I need help understanding a recently observed trend. As a physician, I see lots of naked bodies. For several years I’ve noticed that, generally speaking, many straight patients (men and women) in their 20s have trimmed and/or coiffed pubic hair. A lot of the men tell me that their girlfriends prefer it that way; some have said, “It makes me feel cooler and cleaner.” Occasionally I have to treat folliculitis (an infection/inflammation at the base of the hair follicles) caused by overaggressive shaving. Recently I have noticed many of my 14-to-16-year-old male patients have completely trimmed off their pubic hair. What gives? When I was that age, I anxiously awaited a full set.
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At the same time deforestation was becoming the beauty ideal for women, male homosexuals were taking over American cultural life. That our culture’s now thoroughly dominated by gay men is not some paranoid Christian conservative’s fantasy, PUBIC, but a fact of life. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy confirmed something everyone already knew: outside of hip-hop culture, stylish gay men–not all gay men, mind you, just the stylish ones–are the only tastemakers. And gay men weren’t content just setting tastes in jackets and hair products and cowhide accent chairs. Hardly. We were, however subtly, setting sexual tastes as well. Out went the virile man (so long, Burt Reynolds!) and in came the vulnerable boy (hello, Ashton Kutcher!). Soon the kind of guy most gay men want to fuck became the kind of guy most straight women want to fuck, the male beauty ideal every bit as hairless as its female counterpart.
The funny thing about declaring smooth, hairless skin sexy, PUBIC, is that once you start stigmatizing some body hair–back hair, chest hair, ass hair–it’s only a matter of time before all body hair is deemed unattractive. Body hair on women had long been seen as unattractive and unfeminine; once women were required to wear outfits that basically exposed everything but their vulvas, off came the pubes. Men began shaving off their chest hair in response to a gay-dictated male beauty ideal and gradually bought into the idea that body hair–including pubic hair–was just as unattractive on males as it was on females. And you’re seeing the results of this cultural shift every time one of your 16-year-old male patients drops his drawers.
Now some women, without a doubt, will prefer you trimmed or hairless; some, however, will prefer that you arrive with all the hair God saw fit to grow down there. If you’re indifferent on the pubic hair issue, I would urge you to make the young woman in your life an offer: tell her it’s entirely up to her. If she likes it trimmed she can trim it. If she would prefer you hairless she can shave your pubes off herself.
And, like, excuse me, but your first impulse after carving off a chunk of your clit was to send me a letter? If my clit was lighter by a chunk and bleeding like crazy, CLIT, my first impulse wouldn’t be to dash to the computer to send an e-mail to some fag who writes a sex advice column. I would go see my fucking gynecologist! You may be at risk of infection; you may lose some sensation if scar tissue builds up; it may affect your sex life–but only a doctor can examine what’s left of your clit, look for any signs of deadly clit-eating bacteria, and offer you the medical and/or surgical interventions you may require.
Well, uh, yes: women sometimes act like assholes when they get dumped, and some engage in bad, bad, bad behavior. So perhaps my generalization was a bit of a generalization, WGPTM. But unlike men, women–however pesky they are–rarely kill their partners. Almost half of all women who are murdered are killed by their husbands or boyfriends; women are ten times likelier to be abused by a man than a man is to be abused by a woman (insert your own David Gest joke here); and more women land in emergency rooms due to domestic violence than from any other cause.
