Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

In the last few weeks, Miss Poubelle has been hearing about a growing trend among women -- especially younger women -- of removing all or most of their pubic hair. Because Miss Poubelle is not in daily contact with distaff bush, she consulted some straight male friends and learned that shaving all or most of the pubic hair is now de rigueur in hetero porn, with natural pubes confined to a few specialty publications (comparable to mags that specialize in pregnant women or dwarves).

There is supporting evidence documenting this trend when we look at the magazine Playboy, which showed no pubic hair in its photos until 1969. Then for over 30 years, it would not publish photos of "shaved beaver," until 2001 when hairless shots began to appear. Playboy for many years tried to position itself on the tasteful, soft-core end of the porn spectrum, and hairless pussies were judged to be the domain of hard-core porn until the start of this decade. Now they are quickly becoming standard, even in Playboy.

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o in the world of porn, reduction or elimination of pubic hair is standard, and women with natural pubes are a rare specialty. Blanche has been hearing anecdotes that suggest this porn standard is now moving into the rest of American society.

Exhibit 1: A 14-year-old girl who is in a panic about pubic hair. According to the girl's cousin, all the teenagers in her school say that no boy will finger a girl with pubic hair. So the girl has shaved all her pubic hair and is worried that the doctor would notice on an upcoming visit and tell her mother.

Exhibit 2: A 30-year old woman starts to hear from her boyfriend that he wants her to shave her pubes, and that he will only be turned on if she is hairless down below. The dispute flares into a full-blown breakup after the boyfriend leaves a can of shaving cream and a woman's razor prominently displayed in her bathroom.

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an influential book called The Tipping Point. In this book, he talked about the way in which certain social changes can rapidly spread through a community once they reach a certain critical threshold. The original use of the term tipping point comes from the sociologist Morton Grodzins, who studied residential segregation and found that when the percentage of minority residents in a given area reaches a certain level, the neighborhood rapidly becomes mostly minority as "white flight" to the suburbs occurs.

Miss Poubelle wonders whether American society is approaching a similar tipping point for the shaving of female pubes. The trend begins in porn, but now appears to be rapidly spreading among younger women. Will there come a point at which nearly all women remove or modify their pubic hair? Will women who refuse be thought of as dirty or unfeminine?

Shaving the legs and armpits is already standard for American women, but this has not always been the case. Leg-shaving only began in the early 20th century before reaching a tipping point and spreading rapidly through society. Perhaps we are seeing the early stages of a similar trend for pube-shaving.

His birthday suit's hirsute

What about men? In the porn world, shaved pubes are also quite common on men, but Miss Poubelle is not seeing much evidence that this is spreading to society in general. Conducting a brief (and pleasant!) survey at her local gym, Blanche checked out one hundred naked guys and encountered only one fellow with notably shaved pubes.

So at this point, men seem to be safe from the pube-less wave spreading through female society. Shaving the legs or armpits has never caught on among men, thank goodness, so it may well be that we will be allowed to retain our pubic hair as well.

Is pube-shaving a good thing or not? Blanche in general advocates the widest degree of personal freedom about the body. If you want to get a tattoo, or shave your pubes, or remove your foreskin, more power to you. But at the same time, she understands that our culture has powerful ways of dealing with those who don't conform to its standards of beauty. Women with unshaven legs or armpits are now the subject of ridicule and the objects of disgust, and it is easy to see how unshaved pubes could someday fall into the same category. So freedom of choice in such areas may be severely constrained by the consequences of failing to conform.

Considered in that respect, we may be evolving in a way that makes it more difficult and expensive for an American woman to be considered socially acceptable. That seems to Blanche like a step backwards in making our society a more welcoming and open place.