To Bush Or Not To Bush.

The History of Women’s Pubes.

Photo by engin akyurt

I found my first pubic hair during a sleepover at Kyla Warren’s house. It was her thirteenth birthday, and while everyone else watched The Exorcist in the living room, my best friend Aimee and I—terrified—hid in the bathroom. During our sequestering, conversation turned to puberty and that naturally led to us standing back to back and checking ourselves for pubes. “Oh my god,” I said. “I have one hair! How long has this been here?” I’d grown my first real live pubic hair—the beginning of a bush. And though I didn’t know it at the time, that moment was the genesis of a cycle of removal and regrowth that would be more merciless than Linda Blair’s projectile vomiting.

    I grew up in the late-eighties, back when Madonna spread for Playboy and you couldn’t even see a slit through all that fur. When I was a kid, women’s locker rooms were full of thick, musky, lush bush. My mother would lead me by my hand through the change rooms; I was eye level with muff after gloriously full muff. But the reality was, boobs were the thing I avoided looking at while being led through that wiry jungle, because boobs are naked and looking at you. A bush is modest; it’s basically 3D underpants. Nowadays, locker rooms offer up a smorgasboard of adult vagina, from “bare like a baby” to “Howie Mandel’s soul patch” to “Oh my god, you can have that much hair?” Kids must be confused. 

For me, bush alteration began with simply trimming my bathing suit line. As I became sexually active, I moved towards bushlessness in tiny increments. At first, it was cutting the hairs shorter but still keeping the full bush, then it moved on to removing all of the hair in what I call my ‘undercarriage’ (because I’m kind of modest.) I eventually adopted the Howie Mandel soul patch, but these days my pussy is all over the place, that is, in manner of uniform hairstyle. I don’t keep myself permanently waxed because I’m lazy and it isn’t a lifestyle necessity. I mean, I’m almost always—bikini ready— because I live in California. That’s just state law and I’m a law abiding citizen. But I’ve tried everything, at various times, to keep up with the glamorous life of well oiled pornographic vaginas. I’ve endured many Brazilian waxes, including one brutal mishap where she waxed same area twice, fully removing a layer of actual labia.

And as far as politicizing bush goes, I don’t politicize bush—or the lack thereof—as a feminist statement. The closest I’ve come to making a statement with my pubes, albeit done subconsciously, was letting it really fucking grow out – Jerry Garcia, fifty hours into Woodstock style – looking back, it was a subconscious move because I wasn’t interested in being perceived sexually at that point in time.

A lot of people think that the hairless look was a modern invention. But they’re wrong. Among the Egyptians, the Romans, and even the otherwise hirsute Vikings, smoothly shorn women were considered fancy as fuck. Cleopatra? Waxed. It took good old Western religious zealotry to make bare labia feel immodest, and by Victorian times, the bush was in full bloom. It was like sex didn’t even exist. In fact, pubes were so au courant then that the merkin became super trendy. That’s right, people— a toupee for your vagina, you know, just in case your hair wasn’t hairy enough. That was when we officially lost the clitoris for a period in time. The lost clit years. I’m sure Cleopatra had men and women bowing down to/on her clit and the Vikings were absolute clit worshippers. Then religion was all “"NO! STOP ENJOYING THE FUCKING AROUND JUST MARRY SHOOT SPERMS AND MAKE BABIES.” Boom. Covered vaginas.

Shaved vag was kind of a hush-hush thing women could start doing with the arrival of cheaper home razors in the fifties, and shaving grew in popularity but was still considered “fetishy.” It wasn’t until Carrie Bradshaw got a Brazilian wax on Sex and the City that hairless vaginas went from underground quirk to something you could acquire at every strip mall in North America. We couldn’t all afford Fendi baguettes, but we could scrape up the cash to get the hair ripped from our mounds and reintroduce our clitorises to the world, together.

    I once had a conversation with an Oscar-winning woman who told me that the bush is back. (I mention the Oscar only because it clearly that means her pop culture observations are more valid than ours. She did win an Oscar, after all.) “Young girls aren’t waxing,” she told me excitedly. “Kim Kardashian is an ‘old lady’ to teens and twenty year olds, and bald pussies and landing strips are considered very nineties. Kim had hers permanently removed and young girls consider that an ‘old lady thing.’” Wait, Kim Kardashian has old lady vagina forever because her hair is permanently removed? That’s a terrible spell to cast.

So, if waxing and Kardashians are synonymous, and Kardashians are considered “old,” is the official return of the bush imminent? We live in a society that rejects the concept of being even slightly senior.

    In the last few years, I’ve noticed women with fuller, more natural bushes appearing more often. Maybe what’s happening now is, since every single bush look has had its moment to shine and be accepted en masse with this generation of mounds, women can finally choose how to adorn their mound without having to categorize themselves or feel categorized by partners or by kids in the locker room. So now we all know how to use and have seen a clitoris, hiding it behind a little hair if you want to isn’t going to make us forget about it.

Whether we want full-blown seventies beaver between our tanned thighs, or a bald and vajazzled place to land, each woman should be doing what she wants to do with her pussy. And if enough women have had their pubic hair permanently removed to necessitate the return of the merkin, that’s cool too. I’ll be the first to send one to Kim Kardashian.