How porn (and fashion) feeds paedophilic double standards

One of the sexist double standard I hate the most has to do with the practice of shaving one's pubic hair.

The porn, fashion and cosmetic surgery industries like to pretend that it's something natural, that all normal, reasonable and self-conscious women do. Women are constantly bombarded with images of hairless, child-like women.

We are told that having a hairy pubic area is abnormal and ugly. That a hairy vagina is unattractive to men, that it looks old and "unfresh".

The subtitle to these messages is clear, however. Adult, grown-up, full-fledge women are expected to look, as far as their genitals are concerned, as prepubescent girls.

In short, this "trend" is no less than the acceptation by our society of paedophilic sexual preferences, and the assertion that it is acceptable for men to be sexually attracted by the physical features of female children.

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When it comes to men, however, this reality is not denied at all.

For instance, when the media reported that the infamous recidivist paedophile Peter Whitmore had forced one of his last victims, a 14 year-old boy, to shave his pubic hair, they did not deny that Whitmore's purpose was to make his victim look younger, like a prepubescent child.

Nobody had the nerves to suggest that the gesture was not paedophilic in itself, but that it was just a way for a non-paedophilic, garden-variety, relapse sexual offender to make his victim look more attractive, or "cleaner" to him.

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Why then is it so hard to acknowledge that the same practice is as unhealthy when it comes to women?

You say you prefer women who are well "groomed" down there? I say fuck you, you paedophile.

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"But is it a surprise that men who never thought they would do so end up using child pornography? 'Teen porn' Web sites, videos, and magazines abound, showcasing 'barely legal' young women, fully shaved of pubic hair, cavorting in schoolgirl outfits and pigtails. Many of the sites and films are voyeuristic, featuring peepholes intol girls' locker rooms and showers, slumber parties and schoolhouse toilet stalls. In sex scenes, these 'girls' are typically depicted having sex with much older men. And that's assuming the 'teens' are actually eighteen or nineteen years old.

[...]

"The supply exists to serve the demand. There's an illicit, voyeuristic pleasure to the enterprise. There is also a tinge of revenge.

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"The gazer longs for what he could not have long ago and what he certainly cannot have - at least, legally - today. These girls may not actually be underage, and therefore no 'harm' was done to an actual child in creating the pornographic image. But the desire for a child and the desire for a childlike woman blur and overlap."

[Emphasis added]

- Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography is Damaging our Lives, our Relationships, and our Families (New York: Owl Books, 2006), at 198-199.