ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the way in which pornographic practices have influenced the fashion and beauty industries. It concentrates on the impact of porn on women's genitals. Pornography has created a new area of women's bodies on which they must lavish anxiety, money and painful procedures. Male designers are selling the look of sadomasochism (SM) prostitution in particular to the rich and fashionable. The cult created around the singer Madonna was an important element in normalizing the prostitute look as high fashion. In the late 1980s the cult of Madonna as 'transgressive' heroine united liberal feminists, camp makeup artists, anti-feminists and postmodern cultural studies theorists. The sex industry was able to expand in an economic and social climate of laissez-faire, free market capitalism. There are problems associated with shaving the genitals, though this is the practice that porn stars employ. Shaving has to take place every day to keep hair under control and it causes 'razor bumps'.
