Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation and an incredibly depressing essay about getting older, basically plays the bad cop to Nerve editor-at-large Jack Harrison's good cop in this particular debate, titled "The Brazilian Wax: Bare vs. Hair." Speaking almost like a cliche of The Kind of Guy You'd Want To Have Sex With, Harrison says he likes all of a woman's natural smells, secretions, and adornments, including pubic hair. Wurtzel (perhaps unsurprisingly, given her much-publicized reliance on various beauty treatments) disagrees.

She argues that men prefer a naked snatch, and that this is "just the way things are and will ever be." After speaking for all men and predicting the future, she moves on to generalizing about the preferences of her own gender:

I think we women don't feel entirely female unless we're slaves to beauty.

And:

[A]t one time, when you got pubic hair, it meant that you were an adult. Now, you get it removed to show that... you're an adult. There's something childish about being hairy, now that Brazilians have achieved vaginal hegemony.

And:

I guess there is a philosophical sickness that drives us to do things like go to salons for hair removal: it's an insane drive toward achieving a state that we'll never get to, that we'll always be approaching, stuck at some horrible asymptote. But I guess it makes me feel better to try.

In her post on Wurtzel's aging essay, Sadie wrote that Wurtzel "has always ascribed a universality to her own experiences" — and really, the best response to her thoughts on pubic hair is, "speak for your fucking self." The truth is, I do know women who get Brazilians because men like it (or, as Wurtzel says, "the audience response had been very, very good"). But I also know women who do it because they like the way it feels, or looks — and I know women who keep a full bush for those same reason. Yes, institutionalized standards of beauty are fucked up, and yes, the ideal of female hairlessness is one such standard of beauty. But getting a Brazilian doesn't necessarily mean you don't feel "fully female" without one.

It's a little weird that I started out this post defending waxing, since my personal sympathies lie with Harrison and his let-it-all-hang-out philosophy. But Wurtzel makes all female grooming sound like such depressing drudgery that I feel like stepping in on its behalf. Feminism has long had a fraught relationship with the modification and decoration of the female body, but one of the few nice things about the current post-feminist morass is the widespread recognition that dressing up, wearing lipstick, and, yes, even getting a Brazilian, can be kind of fun.

Yeah, so waxing hurts a lot more than lipstick. So it produces a look that some people think is infantile. That doesn't mean everyone who does it wants to look like an infant, or that every hair removed is an act of willing enslavement. Wurtzel's "insane drive toward achieving a state that we'll never get to" does sound like a pretty good description of the attitude toward beauty that women's magazines and advertisers want us to have. But just because Wurtzel drank that Kool-Aid doesn't mean we have to.

Maybe I'm being too optimistic — maybe it's impossible to make choices favored by the beauty-industrial complex without in some way enslaving oneself to this complex and all its evil familiars. But Wurtzel's idea of womanhood is so heartbreakingly constrained — by men, by porn, by standards of beauty that are totally entrenched and unchangeable — that it seems to leave no room for taking actual joy in our bodies. And I have to believe we're freer than that.

The Nerve Debate, The Brazilian Wax: Bare vs. Hair [Nerve]

As Wurtzel puts it in the Guardian, in the 80s and 90s, films - <"em>Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Temp, Disclosure, almost any Sharon Stone vehicle" - featured a predatory single woman, deranged by loneliness, success, or lack of traditional fetters, making life a living hell for more stable people. While villainesses are nothing new, Wurtzel notes the distinction between the psycho career singleton of 80s vintage and the bored-housewife moll perfected by Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner and their shadow-dappled sisters. As she interprets it,

A free woman is a loose cannon who is so dangerous that everybody else needs body armour and a bullet-proof vest to survive an encounter with them. That this dangerous female is alone and vulnerable, compared to everyone else with their spouses and kids and pets and household staffs, seems not to be anything anyone is supposed to notice. Singleness, in these movies, is actually a form of psychosis rather than a relationship status.

Of course, it's not hard to see that for the era of the culture wars, the single predator was America's Godzilla, or Gort, handily vanquished in two hours and for the price of a ticket. Wurtzel's peg is the latest entry into the "single psycho" genre, the ridiculous catfight Obsession, in which Ali Later's deranged secretary's motiveless stalking proves that "the only lesson any man could learn from this movie is pretty much: 'Don't get out of bed in the morning - ever!'"

Looking at the recent roll-out of horror films, it seems like we could learn a little bit more. Unless it's motiveless, senseless malignancy - The Strangers, Funny Games, Red - which does correlate pretty well with the times actually, the main theme of horror films lately is, young women. Sure, sacrificial lambs of varying levels of resourcefulness are as old as Udolpho. But the girl-on-girl rivalries of The Uninvited, the demonic pregnancy possession of The Unborn , the psycho cheerleader of the upcoming Jennifer's Body the vagina dentata of Teeth - and did we mention the vampires? - shows that nowadays, the conflict is less married versus single than young women against the world, even when that means themselves. These are premises to which men are incidental, but that's not to say the trend's especially empowering. The SWF trend may have been a cautionary tale to those women who Chose Wrong...but nowadays, it seems like there is no safe choice anymore. But then, any internet catfight - or Wurtzel's meditation on againg - could have told you that.

Look Who's Stalking [The Guardian]
Earlier: Elizabeth Wurtzel: Aging is a Real Bitch

Elizabeth Wurtzel is someone whom many blame for the current vogue in oversharing and personality-driven youthquaking. Privileged, fucked up, and, of course, pretty, Wurtzel's always had enemies whom she could dismiss, infuriatingly and with some justification, as merely jealous. Although a genuinely compelling writer and a defining voice of her generation, she's someone who's always mistaken candor as a substitute for insight. And with the narcissist's blithely narrow world-view, has always ascribed a universality to her own experiences, mistaking our voyeurism for empathetic commiseration.

Most of all, love her or hate her, Wurtzel was always a professional Young Woman. And as an ambassador of her generation, Wurtzel's aging process is of more than usual interest to the public she claimed as her due 20 years ago. Which makes this Elle article, "Failure to Launch: When Beauty Fades," incredibly depressing. Basically, Wurtzel is growing older. And, in her words, "people who say they have no regrets, that they don't look back in anger, are either lying or boring, not sure which is worse." Not for her serenity and wisdom. No, she is panicking at the thought of losing the power of her beauty, her hold over (horrible-sounding) men, desperate to preserve her youthful looks ("Thank God for La Mer and Retin-A and Pilates"). As she explains with characteristic candor, she was always a beautiful child, a "hot number," a woman who traded on her looks. And she misses it. While she sees the danger and futility of valuing beauty overmuch, she can't help it: panic trumps insight and she doesn't seem eager to stop it. And it's scary to see a smart and accomplished woman so openly in the thrall of others' opinions.

In Salon, Amy Benfer ruefully analyzes this depressing meditation on mortality, and comes away disheartened. While she dispatches Wurtzel's self-deception and lack of insight with a razor-sharp incisiveness (and do read it), there is, as she points out, no schadenfreude to the exercise: it's impossible to take any pleasure in such naked unhappiness. In a way, though, we're grateful to it. While one can't help but come away from "Failure to Lauch: When Beauty Fades" feeling really sad for its author, if she wants to cast herself as a cautionary tale, we're willing to learn the lesson. Early success, education, conventional beauty, a thin body - Wurtzel achieved everything we're taught to want, indeed, helped form the modern mold of what we want. We're told all the time that this isn't everything, but it helps a lot to have that reinforced by an essay like this. Teenage girls should read it. And then they should listen to another youth icon, now turning 50. It was, after all, Morrissey who said, "age shouldn't affect you. It's just like the size of your shoes - they don't determine how you live your life! You're either marvellous or you're boring, regardless of your age."

Failure To Launch: When Beauty Fades [Elle]

Confessions of a middle-aged "Bitch" [Salon]

Here's where Wurtzel's self-absorption is most evident, but also where she makes her strongest argument. As one of the "third wavers" of feminism who included Katie Roiphe and Susan Faludi, Wurtzel says that she and her sisters promoted "Do Me" Feminism. "I appeared topless on the cover of one of my books, a decision I stand by still," she writes. "But I don't think the idea that you could own your own orgasm was ever intended to teach college coeds that it is a good idea to spend spring break in a shower with your roommate in a motel room in Daytona Beach having a lesbian encounter for the cameras of Girls Gone Wild. That's not feminism!"

As Dodai pointed out earlier this week, Wurtzel is right: those spring breakers are not embracing feminist principles when they lose their shirts. I am not of Elizabeth Wurtzel's generation — I am of the generation that Hugh Schwyzer praises for such "optimistic" feminists as Feministing's Jessica Valenti and Amanda Marcotte — but I agree with Wurtzel that things were better in the halcyon days of the 90s.

Take the Real World as a cultural barometer. When the show debuted in 1992, there were three women on the show, Julie, Becky and Heather. Each one had career aspirations: Julie wanted to be a dancer and took classes constantly; Becky was a musician who played at clubs in the city; Heather was a rapper. The women went on dates and had both relationships and hookups, but they were not getting wasted and competing with one another for male attention. None of the three were conventionally beautiful. Flash forward to Season 19 in Sydney, Australia. Besides the young Iranian woman, Parisa, who is derided about her looks by the other female cast members, the other ladies are interchangeable bleached blondes with fake tits or empty-headed brunettes with long, flowing hair. Kelly Ann got on the show because in her audition video she stripped down to her undies, on which she had written, "Make it Hott: Pick Me!" Shauvon left the show to get back with her boyfriend, whom she had originally broken up with because he was making her choose between him and her career.

Again, the question is: what's happened in the intervening 16 years? Is it the pornification of culture because of the internet? Did we become inured to the idea of women as objects because of the Starr report? Can we blame Britney for this one? Can't we have sexual freedom without flashing a camera?

Bitter Ashes Of Burned Brassieres [Los Angeles Times]

It's Not All About Wurtzel [Los Angeles Times]

Ashley Dupre In Girls Gone Wild Video [New York Post]

Related: Some Young Women Maybe Be Confusing Confidence With Carnality

The Real World: Female Empowerment Is A Stranger To The Seven Roommates

Because now that anyone with a shady doctor and a Livejournal account (or, ha ha, a job actually doing this for a living) can spew out uppers-addled rants weaving together Amy Fisher and Madonna and cutting and crying fits and her own sad, sad, sad life as an incredibly hot and intelligent young writer, it's important we preserve the laws that seal her status as the very first? Because getting a 160 on her LSATs wasn't good enough for the ACLU? I don't know; suffice it to say this story was depressing, but in a kind of overall, non-specific way. That kind of feeling where you don't know quite what's wrong with all this, and that almost makes it worse, and then the whole thing becomes an unending spiral of "I hate myself because I hate my life and it's so hateful that someone like me should hate her life because I have no real reason to hate anything about it which oh god just makes it so much WORSE..." Anyway, there are supposedly drugs for that.

Coming Soon: 'Law School Nation'? [New York Times]

cuntificate v. When a chick rambles on and on about bullshit.

Anyway, we hope that's a lesson to the state censors. You try to eradicate something harmful from society, and society thanks you by coming up with the crack rock of offensive slang.

Do us a favor, Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, and try not to do anything drastic next time, like, you know, outlaw actually being a bitch.

(It's not gonna make that name of yours any prettier-sounding"

It's a Female Dog. Or Worse. Or Endearing. And Illegal? [NY Times]