Hair today, gone tomorrow: waxing lyrical for the body beautiful

  • 2009-09-03
  • By Philip Birzulis

RIP-OFF: Shaving is child's play compared to waxing.

Waxing is a way of life for Baltic ladies, as their silky smooth calves and barren bikini lines testify. Philip Birzulis loses some hair of his own to get a male view of this trend.

RIGA - Beauty is a serious business in this part of the world, as a quick scan of Tallinn, Riga or Vilnius will show. The streets of the capitals boast more hairdressers, manicurists and tanning salons than grocery stores, and encounters with their female inhabitants reveal a passionate concern for outward appearances. 

This is especially true regarding body hair. Many a visitor to Germany has noted the scrubby visage of the average fraulein. In the Baltics, going hirsute is as unthinkable as leaving the house sans hat and gloves was for previous generations of women.
This could all be reduced to simple personal preference, but that would ignore many hairy questions. What drives Baltic women to bear the cost, time and pain of these procedures? Does it indicate healthy self-esteem, or inability to resist male-defined images of the ideal body? And what does the person on the receiving end actually feel?

The author of this article decided to seek answers by putting his own body on the plucking line.

Roots and all

I am not, of course, the first male in history to undergo body waxing. In Western countries, the practice has spread from gay and artistic circles to the broader, beer-drinking population. There are even reports of English football teams doing it en masse for bonding or a lark.
But in Latvia, it seems to be well off the scale of normal behavior. The waxing studios I approached, some ten in total, either baldly stated that they don't do males or seemed clearly unready for the concept. Then I finally stumbled across an establishment that advertised its openness to men, a place of ultra-trendy, neo Japanese decor seemingly in tune with the world.

Even here, only one of the staff actually works with guys. Fortunately, Kristine is very nice. She considers it a professional duty to serve everyone and gladly handles a trickle of boyfriends prodded by their partners into a cleaner image. But she empathized with her more reticent colleagues 's there's no telling what a beefy chap having his pubes yanked out might do, she speculated.

I had received plenty of advance warning about the pain factor. The first time is meant to be particularly excruciating, and men supposedly take it worse than women. So it was pleasant to discover that a moderately furry, slightly overweight heterosexual could actually enjoy the whole thing. Please do not infer from this that I have a high pain threshold 's my dentist can testify that this is not so. But there is something quite sensual about having hot, honey-like wax poured into the nether regions by a vivacious young woman. The ripping that follows stings for a second but is nothing to cry about.

An hour later, I was the proud owner of a hairless chest, stomach, armpits and groin. There was a refreshing sense of cleanliness, and amazement at seeing my body in a state it had last been in at roughly 11 years old. And I had a sense of being like the straight girl's gay best friend who can talk to females about this kind of stuff on equal terms.

Bare essentials

While I was conscious of breaking stereotypes for males, Latvian women seem to take hairlessness in their stride. In my circle of female acquaintances, getting rid of your follicles is one those things you do without philosophizing. Even those who forgo the pain and cost of waxing - at 43 lats (60 euros) my own experience did not come cheap 's consider it a normal part of life to epilate or shave.

But the social geography of hair removal can be mapped. Older women and those living beyond the major cities seem to have little need for it. It's also quite a recent phenomenon in the big smoke, part of the torrent of consumerism that has swept the Baltics since 1991. Whether you view this as a massive expansion of personal freedom and material well-being, or the killing of deeper values by a materialistic monoculture is a matter of opinion. But few Balts would opt to return to communism, and that certainly applies to grooming. "We don't live in the Dark Ages anymore and you have to maintain your standards," was a typical response.

Baltic women seem to wear their sexuality on their sleeve a lot more than the average Western male visitor is used to. Especially in summer, there is more skin on show than in London or Brussels, and combined with high heels and a love of dancing after a few drinks, this has led to more than a few misunderstandings. It's not that Baltic women are "easy," but their deportment does align with male fantasies.

In discussing the social aspects of waxing, a male friend pointedly asked if I find hairy women attractive. I had to answer in the negative, but this does have to do with media conditioning about what is beautiful. Perhaps Latvian women have to try harder to meet male expectations because the odds are stacked against them. The country has the world's highest proportion of women to men, and there is no end of complaints about the alcoholic, emotionally crippled mummy's boys that allegedly dominate the penis-carrying population. Waxing is an essential weapon in the fight for the few decent men out there.

All of this does not mean that Gretchen in Frankfurt with her bushy pits is happier than smooth skinned Ilze in Riga or Rasa in Vilnius. It's just further proof of how diverse this Europe supposedly becoming one actually is, historically, socially, maybe sexually. And it's another reason why the Baltics are an interesting place to be.