A hairy snatch and a tired pregnant woman

Jenny of I Don't Like You That Way thinks PJ Harvey, a musician she cheerfully admits to knowing nothing about, should get her snatch waxed.

And some Socialite is having a hard time with the way Maggie Gyllenhaal looks pregnant and tired.

So neither of these women is all that famous, comparatively speaking. PJ Harvey hasn't been big in North America since that "Down By the Water" single and was most lately known to be playing bass with Moris Tepper - best known for playing with Captain Beefheart, who I'm going to bet a pop-tart caker like Jenny has never heard of. And nobody would even know how to spell Maggie Gyllenhaal's name if her brother hadn't just made waves by starring in a long, boring movie about sheepherders in love; her movies are usually pretty low-key and the mainstream ones she appeared in - Riding in Cars with Boys and Mona Lisa's Smile - were shit, best avoided.

On top of their relative lack of fame, the criticisms of both women are a little like making fun of hippies for smoking weed. Here's what PJ Harvey had to say about her live performances in Spin magazine - not exactly the words of a woman who, on being alerted her hairy snatch was showing onstage, would immediately call for a razor, shocked and upset over her faux-pas:

"It’s that combination of being quite elegant and funny and revolting, all at the same time, that appeals to me . . . Maybe that’s just my twisted sense of beauty."

And in terms of Maggie Gyllenhaal - pregnancy is long, hard and tiring. It's the one time in a woman's life she can be reasonably expected to not give a shit about the way she looks, and is probably legally justified in slapping anyone who even suggests she should run a comb through her hair. This is obvious to the meanest of intelligences.

So what was the interest in writing up these two pieces? And what was the interest in reading them, which judging from the quantity of comments, a lot of people did? We're not reading about cocaine habits or scandalous sexual practices here, there's no juice. For a lot of people, there's not even the thrill of recognition since these women aren't all that notorious.

I think it's a sort of self-dread; an awful thrill of self-recognition. Most women have more snatch hair than they want; obviously Jenny does, considering the quantity of options she offers - in the first person - to lend to PJ Harvey. Not to mention the urgency with which she offers it, as though having a hairy snatch was a real hygienic sin, rather than an aesthetic choice. Running through this is inferiority - the fact Jenny must be aware if she flashed her gash on-stage, no matter how painstakingly tended, it wouldn't give her the power and respect an alternative rocker like PJ Harvey gets from hundreds of screaming fans - it would either get her raped or mocked relentlessly to her face.

Same for Maggie Gyllenhaal - most women are going to get pregnant at some time in their lives and will therefore go through extended periods of looking and feeling like shit. Does one look at Maggie Gyllenhaal in a bandana and say 'if I look like shit when I'm pregnant, at least I'm not the only one'? Or are these pictures about how we must laugh at pregnant women now while we're not, since our pregnancies will mark the time we have to fight the hardest with the least available energy to maintain girlish good looks? Or even worse - does this negative energy come from women burdened the worry that they'll never get pregnant, and who must therefore focus their concentration on how ugly pregnancy can make you?