Hair Apparent

The controversy became cause célèbre when bestseller writer Luis Fernando Verissimo for two days in a row (January 7 and 8) he dedicated his daily national syndicated column published among others in O Estado de S. Paulo and Rio's O Globo to ponder about pubic hair in an article he called: "Musings about the pubic hair of Vera Fischer in Playboy."

Alessandra Dalevi

A pictorial on a Brazilian magazine has brought to the forefront of the national discourse a discussion on female pubic hairs. The theme is being debated not only by the men on the streets, and women at the hairdresser's, but also by the crème de la crème of Brazilian intellectuals. It all started after the January-2000 issue of Playboy hit the newsstands with its special edition celebrating the muse of the new millennium. The chosen one was former Miss Brazil, Vera Fischer, a 48-year-old movie and TV actress who is always making headlines due to a new romance, a custody fight over her son or her battle to beat of drug addiction.

What is keeping people buzzing is not the fact that a woman who is ready to be a grandmother would show all her wares again or that she in a very suggestive pose bites a baguette with her legs wide open or that she bathes her naked body with French Champaign or sucks on a Perrier bottle with her eyes closed. People have found out that La Fischer does not shave or pluck and that's something you don't do with impunity. The last big public controversy over a playmate was when model Adriana Galisteu appeared shaving her pubic hairs

Vera herself concedes that the pictures have a taste of forbidden fruit. "They are certainly daring pictures," she told Rio's daily O Dia. "But they are very elegant pictures that have humor. This was the result I wanted and shows the work of an actress." For stage director Moacyr Góes "no one could expect Vera Fischer to be well behaved. Nothing remains the same after she passes by." And former Miss Brazil Adalgisa Colombo commented: "She rubs her beauty in our face. That body, and color are unbelievable."

Others, like business administrator Farley Dantas, believe that Fischer went overboard: "This is an aberration. She made crude poses, like a man. It was vulgar and the picture with the butcher is in very bad taste. Besides, she is too hairy."

The pictures taken in Paris have some rousing scenes, like the cook who cuts meat while Vera shows breasts and genitals through the window slits, or taking a shower with the Champaign bubbles simulating an ejaculation; or playing a prostitute in a Parisian dark alley.

The controversy became cause célèbre when bestseller writer Luis Fernando Verissimo decided to enter the fray. For two days in a row (January 7 and 8) he dedicated his daily national syndicated column published among others in O Estado de S. Paulo and Rio's O Globo to ponder about pubic hair in an article he called: "Musings about the pubic hair of Vera Fischer in Playboy."

Veríssimo used his tribune and the intimate hairs to criticize what he sees as Yankee hypocrisy: "The appearance of the first pubic hairs in the American Playboy was a landmark in the history of western hypocrisy. For a long time one of the reasons for the success of the magazine National Geographic Society was that in its pages Americans could look at the pictures of naked women and say that they had an anthropological interest… Not by chance, the first woman to be shown in Playboy completely naked—that is, nude even from the resources used until then to cover or disguise pubic hairs—was a black model. A return to the natives so the transition would not shock too much.

"It took a long time, but Goya's Maja, the first playmate, the first respectable representation of Diderot's maxim that there is a difference between naked woman and undressed woman, was able to finally flaunt all her glorious nudity, frontal, natural and without conjectures. The history of the triumph of pure female beauty over the prejudice disguised as good taste, over the euphemistic "artistic nude" and other false pruriences is the history of the slow affirmation of the pubic hairs in the world. Which gets to a kind of apotheosis with those from Vera Fischer in the latest Playboy."

Now you know.

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