Reclaiming Women’s Body Hair For Themselves

Just Like Reproductive Health, Men Shouldn’t Have a Say in Women’s Choices About Their Body Hair

I find it ironic that there’s so many men out there who will claim to dislike a woman with body hair and also so many men out there who complain that they aren’t getting enough sex, side-by-side, in a world full of unsatisfied women and successful men who don’t really care what a woman’s preference is, realizing that her body is her own. It’s rather telling.

The topsy-turvy pendulum swings of popular culture that float around in the collective unconscious are always a fascinating thing to me. When it comes to popular trends, especially popular sexual trends, there’s always a sort of dialectic at work, a surge of one thing in popularity followed by a surge of its opposite, and then a blend of those things to create a new trend. The short, sweet, no-nonsense Rock and Roll of the 1950s would inevitably give way to the long, drawn-out, introspective music of the 1960s, only to bring it back to the short two minute songs of the punk rock seventies, then again, only to revive longer tunes and elaborate pieces of music in the form of ballads in the 1980s. Trends are observable and predictable. The trends of body hair are no different, especially when it comes to women.

I’ll start off by saying that, like the subject of women’s reproductive health, men really have no place telling women what they should or should not do with their own bodies. As the story Stop Asking Us About Our Body Hair spells out quite clearly, telling in graphic detail the nightmarish state that many women exist in constantly of being told exactly how to trim, prep, and tame their bodily hair so that they can make someone else happy, many women are still seen as objects to many men. The good news is, I see this trend going away. Many of my friends are technically Generation Z, and, being a Millennial myself, I’ve always found it sort of odd that my older friends were seemingly obsessed with having shaved women. They couldn’t describe a vulva without adding that qualifier that it is, in fact, “shaved” and getting excited about it, and this confused me.

To me, it didn’t make much of a difference whether they were shaved or not, beauty is beauty, someone who suits me or appeals to my liking would do so whether they had pubic hair or not. Even today, my girlfriend still feels the societal pressure from years past when she gets wrapped up in the long work hours and can’t get around to shaving her armpits, no matter how many times I reassure her that, not only do I not mind, I actually enjoy her still and think of it as nothing more than a complimentary change-of-pace look on a stunningly beautiful woman.

The pendulum has swung back, however, and social movements have been the ones which have done the dirty work to shape minds. I’d imagine the men of the seventies thought pubic hair was “womanly” and then later the men of the nineties clung to the mass-appeal of the new fad of shaved women. It was novel. Now we seem to be saying, emphatically, “We don’t really care,” a testament to how much better things have gotten in regards to female bodily autonomy.

At the time, Generation X was very much a generation living on the promises of global capitalism, Reaganomics, and I vaguely remember being an infant in the 1980s when, even then, it seemed like everyone was being promised platinum credit cards with a Ferrari Testarossa. The movies all featured the cute, often-ditsy, blonde, girl-next-door type, but the sexy women were found in the blockbuster adult films made by big budget porn studios. They were serious, mysterious, bold, and well-posed. And soon, in the 1990s, the natural, garden-variety woman (pun intended) gave way to the new and fresh totally-shaved female form. And, of course, notions of wealth and power came with the notion that the men would be so adored by the women that they’d have their Playmates and what have you.

There seems to be a big divide between those who were of age to watch pornographic movies at the time when this shift happened and those of us who were too young to watch it. Most Millennials I know are with me when I say that we generally don’t care about a woman’s pubic hair. Some people might even add a footnote, here, that as long as it’s not painfully unruly or unhygienic, all is well. I’ll just say that regardless of the situation down there, I always seem to find what I’m looking for in my sexual relations.

I’ll speak for myself, here, when I say that I don’t agree with the notion that men want a youthful, infantile woman when they like shaved women. I think it’s just a matter of softness and ease-of-operation. I don’t think there’s a sort of Freudian symbolism going on whereby we attribute youth to a lack of body hair. Interestingly, I think that some of us men use body hair, especially pubic hair, as a sort of unconscious affirmation of womanhood, so it works in one direction but not the other. A woman with pubic hair can shave for the day, a girl who has grown pubic hair can’t magically make it grow for a day, and I think we know this on a deep level. I find bodily hair a deeply attractive thing on women, as it reinforces the fact that who I’m dealing with has reached a certain level of biological maturity, even if a lack thereof isn’t suggestive that a person hasn’t yet reached that level of maturity.

In the end, what a woman does with their body hair is their own business and I think that us men need to completely stop talking about it, unless it’s a fetish of ours and something we’re very interested in, it’s not a cute conversation to have and it puts women in a difficult place where they feel like they’re being pressured, oh so subtly, to conform to some status quo that isn’t quite clear.

If it is something that’s a non-negotiable, the conversation should take place very seriously and informatively, “Hey, I just wanted to be upfront with you, I have a thing for women with a shaved body, if this isn’t you, that’s okay, I’ll continue my search for someone who’s more in line with what I’m looking for.”

Ultimately, I think it’s time that we erase the stigma of the hair of a woman, at least when it comes to armpit and pubic hair, and just accept it for what it is. Sure, it’ll be a shock at first, to see women brandishing their armpit hair without a care, when literally every single image we’ve seen our entire lives featured shaved armpits — but really, it’s not the women who created this monster, they shouldn’t be forced to shave this part of their body or face what is basically sexual and social ostracism because some media companies decided to get together and promote an image of beauty that was quite literally a pain. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with either, but I’m saying that it’s such a mundane thing that it baffles me how this can be an issue for some people, especially men. Whether to shave or not should be a personal choice and it should bear no weight on our moral fiber or character.

I think most guys under 35 will agree with me here, we generally don’t care as long as whatever you’ve got going on is hygienic and not completely unruly, like dreadlocks complete with several different species of fungi, it doesn’t really matter. A suggestion for women, if guys ask you about this, ask them why they asked…if they even hint that it’s a prerequisite for sexuality, I’m here to firmly tell you that plenty of us men are perfectly capable of doing all sorts of sex with even the most unruly pubic situations, and to me, this is a huge red flag when a man gets hung up over pubic hair. If you’re dating someone like this, you might have to fight a terminal illness together, so think about that when you look at a man in front of you who can’t even handle a little bit of body hair.

While, as I said, I think this is the direction the trend is going in already, can we keep it this way? Can we just give women their body hair back and consider it a part of their own choices of what they do with their own bodies and how they look? There are many more important issues going on in the world than whether or not someone shaves. I can assure all the women out there 100% that, to mature men, a beautiful woman is going to be beautiful whether she shaves or not. Here’s more on a similar subject: