It’s Time to Stop Beating Around the (Fake) Bush
Kenza Bajjar, Sports and Societies Editor, BA Politics and International Relations
The objectification of women is nothing new. In fact, it's old news. We all know it happens. We’re all used to the exploitation of our bodies, of the commodification of our parts, emotions, and appearances. With every follicle and pore, there’s a dollar to be made. It’s tiring, it’s overdone. Coming across the commodification of the female body today, I find myself feeling mild disdain, if anything at all, numb after so many years of inhabiting the product they’re trying to sell to me. Perhaps that’s why the anger I felt upon coming across Kim Kardashian’s pubic wig underwear was so surprising. The £34 Faux Hair Micro String Thong marketed as their ‘most daring panty yet’.
The Bush, the carpet, pubic hair - the last stronghold of the female body that inevitably fell into the grasp of misogynistic capitalist greed. It is almost ironic that it would take Kim Kardashian, a woman whose entire career was built upon the commodification of her own body, by her own mother no less, to be the one to cross that boundary, to knock down that last load-bearing wall. For so long, the bush remained untouched. Everything else about our bodies belonged to the Market; any conceivable part and function has been stripped from us, repackaged in plastic and polyester, and then promptly dangled with an extortionate price tag attached. But not the bush. Never the bush.
The most frustrating thing about Kim K’s ‘Fush’ (fake bush), other than the price tag, naturally, is that she’s called her product, a thong with wispy strings of polyamide, ‘Daring’. Daring! The growth of pubic hair is perhaps the most undaring bodily process. It requires no particular courage; it will happen whether you’d like it to or not. What is daring is paying a relative stranger £40 and upwards to use near-boiling wax to rip hair out of your most intimate areas. Or perhaps paying another relative stranger £40-80 monthly for three years to use a laser to sear off your individual follicles instead. And this is, of course, without mention of the bumps, cuts, rashes, infections, irritation, scarring, and hyperpigmentation that come before and after. It takes a lot more courage to endure that on a semi-regular basis than it would to simply let your bush grow. But of course, Kim Kardashian knows her audience, and her target demographic is particularly lionhearted when it comes to the world of hair removal.
The problem with Kim K’s ‘Fush’ isn’t the simple fact that she’s selling pubic wigs. Pubic hair and other intimate parts of the female body have long been present in fashion and the art world. The late Vivienne Westwood stands as an iconic example, spending her life challenging traditional notions of femininity and the female body - her iconic Tits T-Shirt being one of many examples. Vivienne Westwood took traditional conservative markers of women’s fashion, such as the corset, and redesigned and reclaimed them. The Kardashians rip off the work of independent Black designers and double the price. Where Westwood used her art to elevate her politics, to break the patriarchal restrictions on women and their bodily agency, Kim Kardashian pays a team to design better, tighter bras and shapewear to restrict and contain the natural curvature of the body, provides four colorways, and calls it a day.
It doesn’t take a woman to appreciate the female body, to appreciate the bush. John Galliano’s last collection at Maison Margiela, Spring/Summer ’24 of the Artisanal Collection, exemplified this. Accompanying the spellbinding porcelain-like makeup by Pat McGrath were the blink-and-you-miss-it hairy panties veiled behind the sheer fabrics on the models. Referencing the nude photographs of the French women from the Belle Époque era, Galliano honours the beauty of the female body: of the inherent art within its natural functions.
Needless to say, Kim Kardashian is not approaching pubic hair with any of the reverence or respect for the female body shared by her ‘Fush’ predecessors. To do so would require a feminism that she simply does not believe in, and if she does, one that she does not care to contribute to in any meaningful way. For that is what the ‘Fush’, at its essence, represents: another empty product of commodity feminism. Displaying body hair is feminist! It’s hot and progressive to have natural body hair now! Don’t want to actually grow your own? Well, luckily for you, for a mere £34 (not including shipping and customs), you too can be a feminist! Opt in now! Don’t worry, once you’re tired of being daring, you can simply take it off.
Most emblematic of Kardashian’s inability to stand for anything is Skim’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) score, a metric that measures a brand’s sustainability and ethical impact. Examined and ranked by non-profit Remake, Skims has a whopping 0/150. For reference, Shein has the same score. Frankly, Kim Kardashian is undeserving of a feminist’s benefit of the doubt. Is it really feminist that the synthetic ‘empowering’ ‘Fush’ you’re wearing was assembled by real women, working under inhumane conditions in sweatshops poised to collapse? Is it feminist to exploit the racial and gender inequalities that keep capitalism running so you can make a quick buck?
It happened with makeup, it happened with plastic surgery, and now it is happening to body hair. Commodity feminism, the transformation and adoption of feminist culture, ideals, and critiques into capitalistic commodities, consumes all. The reality of the matter is that our choices do not exist in a vacuum. We have the choice now to remove all our body hair, to pluck and strip and laser whatever we so please, and contribute to the USD3.6 billion global hair removal industry. But with every follicle we remove, it is critical that we understand this is not simply a question of ‘my body, my choice’ but our acquiescence to the misogynistic standards that make the world go round, and at what point we’ve had enough.
