It's not at all surprising that eight minutes in to the first episode of "Babylon Berlin," the lavish new Netflix-by-way-of-German-television opus, there's a moment of HBO-worthy group nudity. Nor is it even terribly unusual that the Weimar-era drama, faithful to its time, shows a naked female sporting a full tuft of pubic hair. But when, in the second episode, a chorus of Josephine Baker-like showgirls in banana skirts lift their arms to reveal that a few of them don't shave their pits, it's revelatory. Underarm hair! Now that's authentic!
I can't be the only person who watches shows like "Outlander" and "Game of Thrones" thinking, "Time travel and dragons, sure, but where are all these women getting shaved and waxed in these mythic worlds? Where do they even find the time?" Four years ago, Buzzfeed pondered how, in spite of their perilous circumstances, characters like Katniss Everdeen, heroine of "The Hunger Games," and every single woman on "The Walking Dead," always manage to keep their underarms so stubble-free. And in the 1920s England of "Downton Abbey," the ladies sported silky smooth armpits under their dresses and between the sheets.
The lack of female body hair in period pieces isn't always anachronistic, though. Women have been waging intermittent war with their follicles since at least ancient Egypt. Renaissance ladies, meanwhile, fashioned crude depilatories out of quicklime and arsenic. The nudes of classical European art are frequently depicted with their hairy parts discreetly covered or extremely well-groomed, making clear a preferred aesthetic. There's no way that Botticelli's Venus hasn't done some serious bikini waxing, and Manet's Olympia sports only the slightest thatch of stubble. But a recent Mental Floss examination of the history of female shaving noted that it was the advent of sleeveless attire in the jazz era that proved, in many ways, the final nail in the coffin of natural pits. That's when fashionable women decided they needed to heed the advice of Harper's Bazaar and "remove objectionable hair." (Even then, they generally didn't catch on that their legs were similarly "objectionable" until the pin-up girl years of World War II.)
In the decadent fictionalized Germany of "Babylon Berlin," the female heroine Lotte (in a star-making turn by newcomer Liv Lisa Fries) may be overworked and poor, but she's trendy enough to keep her underarms sleek. The dancers at the club where she moonlights, however, run a pleasing gamut of pit styles from bare to bushy. The first time I watched the series' show-stopping musical number that revealed them, I had to pause my Netflix player to confirm what I was seeing and to Google whether arm merkins are a thing. Even when popular entertainment magnanimously gives us women with pubes, it rarely depicts them with such genuine, old-fashioned pits.
So deeply mired are we in hairlessness as the default that when an actress sports body hair in a film or television project, it's enough to provoke style features on the wig-making process behind it. After all, as "Boardwalk Empire's" makeup director Nicki Ledermann said in 2010, "Nobody really has hair anymore." When Olivia Wilde donned a pubic wig for the short-lived "Vinyl," she went on late night television to apologetically explain, "I was horrified background actors might think this was my real body hair. So I was walking around like 'WHOA. Check this FAKE merkin out, everyone. It's not real!'"
No wonder, then, that when a female celebrity audaciously flaunts any body hair outside of a role — as Julia Roberts, Miley Cyrus, and Madonna have been known to do — it's headline-making. When Moschino recently posted a photo of Cardi B in her retro '90s ensemble at the Grammys, the Instagram troll population showed up to express shock and dismay at the thin line of hair rising up her abdomen — and was quickly schooled by her fans.
But female armpit hair, once all but taboo both on- and offscreen, has of late been making something of a comeback. A 2017 study by the analytic group Mintel found that nearly a quarter of millennial-aged women don't shave their underarms — a dramatic shift from just five years ago, when 95 percent of women 16 to 24 reported they did. They're shaving their legs less too. Could a pube comeback be far behind?
So shave, don't shave, dye it all turquoise like Lady Gaga — because female bodily autonomy isn't just reserved for our insides. And take some inspiration from the new crop of binge-worthy fictional ladies of the past, raising their arms in the air like they were born before Nair.
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