Earlier this month, the New York Times noted that "American women didn't shave their armpits en masse until the 1920s." These days, Nivea.com has a demonstration of male body shaving.

In a piece from Friday's Wall Street Journal, Cameron Stracher writes: "The same people pushing hairlessness are the ones selling the products. In the best tradition of hucksterism, we must have what we don't need." But Stracher noticed something else important:

Recently I went to see the play Hair, the '60s musical about hair as a metaphor for rebellion, pride, power, sexuality and love. As the talented cast sang about the joys of their God-given hairiness, I realized that at least half the men in the cast had shaved their underarms. In a generation, hair had gone from plumage to be worn "long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty… bangled, tangled, spangled and spaghettied," to being plucked, shorn, waxed, buzzed, razored, tasered, lasered and depilated.

Over the weekend, I went to my friend's parents' 40th anniversary party, which means they got married the summer of '69. The party was hippie-themed, with tie-dye and what not, and someone joked that they'd Googled "Woodstock" to get a costume idea and "everyone was hairy and naked." How did this happen? How did Americans go from being proud of their body hair to being stalked on the streets by gorillas and encouraged to strip it all off? Being shamed into hairlessness can't be progress.

Or course, all things are cyclical — the Ancient Greeks used depilatories. Hairy pits and bush will probably come back around to being "in style" again in another 40 years. Meanwhile, we'll continue to be stripped not only of our hair and pride, but our hard-earned cash: According to WSJ, the shaving and hair removal business made about $1.8 billion in the U.S. last year. Almost makes you want to be a hippie.

Gorillas And Women Tag-Teaming On Spa's Hair-Removal Campaign [BrandFreak]
Receding Hairlines [WSJ]
Do Women Like Men Quite That Cleanshaven? [NY Times]

If you look at Kendra's many Playboy pictorials (just Google it), you can see that she does not have pubic hair. Maybe she shaves though. Does that make her a "technical waxing virgin?"

Deadpans Wetherell of her first bikini wax, "I went for my birthday. The most horrible birthday present I've ever given myself." And, the more she thought about waxing, and the increasingly normative Brazilian (it was back in 2003 that Naomi Wolf, noting the pubic hair generational divide, wrote, "In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled"), the more Wetherell and Axelson wondered about the purpose of hair removal. What is it that makes so many women put up with the pain and expense of intimate waxing? Are we keeping up with the mostly hairless icons of female beauty? Competing with mainstream pornography? Worried about men's attitudes to an untamed bush?

So the directors got women — and men — on the record about sex, attraction, pain, and pleasure where pubic hair maintenance is concerned. Why We Wax, which debuted recently at the TriBeCa Film Center in New York, also covers the history of waxing and pubic grooming (ancient Egyptians apparently endorsed sugaring), the modern history of the so-called Brazilian (actually invented in the U.S., according to Jonice Padilha, one of the women interviewed, who is co-credited with developing the style). But the film doesn't just dwell on the psychosocial aspects of hair removal in the abstract: what's brilliant is that the filmmakers privilege the views of women who engage with the subject as active participants, sharing divergent opinions that together cover all the dimensions of the actual experience of getting waxed. The leg lifts, the "fetal position" pose, the cheek-spreading, the mirror self-check, the strange pleasure of the ass wax, the labia pain that can persist for days ("like, really bad sunburn on your vagina"), the girlfriend comparisons: it's all there.

Esthetician Mara Sanchez explains the dynamics of the waxer-waxee relationship — that awkward repartee, or that more-awkward silence — as an intense game with the goal of distracting the client. "You can't give a client enough time to think about it. We don't really need them to do that, that's just engaging them so that they don't rip your hair out when you rip their hair out. Get it?" It's also important to be speedy. "You're like, SchchchhrrripSripSssschriiipRip. Next leg, please."

It's awesome to hear so many women talking about how they feel about their vaginas as they wax, trim, and regrow. One woman compares her vagina, post-wax, to Jabba the Hut. Another revels in feeling "every hill and bump." Someone says the phenomenon of women getting "a shiny 'giny" to please their husbands is creepy. Another says her husband doesn't care. An impressed dude says, of his wife, "She went from a jungle to a cathedral." One subject offers this advice: "If you don't want to wax, don't wax. Don't! Let it flow. Get designs on it. Dread that shit."

Why We Wax [Film Website]
Why We Wax [Current TV]
The Porn Myth [NYMag]

Earlier: Benny The Tech Geek Gets A Bikini Wax
Pimp My Vadge

This month, Gillette has posted a series of instructional shaving videos on YouTube, one of which being "How To Shave Your Groin," which walks men through the process of "trimming the bush to make the tree look taller."

Philips Norelco (the company responsible for the shaved kiwi ad appearing in public men's rooms) even has an entire site dedicated to male pubic hair shaving, aptly titled Malepubichairshaving.net, that addresses the issue:

Did you know that women like men who shave down there? Having silky smooth balls is a lot nicer than finding a huge bush or choking on your pubes! Today's trend is to have it clean or at least trimmed. This helps both aesthetically and hygienic wise as well.

Content includes posts like "3 Pubic Shaving Methods Men Should AVOID, and "How to Shave Your Balls." Of course there are also links to purchase various Philips Norelco products to get the task done, such as Balla Powder, which sounds like the title of a Chamillionaire song, but is actually a talc for balls.

Braun also has a web-based campaign which references the pubic area as part of male grooming standards with its "Nationality Guide," a list of stereotypical (gay porn-ish?) guys from different countries of origin, that measures their body hair length, including "average hair down there."

Gillette Video Teaches Art Of Genital Shaving [AdFreak]
Male Pubic Hair Shaving [Official Site]
Braun's Nationality Guide [Braun]

Earlier: Dudes: Cut The Crap, Cut Your Ball Hair

Unfortunately, there are no pube-based statistics to back up this shocking discovery, so I'm calling bullshit on the entire thing and saying that not that many women were ripping off all their pubes in the first place.

Writer Lisa Germinsky uses totally anecdotal evidence from her group of friends to prove that women are letting their pubes run wild like the grasses of the Serengeti plain:

As my friend Jen put it, "My landing strip has turned into more of a Dorito." It should probably come as no surprise that the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression would inspire a little fuzz. Conspicuous spending is out, after all. And maintaining a stripper-worthy wax job ain't cheap. "It's back to shaving in the shower for me," says Catlin, a brand manager for a Los Angeles fashion label. "It's a fortune to keep a trim bush," bemoans Meredith, a healthcare marketing executive.

I'll take her anecdotal evidence and raise her my own anecdotal evidence! Maybe the porn world saw the rise of the retrobush, and desperate trend story writers used that, and one Sex and the City episode, as evidence that more and more women were going bare down there. But of the women I know, a couple have tried Brazilian waxes one time, but the vast majority have close to their original plumage.

Germinsky quotes Bill Maher, who says, "Bring back a little pubic hair. Not a lot. I'm not talking about reviving that 1973 look that says I'm liberated ... and I'm smuggling a hedgehog. I just want a friendly, fuzzy calling card that tells me I'm not going to get arrested." But I'm pretty sure the majority of dudes of certain generations always felt this way, and that the editorial whining about men wanting their girlfriends to look like 12-year-olds down below was an exaggeration. Much like the Brazilian wax itself, I find this trend story to be semi-painful and totally unsatisfying.

Bush Is Back! [Salon]

Earlier: To Strip Or Not To Strip?

"I would lick and suck on your balls if you trimmed them."

That's what I told my boyfriend. He was definitely into the idea of getting his balls licked, but I could tell that he was less enthused about taking something sharp to the region of his body he holds most near and dear. But luckily for him, I'd already invested in mini Norelco electric clippers set for my own pubes—a painless, controlled system of hair removal—that I offered for his use. Besides, I didn't want him to get completely bald down there, because it would look weird and gay porno-y.

But he didn't know how to use the clippers, or at least pretended not to know how so that I would do it for him. Which I gladly did. And which he treated as foreplay. I have to say that giving him head is a lot more enjoyable now that I don't get finger-length hairs caught in the back of my throat. And I think that now he's getting his balls licked on a more frequent basis, he would agree with our results. See, social change can be fun for everyone!

"Is Believing In Creationism Grounds For A Breakup?" from Pot Psychology on Vimeo.

A quick poll of the other Jezebels shows that most of us wax to some degree, whether it's just off the top and sides or we get it all off. One Jezzie goes "retrobush" in the winter, which is a term I'm going to have to fit into sentences all the time now.

After I got my most recent wax, I was all excited like I bought a new dress or something and I came home and ripped my pants off to show my dude. He was like, "Oh...neat," because he totally doesn't care either way. The one time I got a Brazilian he was all "You look like porn. In a bad way." Of all the dudes I've dated, only one ever commented on my hair situation, and that was to make a snide-ass comment about the hair on the backs of my thighs (which btw is so hard to reach). Do your significant others have a say in your pube maintenance? I feel like if they're getting what's underneath the pubes, they really don't have a vote about the upkeep, but maybe you can change my mind.

Related: Is Pubic Hair Making A Comeback?
Former Sassy Scribe Margie Ingall Loves Dudes With "A Butt Rug"

Earlier: How To Get Waxed