exactly 😍 the self is within all of us and women sure do care about all those around them! how wonderfully enhanced that would be without the presence of male power
See? I KNEW IT! Blame your crotch hair issue on men! Substack just received a huge reduction in intelligent members bcause of a few women angry at the world including THEMSELVES who need to grow up.
may the kind men in the world show you the love you evidently have lacked. may the women who have known you in your life heal from your harshness and hatred.
I think the beard screenshot sums up the experience for many. Of course you can do what you want, but when your partner “gently” expresses a preference, it’s seen as only polite to oblige. That guy says it so casually, “I like having my own beard one way but my wife doesn’t so I change it.” This is a very common and pervasive influence lots of people experience, and then it raises other discomforts around the topic of pleasure (feeling desirable, feeling considerate of your partner, mutual enjoyment of the act) — I just thought that particular comment was ironic bc he was so close to getting the point.
I am absolutely not making the point that the male preference is wrong and the female is right. I’m saying that society (as a whole) hasn’t considered women’s preferences at large. Because our society is still of patriarchal structure.
Our society is no longer patriarchal. This article is the equivalent of asking a geriatric, bedridden old man if he can finally accept that you have pubic hair. He cries and accepts you because he has no power, so it's best to tell you what you want to hear. He doesn't actually care, he's more concerned about the abusive nurses that he can't mention to you, because that would bum you out and make you stop visiting.
Lastly, I only clicked on this article because I was aroused.
I thought the same! I like my husband’s beard bushy, but he likes to keep it trimmed so he can care better for his skin- it’s his face and he has to live with it. I don’t. My preference at the end of the day is just that- a preference. Dude was so close to the point and still missed by a mile.
Men will never understand the pressures women feel from the subliminal conditioning and the beauty standards they created and sold to us. God forbid we address it.
I know this sounds like a reach, but there’s a somewhat pedophilic undertone to shaving I never liked, like a woman’s ideal state is prebubescent and hairless. It aligns with the general idea that youth = beauty, which is in turn tangled into the idea that men prefer a younger woman because they’re naive and easy to control.
You see a version of this copied, pasted, and then warped slightly on gay male beauty standards as well. The feminine one is expected to be youthful and hairless.
To me, accepting bush seems like an acceptance of maturity and adulthood, and a willingness to break away from these societal narratives. Bush = you’re okay with being (and fucking) an adult.
I'm not sure that "they're naive and easy to control" is likely to be the true reason so many men have such a strong preference for younger women. I suspect it is likely to be much simpler - men find women at their hottest when they are at the very outset of their fertility window. From what I gather, even from one's late teens to one's late twenties, a woman's fertility drops off considerably, meaning that in our evolutionary past, men who made more of an effort to mate with women in their late teen / early twenties would be more likely to get her pregnant and thus end up with more surviving descendants, so there would have been an evolutionary selection pressure favoring men who had a strong preference for women in their first flush of young adulthood.
This seems intuitively correct. I wonder how much evidence this theory has in official science. I’ve heard mixed opinions on how accurate our perception of female fertility decline is, but I’ve never looked into it much.
I guess I wasn’t so much trying to claim naivety was the literal reason men did this and more expressing that, practically, thats what it looks and feels like from the woman’s perspective.
Regardless, it makes me think of our laws and social taboos around age of consent—i suspect a far larger portion of men are attracted to, say, 15-18 year olds then they let on. Kind of raises an interesting question of if men and women are doomed to have fundamentally opposed interests because of some assortment of inherent instincts.
This absurd idea that women have to remove their hair is the idea of a beauty industry starting at the beginning of 2000. I remember being in an art nude photo workshop in 1995. You can hear the outrage as we found out that one model had no pubic hair. "We are doing art, not porn". Which is not better, but if you look at those nude scenes in the 80th, 90th every woman had pubic hair. Search "sophie marceau nude scene".
To make it worse, the moment you start to discuss this issue in public, you accept that this is NOT the private decision of every woman, but social norms should define it.
Historically (100+ years past) when hygiene wasn’t so readily addressable, women removed their public hair and utilized an artificial patch I believe was termed merkin. Not sure on the term’s spelling, just aware of the practice.
It really was 2000. I don't think younger people understand that in the 80s literally EVERY MOM AND GRANDMA on the beach had pubes sticking out of her bathing suit, usually a lot more than the minor amount shown in the pics here. And every single woman in Playboy and all the porno mags had a full bush. It did not start disappearing til the late 90s, and even then it was considered a completely freakish, pervert weird thing to do to remove it, it basically meant you did porn and back then that was not something considered remotely okay.
I looked up each of Pamela Anderson's Playboys to remind myself when exactly pubes disappeared, and it was later than I thought. In her late 80s and early 90s shots, she has a full big brown bush. In the late 90s, she still had it but it was bleached blond. It didn't turn into a tiny strip til 2000, and disappeared entirely after that.
Ok, so unrelated…..but you deserve just every kudo for creating the “Pamela Anderson Scale” as a cultural reference point! This, living forever on the internet, is going to make some interesting research happen for some grad student, one day! 😂
I feel privileged to point it out…..but, WOW! Awesome! 👏
Lol I was actually looking it up and saving photos bc I was going to make a Substack post about it. I used her as the reference point bc she was the most popular Playboy model ever, with the most covers. But then I never wrote the post, and now I have a bunch of screenshots of her groin and varying states of her pubes in my phone, which I keep forgetting are there til I scroll through looking for a photo and think oh shit I need to either delete those or write that post.
Maybe I still will. Except I fear my Pam Anderson's Beaver post would probably be the highest viewed thing I ever wrote, even if it only had three sentences and just a bunch of photos, so I don't know if I want to know that. 😂
I love that this resulted in the photo collection…..and you’re totally right: there’s probably an age range of guys that could even have some digital scans in their phones, even today! 😂
As a male in this society, I’m fully behind your article idea…..and the clickbait title is absolutely going to make me want to see the three to seven actual sentences, and check their relevance with my own recollection……this is the sort of internet tomfoolery that gets big traffic!
But, also being in the same category, I’m forced to admit that the giant share of your traffic demographic is not going to do a lot for any charitable or other thoughts I have about the state of our world.
I mean, Pam is making it still with media…..driving traffic online for showing up makeup free now, as I recall. She could come down on either side…..but I might seek her commentary of the social relevance of her bush……and how her input over its marketing might have changed over the years?
You’re right though, if you just dropped the title with pics and scant words or effort, it would be like using AI…..and also reveal just how easily the human simian (male) is addled by just her name and double entendre. That’s sad…..and I appreciate your not revealing how easy it would be.
The part where seven year old girls are getting bikini waxing is soooooo freaking sad. 😢 women and girls have been trained that our bodies don’t belong to us.
My favorite pubic hair joke is from Amy Poehler on SNL Weekend Update where she and Tina Fey did a bit about pubic hair and Amy waxes eloquence about how she misses the 1970’s when a Lady’s Garden was the size of a NY slice of pizza! 🍕
I have always preffered the bush myself. Keep in mind I'm 50 almost 51. It's weird though throughout my teans it was actually frowned upon my guys for a woman to be shaven down there as it was considered that men who mliked that were probably pedophiles. Then one day in the mid nineties I woke up and all of the sudden the preference shifted to the other extreme. I'm like "What the fuck" "Who decided this?" "I'm not aware of any votes on this matter". Anyway fuck what society says. My wife has a bush , a few scars and strecth marks and she is just as sexy as she was 18 years ago when we met.
I think you're right all the way through, and especially as relates to the male gaze. I have no trouble kicking a critic out of bed and all the way out of my life if he or she won't listen to reason. I note the comment by Raissa, who says that hair is too erotic for her comfort in a bikini. Isn't it strange that it's supposed to be unerotic in the bedroom.
Yes I so agree! Women were born to be erotic sensual creatures but somewhere along the way, the sensuality has been censored for mainstream society / patriarchy. Men got scared?
Maybe, but exercising power and control has its own appeal, too. And few things are more dangerous to control than sensuality, eroticism and reproduction.
Absolutely agree. Female sensuality is still uncharted territory for many though, so the fear remains. I see it all the time being a sex writer, brands don’t want to associate etc. We’re not as progressive a world as we think!
that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”
same goes for the bush. nothing is just personal in society.
YES. I was wondering when / if someone was going to reference that iconic moment in The Devil Wears Prada. This is exactly that! Although sadly it seems that some readers will carry on wearing their blue polyester and thinking that the decision of purchase was entirely their own…
It's heartbreaking really, because every time I try to have a conversation, I'm met with the "it's not that deep" and "you're overthinking it" and "I just like doing it" amidst a personal style crisis. I just don't get why we're being so ignorant and anti-intellectual these days, as if it wasn't dangerous.
absolutely loved this... I've always felt so much concern about if I'm doing my body hair "right" such a strange feeling that one one ever talks about. thank you for this, just followed you on ig!
Tmi, but I genuinely believe I am one of the only girls I know who has pubes lol. I was friends with a girl for a short time who said that once guys saw she had pubes they were uninterested in performing any pleasurable sex acts on her because they were turned off. I’m not saying she is lying, but no guy that I have ever been intimate with (and the list is long) has ever said anything about mine.
Anyways I haven’t read this yet but I’m excited to as I plan to start getting waxed - not for any other reason than it’s just so god damn hot where I live!
Each of your writings seem well thought out and offer a variety of perspectives that give your readers a chance to think over the points you are making. The hair issue is complex like most topics. Being old enough to have lived through several incarnations of body hair popularity I'm okay with anyone choosing to display whenever amount of hair they like. Many men do also shave their pubic hair and it is excepted better in some groups than others. Currently with men, we have seen a big increase in large beards among young men, while my generation typically shaved facial hair. Styles definitely change over time and sometimes go back to something more common in another era. The nice thing about reading post like yours is that someone gets the opportunity to consider how others might feel by societial pressures to confirm to a certain style. Do what makes you feel comforatable and resist confirming to anyone else's expectations, I truly believe its possible to find the person who appreciates you just as you are. Thanks for sharing. Jeff
1. Recent polls have shown that men don’t really have a strong preference regarding genital grooming. When pressed, slight preference for hair rather than not
2. We went through this once already with bra burning in the 1960s. When women bravely pushed back against the patriarchy on the right to free the nipple, men shrugged and said do your thing girl. Eventually women put the bras back on because they thought they looked better with the support
3. There is no such thing as the patriarchy. We’ve been living in a gynocracy for the last 15 years.
what "recent polls" do you speak of? also, i'm not saying they have an actual preference. i'm saying that society's representation of the ideal does.
also, i'm not sure where you're getting your info from. we are certainly still living in patriarchy. all you have to do is look at the number of male vs. female politicians.
lord men love saying “should” to us
LITERALLY WHAT I WAS THINKING 🤣
And women don't say "should" to men? Are you kidding?
This is truly insanity
It IS indeed.
exactly 😍 the self is within all of us and women sure do care about all those around them! how wonderfully enhanced that would be without the presence of male power
See? I KNEW IT! Blame your crotch hair issue on men! Substack just received a huge reduction in intelligent members bcause of a few women angry at the world including THEMSELVES who need to grow up.
men don’t even care about those things bye
may the kind men in the world show you the love you evidently have lacked. may the women who have known you in your life heal from your harshness and hatred.
I think the beard screenshot sums up the experience for many. Of course you can do what you want, but when your partner “gently” expresses a preference, it’s seen as only polite to oblige. That guy says it so casually, “I like having my own beard one way but my wife doesn’t so I change it.” This is a very common and pervasive influence lots of people experience, and then it raises other discomforts around the topic of pleasure (feeling desirable, feeling considerate of your partner, mutual enjoyment of the act) — I just thought that particular comment was ironic bc he was so close to getting the point.
They're so close yet so far!!!! It's frustrating and makes me really want to explain... but I've had no luck thus far.
“The point” is different for men and women, because men and women are different
She will never understand
that is not the attitude! let's work together, shall we?
I am absolutely not making the point that the male preference is wrong and the female is right. I’m saying that society (as a whole) hasn’t considered women’s preferences at large. Because our society is still of patriarchal structure.
Our society is no longer patriarchal. This article is the equivalent of asking a geriatric, bedridden old man if he can finally accept that you have pubic hair. He cries and accepts you because he has no power, so it's best to tell you what you want to hear. He doesn't actually care, he's more concerned about the abusive nurses that he can't mention to you, because that would bum you out and make you stop visiting.
Lastly, I only clicked on this article because I was aroused.
You're hell bent on blaming men, patriarchy, but you're as innocent as a newborn baby. We see through you. You're totally, boringly transparent.
I thought the same! I like my husband’s beard bushy, but he likes to keep it trimmed so he can care better for his skin- it’s his face and he has to live with it. I don’t. My preference at the end of the day is just that- a preference. Dude was so close to the point and still missed by a mile.
Once again, a man-hating woman. Blame your crotch hair on MEN BECAUSE WE PLANTED IT.
Men will never understand the pressures women feel from the subliminal conditioning and the beauty standards they created and sold to us. God forbid we address it.
Great work, thank you.
How pitiful.
I know this sounds like a reach, but there’s a somewhat pedophilic undertone to shaving I never liked, like a woman’s ideal state is prebubescent and hairless. It aligns with the general idea that youth = beauty, which is in turn tangled into the idea that men prefer a younger woman because they’re naive and easy to control.
You see a version of this copied, pasted, and then warped slightly on gay male beauty standards as well. The feminine one is expected to be youthful and hairless.
To me, accepting bush seems like an acceptance of maturity and adulthood, and a willingness to break away from these societal narratives. Bush = you’re okay with being (and fucking) an adult.
I'm not sure that "they're naive and easy to control" is likely to be the true reason so many men have such a strong preference for younger women. I suspect it is likely to be much simpler - men find women at their hottest when they are at the very outset of their fertility window. From what I gather, even from one's late teens to one's late twenties, a woman's fertility drops off considerably, meaning that in our evolutionary past, men who made more of an effort to mate with women in their late teen / early twenties would be more likely to get her pregnant and thus end up with more surviving descendants, so there would have been an evolutionary selection pressure favoring men who had a strong preference for women in their first flush of young adulthood.
This seems intuitively correct. I wonder how much evidence this theory has in official science. I’ve heard mixed opinions on how accurate our perception of female fertility decline is, but I’ve never looked into it much.
I guess I wasn’t so much trying to claim naivety was the literal reason men did this and more expressing that, practically, thats what it looks and feels like from the woman’s perspective.
Regardless, it makes me think of our laws and social taboos around age of consent—i suspect a far larger portion of men are attracted to, say, 15-18 year olds then they let on. Kind of raises an interesting question of if men and women are doomed to have fundamentally opposed interests because of some assortment of inherent instincts.
This is exactly why I have a beard now. Idk why women are so freakishly into my freshly shaven babyface.
Agreed
100%
This absurd idea that women have to remove their hair is the idea of a beauty industry starting at the beginning of 2000. I remember being in an art nude photo workshop in 1995. You can hear the outrage as we found out that one model had no pubic hair. "We are doing art, not porn". Which is not better, but if you look at those nude scenes in the 80th, 90th every woman had pubic hair. Search "sophie marceau nude scene".
To make it worse, the moment you start to discuss this issue in public, you accept that this is NOT the private decision of every woman, but social norms should define it.
It's been around for way longer than that, but yes the beauty industry jumped onto it pretty hard core at the turn of the century.
Historically (100+ years past) when hygiene wasn’t so readily addressable, women removed their public hair and utilized an artificial patch I believe was termed merkin. Not sure on the term’s spelling, just aware of the practice.
It really was 2000. I don't think younger people understand that in the 80s literally EVERY MOM AND GRANDMA on the beach had pubes sticking out of her bathing suit, usually a lot more than the minor amount shown in the pics here. And every single woman in Playboy and all the porno mags had a full bush. It did not start disappearing til the late 90s, and even then it was considered a completely freakish, pervert weird thing to do to remove it, it basically meant you did porn and back then that was not something considered remotely okay.
I looked up each of Pamela Anderson's Playboys to remind myself when exactly pubes disappeared, and it was later than I thought. In her late 80s and early 90s shots, she has a full big brown bush. In the late 90s, she still had it but it was bleached blond. It didn't turn into a tiny strip til 2000, and disappeared entirely after that.
Ok, so unrelated…..but you deserve just every kudo for creating the “Pamela Anderson Scale” as a cultural reference point! This, living forever on the internet, is going to make some interesting research happen for some grad student, one day! 😂
I feel privileged to point it out…..but, WOW! Awesome! 👏
Lol I was actually looking it up and saving photos bc I was going to make a Substack post about it. I used her as the reference point bc she was the most popular Playboy model ever, with the most covers. But then I never wrote the post, and now I have a bunch of screenshots of her groin and varying states of her pubes in my phone, which I keep forgetting are there til I scroll through looking for a photo and think oh shit I need to either delete those or write that post.
Maybe I still will. Except I fear my Pam Anderson's Beaver post would probably be the highest viewed thing I ever wrote, even if it only had three sentences and just a bunch of photos, so I don't know if I want to know that. 😂
I love that this resulted in the photo collection…..and you’re totally right: there’s probably an age range of guys that could even have some digital scans in their phones, even today! 😂
As a male in this society, I’m fully behind your article idea…..and the clickbait title is absolutely going to make me want to see the three to seven actual sentences, and check their relevance with my own recollection……this is the sort of internet tomfoolery that gets big traffic!
But, also being in the same category, I’m forced to admit that the giant share of your traffic demographic is not going to do a lot for any charitable or other thoughts I have about the state of our world.
I mean, Pam is making it still with media…..driving traffic online for showing up makeup free now, as I recall. She could come down on either side…..but I might seek her commentary of the social relevance of her bush……and how her input over its marketing might have changed over the years?
You’re right though, if you just dropped the title with pics and scant words or effort, it would be like using AI…..and also reveal just how easily the human simian (male) is addled by just her name and double entendre. That’s sad…..and I appreciate your not revealing how easy it would be.
The part where seven year old girls are getting bikini waxing is soooooo freaking sad. 😢 women and girls have been trained that our bodies don’t belong to us.
My favorite pubic hair joke is from Amy Poehler on SNL Weekend Update where she and Tina Fey did a bit about pubic hair and Amy waxes eloquence about how she misses the 1970’s when a Lady’s Garden was the size of a NY slice of pizza! 🍕
Slayyyyy they're such queens!
I have always preffered the bush myself. Keep in mind I'm 50 almost 51. It's weird though throughout my teans it was actually frowned upon my guys for a woman to be shaven down there as it was considered that men who mliked that were probably pedophiles. Then one day in the mid nineties I woke up and all of the sudden the preference shifted to the other extreme. I'm like "What the fuck" "Who decided this?" "I'm not aware of any votes on this matter". Anyway fuck what society says. My wife has a bush , a few scars and strecth marks and she is just as sexy as she was 18 years ago when we met.
I think you're right all the way through, and especially as relates to the male gaze. I have no trouble kicking a critic out of bed and all the way out of my life if he or she won't listen to reason. I note the comment by Raissa, who says that hair is too erotic for her comfort in a bikini. Isn't it strange that it's supposed to be unerotic in the bedroom.
Yes I so agree! Women were born to be erotic sensual creatures but somewhere along the way, the sensuality has been censored for mainstream society / patriarchy. Men got scared?
Maybe, but exercising power and control has its own appeal, too. And few things are more dangerous to control than sensuality, eroticism and reproduction.
Absolutely agree. Female sensuality is still uncharted territory for many though, so the fear remains. I see it all the time being a sex writer, brands don’t want to associate etc. We’re not as progressive a world as we think!
Heh. You should try femdom if you want reluctant brands! But I don’t know that you don’t write femdom, come to think of it…
that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”
same goes for the bush. nothing is just personal in society.
YES. I was wondering when / if someone was going to reference that iconic moment in The Devil Wears Prada. This is exactly that! Although sadly it seems that some readers will carry on wearing their blue polyester and thinking that the decision of purchase was entirely their own…
It's heartbreaking really, because every time I try to have a conversation, I'm met with the "it's not that deep" and "you're overthinking it" and "I just like doing it" amidst a personal style crisis. I just don't get why we're being so ignorant and anti-intellectual these days, as if it wasn't dangerous.
absolutely loved this... I've always felt so much concern about if I'm doing my body hair "right" such a strange feeling that one one ever talks about. thank you for this, just followed you on ig!
thanks so much for the support gorge! x
I remember the first time I saw a woman in the spotlight who didn’t shave her armpits — it was a decade ago and I haven’t shaved mine since.
Tmi, but I genuinely believe I am one of the only girls I know who has pubes lol. I was friends with a girl for a short time who said that once guys saw she had pubes they were uninterested in performing any pleasurable sex acts on her because they were turned off. I’m not saying she is lying, but no guy that I have ever been intimate with (and the list is long) has ever said anything about mine.
Anyways I haven’t read this yet but I’m excited to as I plan to start getting waxed - not for any other reason than it’s just so god damn hot where I live!
Being a product of the 70s, personally I think the furrier the better.
Each of your writings seem well thought out and offer a variety of perspectives that give your readers a chance to think over the points you are making. The hair issue is complex like most topics. Being old enough to have lived through several incarnations of body hair popularity I'm okay with anyone choosing to display whenever amount of hair they like. Many men do also shave their pubic hair and it is excepted better in some groups than others. Currently with men, we have seen a big increase in large beards among young men, while my generation typically shaved facial hair. Styles definitely change over time and sometimes go back to something more common in another era. The nice thing about reading post like yours is that someone gets the opportunity to consider how others might feel by societial pressures to confirm to a certain style. Do what makes you feel comforatable and resist confirming to anyone else's expectations, I truly believe its possible to find the person who appreciates you just as you are. Thanks for sharing. Jeff
This take seems dated by about 30 years
1. Recent polls have shown that men don’t really have a strong preference regarding genital grooming. When pressed, slight preference for hair rather than not
2. We went through this once already with bra burning in the 1960s. When women bravely pushed back against the patriarchy on the right to free the nipple, men shrugged and said do your thing girl. Eventually women put the bras back on because they thought they looked better with the support
3. There is no such thing as the patriarchy. We’ve been living in a gynocracy for the last 15 years.
what "recent polls" do you speak of? also, i'm not saying they have an actual preference. i'm saying that society's representation of the ideal does.
also, i'm not sure where you're getting your info from. we are certainly still living in patriarchy. all you have to do is look at the number of male vs. female politicians.
That's not how it works lmfao
I still find it amazing that men expect us to have 0 body hair when they walk around like actual animals with the sheer volume of body hair they have!