Not as Nature Intended – The Vogue of Smooth Pudenda

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It might have been lice and crabs that first prompted men and women to deforest their pubic hairs. It was much easier to remove the offending critters by “deforestation” than to try pick the nits off through a tangle of curly hair. If you look at paintings and sculptures of nude men and women over time, however, curiously, they often have no genital hair. Historically, I haven’t found an explanation for this. Nevertheless, our recorded history of pubic hair removal dates back to antiquity. Our forebears of civilizations in Egyptian, Greek and Roman societies employed pubic hair removal, but it was more likely on a courtesan level.

It was the wealthy, upperclasses and monarchal courts who would have the free time to cosset themselves in the vogue and erotica of smooth pudenda. It was the poor, incoherent, uneducated masses who missed out on the fun erotica of the times. Perhaps, they devised their own?

Women more so than men were likely to remove pubic hair, certainly to please their partners, both men and women. Men on the other hand were less likely to take it “all off.” It may not have been a manly thing to do. After all, if you’re washing up after all the slaughter on the battlefield, you don’t want your fellow soldiers to see your privates without manly hair. Dandies were not entirely acceptable in the mannish world.

It was the Greeks who took hair removal to a new level by plucking it out with tweezers. If that didn’t work, they would burn it off, very carefully of course. Some Greeks thought female pubic hair looked “uncivilized.” What’s a poor woman to do?

By the middle ages the bush hair trend swung the other way to leave it on. While it was out of favor, however, some women used a “merkin” which was basically a pubic hair wig! Keeping up appearances may be superficial, but one must be prepared to maintain standards.

From antiquity to recently, sharp flints, pumice stones, tweezers and burning were the main methods of hair removal of patches of hair on the pubes. It was in 1915 that Gillette, introduced the first shaver, ostensibly, as they advertised, for armpits, who started the “shaving” craze. Of course, what’s good for the armpits is good for pudenda, but it wasn’t likely that the Gillette brand would put that on a billboard.

Removing hair pubes can’t be discussed in the modern era without noting the aesthetics of pornography. Naked adults engaged for your viewing pleasure might elicit greater arousal by those who appreciate the shaved or clipped because the erotica of hairless genital exposure is impossible to ignore. The ubiquitous nature of skin flicks has “reset the norms” of human naked appearance. It is the lack of bodily hair that is premium in abundance of adult viewing materials on and off online.

In fact, as was recently reported, “For years, gynecologists have had a bird’s-eye view on a phenomenon that is now so popular as to be almost commonplace: female genitalia, bereft of hair.” It turns out that sixty-two percent of women in a national study said they, “opted for complete removal of their pubic hair at least once.”

But, wait a second. With that kind of popularity, don’t think for a minute that shaving or clipping is only a woman thing. It is not. There are a lot of men who also bare the skin below the belly button for the same reasons. They can all claim it’s for hygiene or comfort, but also to elicit “a bird’s-eye view” of that which commands so much of our attention.

Finally, we have the fresh view that, that unruly, tangle of a mess down there does not have to be as nature intended.