lady gaga bares all for candy: subverting female pubic hair taboos

Stefani Germanotta, otherwise known as Lady Gaga, has never been shy of turning heads through her individual brand of provocation. In the past, she has worn a dress made entirely of meat, arrived at awards shows in giant eggs and worn shoes with heels so high her ability to walk has been compromised.

In her latest provocative act, Gaga has posed for Candy magazine, self-described as ‘the first transversal style magazine’, in a photoshoot by Steven Klein, where the pop star wears one shoulder of a fur coat, a moustache, a scorpion pasty and that’s all folks!

Wearing nothing to cover herself up ‘down there’, the leaked photoshoot of Gaga has generated discussion online not due to the fact that she has posed nude, or even her body shape (which generally tends to be at the centre of Internet fodder), but rather the fact that the shoot shows visibly and clearly Gaga’s pubic hair.

Gaga has posed naked before for V Magazine, but this more recent shoot reveals uncensored shots of her nether regions. Due to the NSFW nature of the image, many websites have censored this part of the image, occasionally accompanied by the tagline ‘contains nudity that is offensive to some people.’

It is true that female pubic hair is not often seen in fashion shoots, modelling runways or through mainstream media sources at all really, but it is this kind of photoshoot that Gaga has done which provokes a conversation on this otherwise uneasy, untouched and uncomfortable topic of conversation. That is not to say, however, that media outlets have not touched upon the subject before – Jezebel came up with this article earlier in the year, and the UK’s The Telegraph published this extremely interesting article; even here at Lip we have not left this stone unturned. And yet, there still remains a sense of taboo around the subject.

This is due to many, possibly clichéd, facts. The first is that of pornography, which has arguably normalised the Brazilian waxed woman to the extent that to find anything to the contrary has to be actively searched as a pornographic subgenre of ‘hairy’. On the flip side, we also have the ‘grown ups’ debate, that a woman with pubic hair is a fully grown, fully formed, adult woman; whereas a hairless vagina is vaguely reminiscent of a prepubescent young girl.

The fact still remains that fully visible female pubic hair is still considered risqué and unusual, therefore making Gaga’s latest shoot subversive. Yet the fact that it occurs in Candy magazine, a magazine which, in the past, has celebrated transvestism, transsexuality, cross-dressing and androgyny, having also seen the likes of Tilda Swinton, Jared Leto and James Franco grace the covers, shows Gaga’s contribution to its covers adding a new angle.

It is unusual to consider androgyny and female pubic hair in the same category; yet perhaps this is something that Gaga and Klein wish to address to viewers. There is nothing inherently masculine about bodily hair, despite how it is branded, and the fact is that it is natural and, more to the point, the choice of the individual on how they wish to look and to present themselves.

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