Men Prefer To Play In The Grass

As I perused the excellent and extensive archives of the Morning Quickie the other day, I read with interest a short piece about the possible recent resurgence of more “natural” pubic hairstyles among women, following the appearance of this look on models in a couple of fashion shoots.  The point was that there were some indications that women might finally be freed from the fashion industry’s tyrannical dictating of their pubic hair design, which, since the 1980s, had been tending more and more towards the narrower, shorter and balder.

Two thoughts came immediately to mind when I read this: firstly, do women really follow fashion to this extent?; and secondly, do men really like the kind of “scorched canary” look that the likes of the Sex and the City cast would have us believe is as essential to female grooming as brushing your teeth?

On the first question, while I can’t claim any vast experience of women and their pubes, I don’t think the ones I have encountered to this level of intimacy had ever really undertaken anything more than the subtlest tending of that area.  A friend of mine had a girlfriend who once tailored hers into a heart shape for St Valentine’s Day, but that was more of a one-off romantic gesture than a serious piece of loin topiary.  So what I want to know is: who are these women who hack back the undergrowth so regularly according to what they read in Grazia, because I’ve never met any.

On the second question, I can as usual only speak for myself, but I have to say that encountering something resembling one of James T Kirk’s tapered sideburn down there on a woman must be a little unnerving.  It would be a bit like meeting an old and beautiful friend, only to discover they’d had a Mohican.  Not necessarily a disaster, but you would wonder why they did it.  And as for those women who leave nothing at all, well I’m sure it would make an interesting novelty, and I’m prepared to allow that it could even be quite erotic, but after a while it must begin to feel a bit … well … paedophiliac.

Now, obviously, the pubic hair in question belongs to the woman in question, and it’s theirs to do with as they wish, but you have to wonder about the sort of people who would slavishly go to all that trouble (and I would imagine not a little discomfort) because they were told to do so by people who eat toilet paper to stay thin and would unblinkingly hand over thousands for a small handbag.  But, as I said, I don’t think that many women actually would follow fashions like this en masse, at least not on a regular basis, and I can’t imagine that many men ask their female partners to keep themselves either trimmed to the standard of an embassy hedge, or completely snooker-ball smooth.

So who actually does follow this fashion?  I like to think it’s really only the people who work on fashion magazines (probably both the men and the women), and the sort of nine-foot emaciated aliens who pose in their publications, who actually do it.  And of course SJP and her chums.  And I like to think of them all wincing as they pluck and scrape their groins in the hope of reaching their pubeless nirvana, and scratching themselves to a rash as the hair grows back in.  And all because they think they’re at the very forefront of this frankly peculiar trend that probably started sanely enough with what clothes looked nice, and has now ended up with them religiously shaving parts of their bodies they’d never show to anyone in a million years.  But maybe that’s just another reason why I’ll never be a fashion visionary.

Contact the author here: thewhy@morningquickie.com