Thanks to my Persian and Greek genes, I have body hair that’s especially thick on my arms and legs. Kids in grade school used to call me “Gorilla.” I got teased so much that I started hair removal at a pretty young age.
To this day, I wax my arms and armpits. I shave my legs. For a very long time, I also waxed — you guessed it — down there. In high school, my friends and I decided to get our first bikini waxes together for moral support. We took turns on the table as the sweet Taiwanese woman violently ripped muslin from between our legs, alternating between shushing our cries and muttering “it’s OK” under her breath. My pores bled that first time. But I walked out of there with my head held high, slightly uncomfortable with my cotton underwear rubbing against raw skin.
My boyfriend at the time loved it. The guys I dated later followed suit. Each would talk about how sexy it looked, and whenever I walked out of the salon, I knew that night I’d be getting oral. The awkward growing-out phase between waxes was my nightmare. The new hairs growing in would be painful (not to mention unsightly), and each partner would make it clear he just couldn’t wait for the next time I got waxed.
Then I started dating a new guy. One night, while I was between waxes, we were lying in bed naked. He turned to me and with some embarrassment said, “I kind of like pubic hair.” Once I got over my surprise, I decided to grow it out, in part to turn my partner on and in part to see if I liked my own pubic hair. Until then, that possibility had never really occurred to me.
Turns out, I love it. It’s this little patch of darkness that covers up my sexy bits. I feel seductive and womanly. The days of scalding wax and searing pain are gone. No more red bumps or ingrown hairs.
The trend, especially among college students, is to go bare. Statistics show that around 70 to 88 percent of women and 58 to 78 percent of men partly or fully remove their pubic hair. With numbers like those, getting rid of pubic hair isn’t even a trend anymore — it’s the norm. How did we get here? Porn, the great trendsetter of American sex, seems to be the most obvious choice.
Your hair serves a purpose. First off, it traps pheromones, erotic scents that are biologically designed to make your partner want you more. Not only that, but it helps protect against sexually transmitted diseases, which we all know are common on college campuses.
Think about it. You wax or shave, creating tiny cuts in your skin. Then, if you happen to sleep with someone who has herpes or HPV, it’s way easier for the virus to come in contact with your skin. Condoms can’t help, since they don’t protect against the STDs that are spread by skin-to-skin contact.
A lot of people remove the hair for aesthetic reasons. My guy friends tell me they shave because it makes their penises look huge. Newsflash: However big your dick looks isn’t going to change how big it feels. My girl friends tell me that it looks pretty and makes them feel clean. I can understand the appeal, but really we just end up looking like prepubescent girls. I don’t want to look like a 5-year-old. I want to look like a woman. Going bare doesn’t make your pussy clean. Taking regular showers keeps your pussy clean.
It scares me how deeply society has internalized this aesthetic trend. When Sasha Grey, a well-known porn star, sported pubic hair during her guest spot on “Entourage,” Twitter exploded with things like, ‘Entourage was wild. So was Sasha Grey’s bush. #EW” and, “…disgusting. IT’S 2010!” It’s not just that we feel dirty or gross with pubic hair. We go so far as to bash other people for their downstairs grooming choices.
Now, I’ve been there. I’ve done the shaving, the waxing, the agonizing. It wasn’t until that one guy who told me he liked hair that I even considered the possibility of going au natural. Sometimes all it takes to get over the fear or shame is one person to tell you it’s OK.
You may not get that from our society. The people you sleep with, the porn you watch and your own internal voice might be giving you the same discouraging message. But I’m not. Pubic hair is sexy and liberating, and even if you choose to keep shaving or waxing, just make sure you’re doing it for you. It’s your body. If anyone gives you shit for being empowered and confident about the choice you make, give them the finger and kick them out of your bed. They don’t deserve to be sleeping with you anyway.
Contact Elisabeth Bahadori at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @lisabaha.