Sorry, Kim Kardashian’s hairy thong nonsense is not a feminist rallying cry

This latest marketing wheeze – a line of ‘faux hair micro string thongs’ – is less about making women feel comfortable in their natural bodies and more about making piles of dosh, says Olivia Petter

Surely nobody has upheld society’s increasingly restrictive beauty standards quite so much as Kim Kardashian.

This is the woman who bragged about the extreme diet she undertook to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s dress. A woman whose bodywear brand literally sells waist trainers. And – let’s not forget – a woman who once said she’d happily “eat poop every single day” if it made her look younger.

And yet, this week, that woman has done a 180 by encouraging us to embrace the one bodily thing women have always been told to feel the most shame around: our pubic hair.

This is still a shapewear brand that ultimately hopes you hate your body enough to buy its products, says Olivia Petter (Kim Kardashian/Getty)

Well, sort of. The 44-year-old reality TV star-turned-bodywear mogul announced that her brand, SKIMS, was launching a line of “faux hair micro string thongs” that feature “a mix of curly and straight faux hair in twelve different shade variations”, as described on the company’s website, labelling the $32 product as its “most daring yet”.

The thongs might be tongue-in-cheek – they were launched alongside a video mocking sexist game shows in the 1970s, with a male host standing beside female models as he asks an audience to guess “does the carpet match the drapes”. These merkin-like garments are already sold out in the UK.

But don’t let the marketing speak fool you; a rallying feminist cry against the patriarchy, this is not. Sure, it could be easy to mistake Kardashian’s latest launch as an empowering attempt to undo decades of damaging myths that have forced women into clinics to wilfully strip off, get on all fours, and pay strangers to slather hot wax onto their nether regions while they yelp in agony. That isn’t what this is, though.

If Kardashian is a feminist – and some would argue that her undeniable hustle and drive would classify her as such, though personally I’m not convinced – she’s a businessperson first. Her capitalistic (and somewhat myopic) compulsions have been repeatedly relayed in interviews – who could forget her viral message to women in business to “get your f***ing ass up and work”?

With this in mind, I can’t help but feel this hairy thong nonsense is little more than a marketing ploy. At best, it’s a stab at creating some sort of controversy to spark online chatter about SKIMS. At worst, it’s a feeble attempt to seem “down with the kids” that makes consumers think it’s on their side when in reality, this is still a shapewear brand that ultimately hopes you hate your body enough to buy its products, most of which are designed to make you look thinner.

It all feels a little rich, shall we say. Consider too the fact that Kardashian comes from a family that has single-handedly dominated the beauty standards discourse for the better part of a decade. If we’re to believe the tabloid reports, there have been facelifts, lip flips, BBLs, and even Ozempic. Forgive me, then, for being a little sceptical that a woman from this remarkable regime is telling us it’s time to learn to love our natural selves.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I would love to think otherwise – believe me: waxing is painful, laser hair removal is expensive, and shaving is downright terrible for your skin. But that’s not where we are in the culture. And even if we were to get there, which I highly doubt we would any time soon, one thing I know for certain is that the person to do that would be a subversive, powerful voice from the counter-culture. And they wouldn’t have the surname Kardashian.