You Can’t Blame Porn for Smooth Pube Preferences

Manscaping and Brazilians Pre-Date the Alphabet.

I am a feminist. More to the point, I am a humanist. I like sex. I like to engage in it. I like still images of saucy men and women when they are flirty and when they get down and dirty. I like to watch soft and hardcore videos of people who want to be watched being sexy and doing sexy things. During my 30 years of professional porn commentary, I have seen things that have troubled me and things that have given me hope for the future.

What has impressed me the most is how political the human body in its natural state is, especially that of women. It’s not only those with “traditional” values but also those who claim “progressive” principles who have opinions about the subject, especially as it relates to other people’s bodies, legs, and pubic hair.

When I was double majoring in subjects that don’t usually lead to jobs reviewing or writing about porn or pubic hair, I discovered an on-campus woman’s group was giving a presentation on the evils of pornography. I was not a porn consumer, although my live-in boyfriend at the time was in the closet about his interests. I was fascinated by sexuality, history, anthropology, sociology, and religion, though. The presentation seemed like a great way to combine all these things. I might even make a friend or have an intelligent conversation.

It was a fascinating presentation, and I can only wonder how I would respond if confronted by it today. I was particularly curious about the “dead woman” pose they were outraged to see used in some ads, breast enhancements, and pubic hair trends. Although I’d seen silent stag flicks on reels and still photos of nudes over the decades, my experience with commercial porn was limited. I was also at an age when I was struggling to come to grips with my body, my desires, and how others perceived them. So, I bought my boyfriend a year’s subscription to Playboy Magazine to see if these earnest anti-porn women were correct that I should be concerned.

At this point, I didn’t know anything about the infamous “Pubic Wars” that had taken place between Playboy and Penthouse during the 1960s and 1970s. In those days, the deciding line in the US between porn and art was whether you could see pubic hair or genitalia. Hoping to capture subscribers without being arrested, each publication pushed the limits of the law and public tolerance as artfully as possible.

Two related accusations that I have heard from my otherwise mostly sane feminist sisters is that porn prefers female performers to remove their pubic hair to make them look pre-adolescent. Further, those on both the Right and the Left fret that porn has an unfair influence over what women decide to do with their pubic hair. This ignores the full bushes of the 1980s, including those of famous video vixens Christy Canyon and Kelly Nichols. It also suggests a discomfort with the sight of and variation in vulva, labia, clitoris, and anus.

My favorite response to the “porn shames women into shaving their coochies” claim is that artifacts suggest that shaving and plucking body hair began as early as 100,000 years ago, long before Houston’s labia removal became famous. After starting with sharpened stones and shells, 30,000 years ago humans realized the many uses of flint, including its ability to cut. In addition to employing this wonderful new beauty and war aid, our ancestors began to create cave art that depicted hairless adults so that their descendants would know what the people who created cave art looked like.

Then the Egyptians became obsessed with hygiene. Both men and women went as hairless as they could afford, with priests rumored to see the barber daily and even pluck their eyebrows and lashes. The fortunate were shaved with early bronze razors or waxed with honey, oil, and sugar. The less fortunate applied depilatory creams and lotions containing ingredients like quicklime and arsenic. A good barber must have been able to name the price for their services. The downside of the job was the right of nobles to have their barber join them in the afterlife.

At about this same time, the women of ancient India were removing their pubic hair, a custom continued into the 20^th century by the Hindu Nair caste, whose members also preferred a smooth vulva. Western European peoples who came under the spreading influence of Christianity initially became more modest about their lower bodies but were able to maintain a certain amount of female cleavage, arm, and shoulder exposure. While hair on the upper body was tolerated, the fire down below needed to be covered.

Then Protestantism took care of everything by making public exposure of pubic hair immodest, if not obscene, and a matter for humiliation. During the 19^th century, Charles Darwin shook up the status quo when he observed that pubic hair was uncommon in many indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Interestingly, white European women were largely left to their own devices in the pubic hair department.

This did not stop a rumor from spreading about Victorian-era art critic and writer John Ruskin. After six years of marriage, his wife Effie Gray was granted a rare gift by the church and government: an annulment. She reported that her husband refused to be sexual with her, saying he did not want children and was “disgusted with my person the first evening.” Some biographers insist that Ruskin knew women had pubic hair unlike Greek statues and was not surprised or offended by the sight of his nude bride, but the topic is not considered settled.

Working girls have long known the benefit of shaving their money-makers for general health purposes and specifically to do battle with pubic lice. During the 1450s, the occasional merkin was worn over the routinely bare mons pubis. A merkin is a wig made of soft fabrics, hair, or pelts. Invented in China, they were originally heart-shaped and made of animal hair. Less than 300 years after the merkin hit the West, pubic hair became a keepsake and a fetish for upper-class British lovers to exchange.

My point, which I believe I have made clear by now, is that women and even men have been playing with their body hair since the literal Dawn of Time. The first Gillette safety razor for women was released in 1901 and changed the world of hygiene by making the process of intimate hair removal less bloody.

The Brazilian (ironically “discovered” in NYC by a sixtysomething immigrant from Brazil) became a porn thing in 1987 and, due to the increasing availability of erotic materials, did, along with an eventual episode of Sex and the City, influence the popularity of pubic waxing and shaving. In neither case did these media offerings create a desire that had not previously existed.

This does not mean that late 20^th and early 21^st century zealots don’t continue the ancient traditions of assigning value to people based on physical appearance and then trying to pressure them into complying with a rigid set of approved ways to express independence or experience pleasure. The bikini’s arrival in 1946 introduced something new to worry about, bikini lines. Marilyn Monroe was concerned enough to bleach her pubes blonde but unwilling to subject them to the blade. During her famous NYC subway grate updraft photos, she doubled up on the underwear to make sure none of it could be seen and her modesty could be preserved.

Pubic hair continues to be a cultural battlefield, although on a lower level than it has been. In 2011, The Atlantic clutched its proverbial pearls and pleaded to know, “Has Pubic Hair Gone Extinct?” In 2015, Role Reboot bemoaned what it saw as an annual false insistence that pubic hair was “back.”

Yet, two years later, former performer Kasey Warner told Vice that instead of a landing strip, she’d had “a bush only on top of my pubis” while in the biz. Jasmine Summers reported that she grew her pubic hair back after a request from her manager because people wanted content with it present. Ana Molly said she had never lost a potential gig because she doesn’t shave. Even Jessica Drake has been asked to grow some hair for a few projects. There were also lines like Seattle Hairy Girls from Rodney Moore and Pubic Hair for Sale from White Ghetto.

Through the miracle of the internet, it is now easier than ever to find someone happy to be an exhibitionist for our voyeurism. If we don’t like pubic hair, we don’t have to look at pubic hair. If we love pubic hair, it's out there waiting for us. For all their faults, both the internet and porn provide us with copious opportunities to see what usually hidden body parts look like and check out the many-splendored ways that other adults like to tend their pubes.

Porn ain’t perfect. Without context, a lot of it makes no sense and some of it can even be distressing to watch. But, freaking out about whether someone chooses to have bare skin or hair “down there” seems like a waste of perfectly good fapping time and energy. If they are doing it willingly, who cares? If they aren’t our genitals, we can move along. And our friends the internet and porn will be waiting for us, regardless of whether we’re bare or a bear down below.