Speaker 03 You know, 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 politicised 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.
44:27 Kate 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 is if you found it in a hedge.
44:48 Speaker 03 Yes, by the side of a railway. You can look at it in a newsagent.
44:54 Kate Lister? Yeah, I remember that. You'd find like stashes and like rips pits 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.
45:09 Speaker 03 I think so, yeah. Because there's some evidence that pubic hair removal is much more common now. It's 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 move 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. And what he can see. It's visually normal. 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.
45:47 Kate Lister? They've never really had to deal with this crap, have they? Maybe a just a bit of a quick trim and they are on their way.
45:54 Speaker 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. So that's the way that this encounters women's naked bodies is mainly via porn. Yeah. So in fact, anybody should be very grateful for people showing them their bodies.
46:13 Kate Lister? Just quietly grateful, I think.
46:15 Speaker 03 Whatever state they happen to be in. Just say thank you.
46:19 Kate 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.
46:32 Speaker 03 If they do, they should go home.
46:34 Kate Lister? They should go home, quite frankly.
46:36 Speaker 03 That's unacceptable.
46:38 Kate Lister? That's, that's unacceptable. He's going to be a shit shag, quite frankly.
46:41 Speaker 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.
46:54 Kate Lister? We're guessing what they'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've noticed.
47:15 Speaker 03 I think it's great.
47:17 Speaker 03 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 teaching eighteen to twenty two year olds, love it. And they're just really feisty.
47:30 Kate 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. Nobody really gives, it's not even a statement.
47:43 Speaker 03 No, it's not a statement. It's like, I couldn't be bothered. Or I just don't want to.
47:47 Kate Lister? Yeah.
47:48 Speaker 03 And that's absolutely fine. I'm too right.
47:50 Kate Lister? So I think they're going to come through and probably save us off. But then eventually, eventually there'll be another pushback against it.
47:57 Speaker 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.
48:03 Kate Lister? Well, as long as they're not using arse.
48:05 Speaker 03 Yes. I hope we haven't inadvertently brought that into fashion.
48:08 Kate 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?
48:18 Speaker 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.
48:26 Kate Lister? Very good.
48:27 Speaker 03 It's out with profoets and paperback. So it's not massively pricey. It, you know, it's quite good. I like it.
48:32 Kate Lister? Very good. Thank you so much for talking to me today. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
48:36 Speaker 03 Thanks so much for talking to me. Thank you so much about pubic hair. It's so great to talk to another pubic hair aficionado.
48:49 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Jill for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you could email us at [email protected] . Coming up, we have the next installment in our limited series, The Secret Lives of the Six Wives and Michelangelo's Sex Life. Those two things do not have any crossover, by the way. But those episodes will be with you very soon. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheet, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
49:42 Speaker 01 Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near-death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.
Previous Anne Boleyn | Secret Lives of the Six Wives Next Jane Seymour | Secret Lives of the Six Wives Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated