In the last year at least three products were launched to prevent camel toe. Last month it was a brand of panties called Camelflage; before it was the Cuchini and Camel Ammo, inserts for women to place in their underwear.
Note the similar before/afters for the products: the images on the left side, with (something of) the shape of the vulva showing, i.e., camel toe, are “wrong.” The images on the right are “correct”—corrected.
No way around it: there is an increasingly demanding beauty ideal for this most private part of a woman’s anatomy these days. A public standard, for the increasingly public parts of our parts. We dare our pubic area to show—make it harder and harder not to show—yet penalize women more when it does. The ideal denies the (endless) reality of the female body, and pushes fat female bodies into a kind of sexual exile.
Our bodies are certainly more exposed in both clothing styles and level of casualness, and clothing is often thinner, clingier, and made from fabric without much tailoring, which can add the bulk and protection of seams. That doesn’t mean fifteen or fifty years ago women’s bodies were completely unavailable to the public eye, but the pubic area is suddenly there to be seen, much more than it used to be. And under tighter scrutiny—which amounts to the same thing. Nowadays women’s pubic area is to be:
very flat in all directions; no hint of the pudendal cleft; no roundness, or very little, where the lines of a woman’s legs and her pubic area meet; defined by lines that create a sharp, clear V that comes to a point. No hint of depth, no valleys, no mounding, basically. A sheer front of abdomen that ends in the pubic area without notable emphasis.
The ideal seems connected to things such as body size, but also to the wholesale flip in less than a generation to a baseline standard of little or no pubic hair. Pubic hair doesn’t just provide physical protection, as it’s designed to do, it provides visual protection. It can create its own visible shape but simultaneously prevent further scrutiny. Now, though, all the hair has to go—or at least be trimmed enough so that there is no hint of mass visible from the outside, which makes the talk in my generation about managing the bikini line seem hopelessly outdated.
American Apparel ads would be an obvious, aggressive example of the no-hair look, and are a worthwhile (if easy) target to comment on in all this mess, like Camelflage, but I don’t think they should be treated with any surprise or as the worst example of our obsessions.
Because there are fierce standards at work here, even with a lot of seemingly modest clothing. We constantly trade in pussy-related beauty ideals at a high pitch whether we admit it or not. Regular low-rise jeans (not even skinny jeans), with their center seam, demand a very particular look. Bikinis do the same.
Yoga pants are another a good example; they are really harsh and unforgiving (strange, in such a comfy piece of clothing). They have to hang from your hips and cling nowhere else. There can’t be anything there—protruding, sticking out—for them to look right.
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