FYI: Pubic Hair Is a 'Fossil of Female Anatomy'

There are two advice columnists in San Francisco who want you to shave off your pubes to please your man. S.F., you should be ashamed of yourself. Please travel back in time to the corner of old hippie and dirty hippie and burn some bras until you remember your damn roots.

It all begins with a man who is perplexed by his au naturel girlfriend. He really likes her a lot, but he’s a little terrified of giving oral with all that gross hair down there. What a conundrum!

He writes:

I started dating a woman recently and was surprised to find, when we first had sex, that she didn’t have a Brazilian or something close to it. Don’t get me wrong. She was lovely, sexy, well-groomed and healthy. She was just … much more natural … than any woman I’ve seen since high school, which was 15 years ago. At first I couldn’t stop looking at it, like it was some kind of fossil of female anatomy. I have to say I’ve quickly gotten used to it, except when I’m giving her oral sex. It’s distracting me to the point of throwing me off my game down there. But I’m loathe to ask my new girlfriend to start waxing. I even kind of admire her for not going along with the rest of the lemmings and taking pride in her own body, you know? But what do I do about the oral?

Fossils of female anatomy!? Or, uh, a visual cue of sexual maturity.

And it’s impressive how he single-handedly insults every woman in the course of a few lines. If you do wax, you’re a lemming. But he still wants to strip the independence from his girlfriend’s admirable beaver. You can’t have it both ways, guy.

Mr. Confused in Colma bundled up this important question and sent it off to the advice givers at San Francisco’s 7×7 magazine. From there, Robin Rinaldi (she said) and Chris Bull of GayCities (he said) answer in a round of “He Said, She Said.”

Their advice?

He said:

Sometimes it can be hard to keep up with the grooming trends. Among gay men, sometimes hairy and unshaven is in, sometimes smooth is out. And then the whole thing reverses for no particular reason. The newest rage is tats (often below the belt), Prince Alberts, and the scruff look. There’s even a new dating app known as “Scruff.” It can all be a little confusing. Sounds like you are being a trooper in respecting her body preferences, but have hit a kind of pubic wall, shall we say. Maybe there’s a compromise between au naturale and Brazil. Certainly, your accepting and open-minded approach has earned you at least the right to broach the subject.

Yes, he’s such a “trooper” for “respecting her body preferences.” A real war hero!

She said:

I say when a person offers to put their face in your genitals for the sole purpose of bringing you to orgasm, that person gets to make a small request regarding the topography of the area. If you’d like her to trim up before you venture south, say something like, “I love going down on you and I love how you look, but it would be even easier for me, and might feel better for you, if you trimmed a little bit around … you know … here. Only if you feel comfortable with it, though.” Suggest it with an air of experimentation, and of course, offer to do the same kind of cleanup on your own nether parts in return.

Yes, because this sort of request will totally make it okay for the woman to be like, “No sorry, I’m not comfortable shaving even though you don’t like it.” That’s just not a great position to put a person in.

The fact is, this is a personal decision for a woman. If she wants your input, she’ll ask. If going down on someone who looks like an adult woman is a deal breaker for you, then it’s a deal breaker. Women can wear their hair like they just don’t care, and that includes everything up to stringing it with beads and braiding it. If this man’s girlfriend is sporting the natural look, it’s probably by choice. In a society that tells us that bald like a baby is the sexxxiest, it’s not something that a lot of ladies take lightly.

This reminds me of a question to one of the parenting newsletters I subscribe to (what?), where a woman said her husband wanted her to shave her pubic hair, and though she didn’t want to, she was going to do it for him. Her other question was, “How do you get rid of pubic hair?”

OK, first, what? If you don’t want to do it, then don’t do it. And secondly, how do you think you get rid of pubic hair? With your teeth? Everyone knows you go to the barber shop and sit in the chair upside down. Jesus christ*.

Of course, any woman can and should do whatever they want with their pubic hair, but it’s a very personal decision. If their partner wants to state a preference, they can do so, but they should be prepared for whatever repercussions arise. It’s a sensitive topic, and one that’s a conscious choice for many women, so be warned. Perhaps a better suggestion would be to encourage the dude to cultivate a love for the natural look. If you’re super into the person, it won’t matter if their pubic hair was macraméd into a potholder, you’ll still get down on it.

*Actually, with the pubic hair grooming injuries on the rise, maybe it’s a valid question.

[7×7]

Image via BMJ and Krzysztof Wiktor / Shutterstock.