Porn as pubic trendsetter? As indicator? Is bush making a comeback?

In April, 2011, the cover of Penthouse Magazine declared that "Bush is Back." The 23-year-old porn sensation Lexi Belle graced the cover. 

Lexi Belle and Sasha Grey, perhaps two of the biggest porn starlets today, may be early trendsetters. Although they are bona fide porn stars who perform in mainstream pornos, they don't have inflated silicone breasts, an array of tacky tattoos, and, perhaps most shocking to mainstream suburban America--they sometimes appear with pubic hair. Not just a little Hitler mustache on their mons pubis, but a full triangle of curls. 

Could mainstream porn be turning back to the time of natural breasts and unshaved pubes?

It is pretty universally agreed that shaved pubic hair has been the mainstay for more than a decade. In fact, pubic hair has been so banished that to find full bush on the internet is often categorized as a fetish. You don't have to search through very many comments on blogs to find a chorus of posts such as found on an article called "Sasha Grey and the truth about having a bush." Here's some comments for your reading pleasure:

SILVERBACK: Pubes down my throat are fucking nasty.

DRIFTBUS: My gf has recently started to grow pubic hair again. I hate it. Sex is just that slightly bit harder, it gets in the way, feels rubbish on my teeth, and smells different. Shave it all off.

Valientjedi: Gag. I’ll take shaved ANY day over a hairy one. The smell..the hair in your mouth.. ugh

Mountainman: Gak, all the stank and skank in the fur there. No thanks

These comments are hardly in the minority. I have come across dozens of similar posts, where men and women equate pubic hair with the most heinous foulness.

Whether you count yourself as a hair hater, or bush believer, I think that if history has shown us anything, it's that fashion is not linear, but rather cyclical. What goes around comes around, as they say.

If indeed this premiss is true, then the question becomes, how quickly or slow do these wheels of fashion turn? Is bush making a come back? Is shaving on the outs? The answer is a resounding maybe. 

I put forward that fashion and culture is both linear and cyclical. For example, if you made a timeline of women's clothing styles throughout history, you'd see a fairly linear progression, where one century is different than the one before or after it. For example, a 18th Century women of Colonial America doesn't look like an 19th Century woman of the Victorian Era, which doesn't look like a 20th Century woman. On the other hand, you can look at fashion within the past 100 years and see a revolving cycle. Take dress length, or hair length. Both very long at the turn of the Century. Then became short in the 1920s, then became long into the 1930s and early 40s, and then turned back toward short by the 50s and early 60s and then circled back to long in the late 60s/70s and then with the 80s, short hair and mini shirts were back... and so on. As you can see, every 25 years or so the cycle comes around. 

If that is true, then it makes sense that pubic hair is on its slow and eventual way back. I think it's pretty universally agreed that the trend of shaving pubic hair began with the wide-spread proliferation of internet porn in the late 90s. In her 2003 book, Erotic Home Videos, pornographic director Anna Span suggests that a relaxing of censorship laws in the mid 1990s allowed porn directors greater freedom in showing the inner labia, and therefore wanting to show everything as explicitly as possible, asked their starlets to shave it all to show it all.

There is certainly a lot of truth that the instant millions of Americans could dial up and log onto the World Wide Web and saw thousands of images of shaved labias, it made them turn to their partner and suggest they try it at home. Life imitates art as much as art imitates life. However, stepping back, there is a much larger and slower scale at work.

It is not just a trend that started overnight. It has to do with the movement of porn into the average American middle class home, shifts in technology and availability of porn, the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s, and America's competitive Capitalist market. 

It didn't start with Playboy, but that is such a clear starting point. There had been nudy mags before Playboy, but they were sold under the magazine stands, and in seedy shops on times square, and technically, couldn't be shipped via US Mail as per the Comstock Law (with the exception of Nudist magazines that could sidestep that law). What was so damn genius about Hugh Hefner's first Playboys was that he made the Nudie magazine mainstream. He put the most popular movie star of the time on the first cover, Maralyn Monroe, he published writing from writers like Jack Kerouac and Ian Flemming, and the pin ups were posed so delicately, that they were hardly more pornographic than the Vargas pinups the GIs painted on the noses of their WWII bombers. 

Sales for Playboy were good. Very good. Hef became a millionaire, bought a mansion in Chicago, an then one in LA, and a private 747 to shuttle him and his Bunnies. The 50s turned to the swinging 60s, and Playboy began to show full breasts, and even nipples. And then... in 1965, an unknown would-be photographer Bob Guccione published a new magainze, almost a carbon copy of Playboy, called Penthouse. By the late 60s, it was outselling Playboy, and in the process, breaking new ground. “We began to show pubic hair, which was a big breakthrough," Guccione recalled. "At the time, this was referred to as the Pubic Wars. Because after about nine months of denial, Playboy started to put wisps of pubic hair in the pictures." A detailed and fun recounting of the Pubic Wars can be found here. 

If Playboy showed boobs, Penthouse showed boobs and bush. If Playboy then showed bush, Penthouse showed a model with open legs. If Playboy showed a full frontal shot, Penthouse showed a model stroking her bush. Guccione claimed he was the first to show a visible clitoris. I don't know if that is true. By then the competition was on. Magazines like Gallery and Hustler had emerged in the market, each trying to carve out their space and steal subscribers. 

Grab a handful of magazines, especially Playboys, as they are perhaps the most mainstream, and you can see a slow, but steady decline of pubic hair. Even in the early 80s, the bush began to be trimmed. Then by the late 80s, the bikini lines had started to narrow to accommodate the high-hipped leotards and swimsuits. That narrowed to the landing strip in the early 90s. And then the landing strip became the landing patch. And then at some point it was gone. All of it. A bare pubis. 

Of course, a bare mons pubis was nothing new in history. Look at Greek and Roman statues. Look at the pinups of the 1950s that had to airbrush out the pubic hair to conform to censorship laws. And of course Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat. Shaved bald. But, in those times, shaving was the exception.

By Y2K, shaving had become not only accepted, but rather the norm. Waxing, plucking and lazer removal. Pubic hair was seen as something from the 20th Century, and that century was done.

For those who see fashion as a forward march, pubic hair will never come back. Others see it as inevitable. The pendulum has to swing back.

One of the commeters on the Sasha Grey article mentioned above made a good point: "...it’s all about transgression. Porn is one of the many capitalistic endeavors that earns money by pushing the edge of what’s acceptable. This of course leads to it eventually being acceptable, requiring a new definition of unacceptable. Thus lack of pubic hair was once transgressive and now it’s the norm, so public hair becomes the new transgressive..."

I can certainly relate to this. In the late 90s, having only known unshaved, shaving seemed new and novel, naughty, and bold. Now, after a decade of shaving, when every single suburban soccer mom is shaved, it seems.... well... not exactly subversive. When all the women in the local Walmart or Target are shaved like porn stars, where is the transgression of social sexual norms? Old fashioned bush suddenly seems punk.

The question is: will bush make a come back? A little or a full one? 

Sasha Grey and Lexie Belle may be early indicators. Or they may be outliers. 

From what I can see, the acceptance of pubic hair is returning a little. It looks like 99% of nude women on the internet are still shaven, and the disgust of pubic hair is still vocal in the blog comments. But there are some signs that attitudes are relaxing, a bit to allow for some softer curls instead of razor bumps.

I am very curious to see where the pubic hair trend goes. If it's true that fashion cycles back approximately every 20 years, then we should be seeing a return of bush in the next 5 years or so. I don't doubt that this will happen a little. I mean, it's inevitable that people just want change. Look at cars. In the 70s we had really big station wagons, suburbans, and rad muscle cars. Then the recession of the 80s hit, and in came the Honda Civic, the VW Golf, etc. Then the economy recovered in the 90s, and then cars got bigger and in came the generation of the SUV, and even the Hummer. Remember those? And now, our local Hummer dealer is out of business. Companies have come up like Kia, with small, compact cars. It's a lot like the 80s again.

And yet, we're not totally retuning to the 1980s hatchback. We're in the time of the hybrid. A little of the old and a little of the new. And perhaps that's exactly what will happen. Shaving won't ever leave, and bush may never come back to its Woodstock heyday, but perhaps this new generation will enjoy a little of both, changing it up. Hopefully with that, some of the neanderthal comments and hate language about women being "disgusting" for growing pubes will fade away.

Perhaps pubes may never again be fully the norm but become a bit of an eccentric bohemian fashion statement. 

In ancient Rome, all men wore togas--in the town square, in the senate. Now frat boys wear them at parties. In the Victorian Era, women wore whalebone corsets when they went out in public. Women haven't worn corsets as daily practice in a 100 years, yet, I can go to my local mall, to the lingerie shop of a popular national chain store, and buy a corset. I might not wear it to work, but its a lot of fun in the bedroom.

Perhaps bush will become like that.