5 Reasons You Should Stop Shaving Your Pubic Hair

Obviously, apart from the fact that you don’t want to, which is reason enough. For those of you who may be sitting on the fence about the issue, here are five reasons why you will be glad to be sporting a full, glorious bush.

1. Shaving rash

Shaving rash is bad enough anywhere, but to have it in your crotch, moving when you move, constantly announcing itself, is far more uncomfortable than being caught with a tuft of hair where it ought to be.

During the direct post-shave period, your genitals might look like an angry sea creature, and by the time the redness starts to subside, prickles have emerged, and your genitals might now look like an echidna. If you can’t see the echidna, you can probably feel it – your prickles might be poking through your underwear, or into your lover’s sensitive areas.

Inevitably, as a shaver, you spend more time with these prickles than you do with smooth skin on your intimate parts. Waxers may escape the rash (maybe?), but must endure the echidna phase longer than their shaving counterparts. With hair making itself known so much more often than not, why not embrace it?

2. Passing judgment onto your unassuming lovers

Sometimes, you might find yourself in bed with someone you don’t know very well. That’s okay, that is what the internet and alcohol are for. It can happen that have not made a great choice in this person who you are about to get down with, and your pubic hair will help you notice!

The telltale flinch of a hand entering underpants that contain a vibrant bunch of hair may demonstrate that your lover is not as open-minded as their Tinder profile says they are. The enquiry “Why haven’t you shaved?” may lead you to believe that your lover attaches great importance to society’s norms. If you’re offered a casual “nice bush,” with the correct intonation, or an enthusiastic parting of the pubes to which your new lover doesn’t give a second thought when it comes to performing oral, you might assume that this new lover is pretty cool.

In any case, a response to pubic hair can often be a helpful indicator as to whether or not you ought to bother with a phone number exchange after the fact.

3. Because fuck capitalism

Shaving is a fashion trend. It’s longer standing than many fashion trends, and has a history – women were encouraged to start thinking of their hair as “objectionable” in the early 1900s. Since then, increasingly revealing clothing has gently requested more and more hair removal.

Obviously, wanting to get rid of hair is something people will spend more money on than simply letting it be – hating various parts of our bodies is an excellent way for companies to profit from us. The specific trend of shaving one’s pubic hair is so recent that many of our parents’ generation are completely perplexed by that which has become a complete norm for us (evidence of this: unless a porno’s title explicitly mentions “bush” or a related term, its star will probably not have one). That it is merely a trend or a marketing ploy is enforced by people’s most cited reasons for preferring hairlessness: hair being unclean, or it being a simple matter of preference. The cleanliness argument is absurd because it implies something natural about human sexual maturity is dirty, and the preference results from the fashion and porno industries’ presentation of baldness as the norm, smoothness as beauty.

4. Because girl power

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing points out the traditional symbolism of a woman’s pubic hair in relation to the female nude tradition in European painting. “Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion” (page 29). Not painting a woman’s pubic hair, he argues, was a way for the woman in the picture to be a non-threatening piece of eye candy for men to look at – not depicting her hair lessens her sexuality, and turns her into a vehicle for the sexuality of the male spectator (Berger, Chapter 3).

It is a logical kind of symbolism, that body hair, which arrives with puberty, sexual maturity, should symbolise that in art, and in life. Our parents’ generation’s rebuttal to Gen Y’s pube-hating tendency is that a shaven vagina resembles that of a little girl, and not of a mature adult woman. Indeed it is often noted that shaving makes a woman look like a little girl, and those who prefer this look vehemently deny that being the reason for their preference. What else could it be? Perhaps encouraging women to remove their hair diminishes, at least symbolically, their sexuality, and in alienating women from their sexuality in this way, the patriarchy finds a way to subconsciously assert itself in this generation of empowered women.

5. More time for grooming

Now that you don’t want to shave your pubes any more, you can devote the hours once spent putting your legs and asscheeks into compromising positions to those other self-grooming tasks you may have been neglecting, like painting your fingernails, addressing your thick snail trail, or that boil on your upper thigh that’s been brewing for three weeks.