Molly Walsh – Pubes (2016)

This little comic is excellent for a number of reasons.

It’s simple, cute and spends a lot of energy contextualizing the action in a fully formed world, i.e. the shower with a polka dot shower curtain, soap, shampoo, a razor–in other words the detritus you’d expect to see in any normal shower; the nude beach is palm trees, tropical fronds and flowers but also other people go about there lives pretty much normally (except for the fact that their nude in public).

Someone a great deal wiser than me once gave me the following advice: never tell where it is possible to show.

A lot of folks on Tumblr like to talk a lot about how radical they are. There are folks that argue that the normalcy of the patriarchal expectation for women to shave down there has rendered the natural state of post-pubescent women as undesirable. To combat this, some people go overboard supporting personal autonomy w/r/t body hair to a point that is–for all intents and purposes–fetishization.

This cleanly cuts through all that mess by showing a woman who clearly inhabits a world similar to the viewers own. The ‘politics’ of it don’t enter into her decision–it seems she’s just curious how it’ll look and finds it cute.

Subsequently, her friend expresses surprise in a joking fashion but is super accepting and supportive. (Instead of being like oh look at you, you rebel you!)

In other words, this isn’t focused on theory or praxis, it moves straight to simple application and in so doing it presents something that’s equally legible to folks who’ve spent half a lifetime immersed in critical theory to folks who just stopped in for a momentary distraction.