Having a baby is the world’s single most courageous feat. So why would a textbook publisher illustrate it with a picture of a woman with trimmed pubic hair?
Of course, your body, your choice and every woman has the right to treat her nether regions as she sees fit. But it was heartening to read the recent apology from the school textbook publisher Pearson Edexcel (a name that will act like a sour batch of Proust’s madeleines on many of us) for an illustration in its 2017 International GCSE Human Biology textbook, which appeared to show a pregnant woman with a brazilian-style landing strip of pubes. The image, arguably, not only reinforced current social pressures on women to remove their pubic hair but, in a medical and educational setting, failed to show how bodies naturally grow.
Skip to content