Christopher Hitchens, hammer of Islamism, rationalist supernova, has just had a “back, sack and crack wax”. Here he is in December's Vanity Fair, pudgy hands clasped in unlikely prayer pose, while a cadre of beauticians yank swatches of what seems to be shag-pile from the nethermost Pelt of the Hitch. Antiwar types might relish his agonised depilation diary — “like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper handjob” — and wonder if it might afford him some deeper insight into activities inside Guantanamo.

Yet, strangely, in submitting to this ritual for a feature on self-improvement to celebrate his recently acquired US citizenship (he also traded fag-stained British hat-pegs for twinkly Hollywood gnashers) Hitchens has stepped into a rare place where Islam and Western consumerism concurs. For both agree that body hair, in its lush, natural form, is gross and repellent, a problem that must be eradicated at all costs.

While Hitchens was merely emulating male models, gay men and footballers like David Beckham, who have championed the modern aesthetic of a smoother male torso, he was also echoing the religious rites of the 9/11 bombers, who reportedly shaved chest and pubic hair the night before their missions, to render their bodies pure and cleansed for when they pitch up in Paradise.

It is hard not to frown at the contradictions in both reasonings in reaching for the razor. Is Islam suggesting that the human form, created by God, must be perfected by Man, assisted by the Gillette Mach 3? Why in the West is the pubic bush, the most luxuriant manifestation of our sexual hormones, now universally condemned as “unsexy”?

According to some Islamic teaching both men and women are obliged to shave their pubic hair. In men it is part of the fitrah, the cleansing rituals, which also include circumcision, cutting nails and armpit hair, and trimming the moustache. And one can only reflect that males of all faiths (and none) would benefit from such a tough toilette to-do list from an early age, particularly those living in hotter climates. But Muslim women too are enjoined to be hairless, particularly preceding their weddings, and often to remain extensively manicured afterwards for reasons of cleanliness and purity.

Yet in the West such hairlessness in women denotes the inverse: in fact, a hot-hot-hot impurity, a 24/7 readiness for all-night dirty bedroom action. Such is the strength of this assumption that, when a website specialising in sick war snaps by US servicemen posted a photograph of an Iraqi woman injured in an explosion, revealing her bare and shaven lower half, American posters commented that she must be a lapdancer or a whore.

It is hard in the West to recall that there was a brief moment when the ladygarden was left untended, and the female body celebrated and desired in its natural state. The actress Sienna Miller is now filming Hippy Hippy Shake, a movie about the Oz magazine trial, and photos have circulated of her naked, except for obligatory flowers in her hair. And yet for all the effortful re-creation of the Sixties, one glaring anachronism remains: the Hitler moustache of a Brazilian wax, which marks Miller out as a totally 21st-century girl. Perhaps Hair and Make-up couldn't manage a merkin.

But then around the mid-90s some mysterious memo went out to twentysomething women that it was no longer sufficient to tidy the “bikini line” so it didn't cascade down the inner thigh like a spider plant. The gyms of Britain were suddenly full of women waxed into weeny welcome mats, with all the stubble, bruises, pimpled hair follicles and burst blood vessels that accompany this excruciating sexifying of the sex.

Like a trend for comedy-size breast implants, inflatable lips, hair extensions, extreme nails and high street daywear revealing more tittage than a ten-quid hooker, waxing filtered down from the porn industry. Here defuzzing makes the action, as it were, easier to follow. And for male performers depilation adds the illusion of an extra inch. Maybe Hitchens had that in mind.

The aesthetics of porn reigns in an age when sex is so commodified that lapdancing is deemed “empowering”, prostitution glorified in TV drama, sex less concerned with pleasure than display. Young women have swallowed the idea that they must look so “hot” that men would pay to sleep with them: pity the poor cow so badly maintained that she'd have to give it away for free.

You don't need to page Dr Freud to wonder how the craze for bare pudenda might be tied to some unsavory fetishisation of youth. And now the waxed look is supported by a massive industry — hair removal in Britain is worth £280 million a year.

But as Western women are slaves to the diktats of fashion and beauty industries, likewise Islam preoccupies itself with all matters of intimate grooming. In North London, Bushra Noah, a 19-year-old British-born Muslim, is suing a North London hair salon for refusing to employ her because she demanded to wear a headscarf at work. The young owner of Wedge argues it is part of a stylist's job to showcase the salon's creativity in her own funky do.

Would it feel comfortable, I wonder, to have your hair cut by someone who believes that merely sipping coffee in the salon, with your head publicly revealed, is immodest, even obscene? Why anyway would a devout Muslim want to cut women's hair? There are endless scholarly writings interpreting the Koran's position on this: some suggest that women's hair should not be cut at all, or only if it reaches beyond the base of the spine, others that styles favoured by non-believers are banned — but all agree women's hair should never be so short she might be mistaken for a man. So how could Ms Noah square her avowed faith with a client opting for a Britney?

But then she is not fighting to wear the headscarf out of religious faith. Like the West Yorkshire teaching assistant who demanded to obscure her face while teaching infant children, the veil is a cultural weapon. It is a statement of separation from — and declared opposition to — the secular society in which she was raised, which she expects wholly to accommodate her impossible wishes, while she herself will not budge an inch.

In our war of ideas, the body is a key battlefield, and hair, as Samson discovered, is power.

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