Shower Voyeur

Concentrating as she shaved her legs, she doesn't notice that sometimes I watch her. She's so sexy in the shower. A perfect moment captured.

Shaving In the Tub

As many Dear Readers know, I usually let my curls grow wild and free, as nature intended. However, I have to admit, I find the act of shaving very erotic. 

So sometimes I change it up. As they say, variation is the spice of life.

Shaving Herself Bare in Black and White

Shaving In Shower

As much as I advocate the glory of a natural bush, I have to admit there are few things sexier than the sensation of shaving one's vuvla in the shower. 

New York Times Reports: "Return to a more natural state."

As editor of My Sexy Spot Blog, I strive to bring the best, most accurate, and most historically relevant stories about our understanding and appreciation (and acceptance) of human sexuality. As many long-time Dear Readers know, I have been following and reporting on what seems to be a grassroots cultural shift back toward a more normal (and in my opinion healthy) acceptance and appreciation of pubic hair.

I've noted it in amateur blogs, in the emerging works of Fine Art photographers, and even in the porn industry.

For so long I've seen hope peeking out like the stray untamed hairs from a bikini line. I'm amazed, and thrilled that finally a publication with a lot wider viewership than this humble DIY blog is finally taking note.

Last december, The New York Times blog ran "On Beauty For Women, a New Look Down Under."

Only once before in our history have we reprinted an article verbatim and in its entirety. We felt this article well worth it.
--Annie O.

On Beauty For Women, a New Look Down Under

by Amanda Hess

After years of razors, wax and lasers reducing pubic hair to the bare minimum — or nothing at all — there’s a return to a more natural state.

Marilyn Monroe’s maid claimed she once walked in on the actress naked and splayed-legged, bottle and toothbrush in hand, meticulously bleaching the hair between her legs a perfectly matching platinum. When Monroe danced onto a breezy New York City subway grate in that billowing ivory dress in “The Seven Year Itch,” she layered two pairs of underwear to ensure that her bountiful crop was obscured from gawkers’ sightlines. And when the studio photographer snapped on-set publicity shots of the scene, they were meticulously airbrushed to smooth out the unmistakable texture visible beneath her pleated skirt.

For women of Monroe’s generation, pubic hair was a game of peekaboo — on full display in the privacy of the bungalow, but carefully hidden from popular view. In recent years, the bombshell bush has essentially disappeared. Wax-wielding estheticians and permanent lasers have whittled it down or erased it entirely. Pornography has served up a new degree of bareness. When the paparazzi shoot pantyless pop stars exiting limousines, their cameras zoom in on a barren landscape.

It wasn’t always this way. For centuries of artistic tradition, the absence of pubic hair was merely an illusion. Renaissance artists depicted the female pelvis in smoothed stone or oil-painted shadow. Although a few artists made bids for erotic realism — notably Gustave Courbet in 1866 with the furry black patch in his painting “L’Origine du Monde”— the taboo persisted. The story goes that the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin was so shocked by the discrepancy between the renderings he’d studied and his wife’s naked body that he annulled the marriage. “Though her face was beautiful,” he wrote, “there were certain circumstances in her person” that left him unable to proceed. When the photographer Alfred Stieglitz exhibited 45 portraits, several of them nudes, of his muse Georgia O’Keeffe in 1921, they caused a sensation.

The explosion of the bikini on 1960s beaches changed everything, bringing with it the “bikini line,” which required a precise shave. The beauty industry graciously homed in on this new terrain, first with razors and depilatory creams, then waxes, electrolysis and lasers. Peruse popular nudes over the past decades and you can practically carbon-date the photo by the area’s dwindling dimensions. In the 1960s, the fashion designer Mary Quant got hers trimmed into a heart. Helmut Newton’s 1981 “Big Nudes” series of photographs featured towering heels and equally imposing pubic hair; by the 1990s, Playboy centerfolds had transitioned from a full growth to a teensy landing strip; by the 21st century, the “Brazilian” was established as the new standard.

Did it go too far? Today, the Helmut Newton nude makes for a more aspirational ideal than an unfortunate celebrity crotch shot. The New York waxing emporium J. Sisters displays a 1990s head shot of Gwyneth Paltrow signed, “You changed my life!!” But these days, Paltrow laughingly told Ellen DeGeneres, “I work a ’70s vibe.” Mert & Marcus photographed Daria Werbowy and Naomi Campbell with full, frank pubic hair in a 2010 Love magazine spread, and they look assertive, real, even rebellious.

Even young porn stars are “bringing the ’80s back,” says Nina Hartley, a doyenne of the scene. Stoya, one of the highest-profile porn actresses of the moment, has also posed for the fashion photographer Steven Klein with grown-out pelvis and armpits. “I’ve had all sorts of pubic hair,” she says. “I’ve been completely bald, I’ve had my entire natural bush grown out, and I usually have an arrangement somewhere in between.” It’s worth noting that this look isn’t completely untamed, of course. Many women still attend to the sides and underneath. But there’s something refreshingly retro, delightfully expressive and confidently grown-up in getting back to nature. And Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde”? It now resides at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where — judging by the sale of postcards — it is one of the most popular paintings of all.

Here's the original link to the full article.

American Apparel Got Real For Valentine's

Known for its "provocative" ads, clothing retailer American Apparel sent shockwaves rippling across lower Manhattan last month when its Houston Street store displayed lingerie-clad mannequins with nipples and faux pubic fur.

District Visual Manager Dee Myles stated that the display is meant to bring "rawness and sexiness" to the upcoming Valentine's day holiday, and to "spark up curiosity and conversation about what we deem beautiful."

American Apparel issued this statement to the media:

“American Apparel is a company that celebrates natural beauty, and the Lower East Side Valentine’s Day window continues that celebration. We created it to invite passerby’s to explore the idea of what is ‘sexy’ and consider their comfort with the natural female form. This is the same idea behind our advertisements which avoid many of the photoshopped and airbrushed standards of the fashion industry.”

A few detractors have claimed that the marketing move was done more to sell lingerie than to promote pro-woman body acceptance in its natural state. To which I say: duh! 

If a retail giant like Home Depot runs an ad showing a happy family in their backyard having a BBQ over Memorial Day, it's because Home Depot wants to sell you a lawnmower or a new shiny barbecue. Whether or not you have a family picnic is up to you. 

Of course American Apparel wants to sell bras and panties. That's there for-profit business. And, as someone once said: the business of business is business. Ads, by their very definition, are human designs calculated, created, and put to the public eye to arouse interest and spark an emotional response.

There's another old saying: sex sells. 

That's not news--so why can anyone in the 21st Century be surprised, or even remotely offended by American Apparel trying to tap the fact that "sex sells?"

Other major retailers have been pushing air-brushed women with spray tans and plastic boobs.

If American Apparel displays mannequins with untrimmed bushes to sell "sexy," I say: right on!

As long as sex sells sells and people buy sexy, I think it's great to finally be seeing "sexy" as closer to natural than to fake. I personally think it's lovely to see--FINALLY--a mainstream American advertisement that looks like me. Brown hair. glasses, and bush.

(and nipples)

No Shave November: Checking In

Hey Dear Readers,

We're halfway through No Shave November, how's it going?

Keep fighting the good fight, whether you're doing it to promote healthy body image or raise awareness and funds for cancer research, or just being beautiful in your own body, it matters.

So keep not shaving!

No Shave November

Well it's November. Welcome to the grey. For college students, it's when the enthusiasm for fall term has turned into the grind toward finals, and the push to winter break.

For Americans, November's claim to fame is Thanksgiving, eating too much turkey, watching the game, and the associated shopping mayhem of Black Friday. But for college students around the world, the month of November is also important for another reason: No Shave November. 

The name pretty much summarizes: ditch the Gillettes for one month. 

My guess is that the average college student who doesn't shave in November might not even realize how, when, or why the tradition got started. They simply know their pals are doing it, and hey... does a college student really need an excuse to save a little money and be a little lazier? Exactly.

It's been suggested that Plato encouraged the young students of philosophy to skip shaving and grow out their beards, making them look more sagacious like their mentors. Maybe....? There's also the rumor that Karl Marx encouraged workers to grow their beards to piss off the ruling class. I doubt this is true, especially since rulers like Tzar Nicholas actually sported beards. But, Karl did rock a pretty good one.

The more direct modern movement of No Shave November has roots in a rally for guys to grow out great mustaches.

"Movember" is derived from No Shave November. The difference is this: Instead of not shaving your entire face for the month, you sprout and manicure yourself a mustache.

I got some background info from Youngstown State University. Here's the scoop: a few young men in Melbourne, Australia, coined the term in 1999. Then, in 2004, the Movember Foundation was founded; it’s a way for men to grow out their moustaches throughout November — and raise money for men’s health awareness at the same time.

That first year, the fundraiser raised $40,000. Since then, the movement has grown exponentially internationally. The growth the foundation has experienced was evident last year when 854,288 men in more than 15 countries registered to grow moustaches in honor of Movember. Last year, those men and their moustaches were able to raise $126.3 million, which was distributed to varying organizations who support men’s health.

Participants are dubbed either Mo Bros or Mo Sistas; Mo being short for Moustache (obviously).

To participate, all you have to do is.... nothing! Just don't touch your razor for the month. It's that simple. 

It seems the No Shave November is mostly considered a guy thing. Perhaps because there is such a backlash against women letting their hair grow naturally. Of course the actual truth is that many--if not most--women practice some form of relaxing their shaving habits in the winter months. I mean come on--who cares under long pants and long sleeves? There's not a lot of skin that gets shown in the winter, and frankly, shaving is chore. Simple as that.

So, while No Shave November is generally considered a men's event, women are encouraged to show support and join the cause.

So, Dear Reader, I challenge you to join me for No Shave November. Donate the money you usually spend on shaving and grooming for a month to educate about cancer prevention, save lives, and aid those fighting the battle.

art by katy

Before We Go Out

They'll go to dinner at a nice resturant. The reservations are set. She has picked out her dress. He has shaved. He tells her she should go without underwear. She says, ok, but that she wants to feel the cool night air caressing softest skin.

Heather + boredom + razor = landing strip

Here's a self shot from a wonderful girl with a wonderful blog. I love how she deals with boredom. Just proof that only boring people get bored.

Shaved Vs Natural: An Idiot's Debate

There's a blog I used to check out a lot, Guess Her Muff, which is a playful concept: there's a photo of a  woman, and then you "guess" how she coifs her private parts based on your assumptions about her looks. Then you click on a link to open a photo of her nude. Then you can "rate" her and leave a comment. 

I give the site props for its concept as far as utilizing the Blogspot platform in an interactive way. But I have to say: I stopped looking at it because there was just too much immature, and downright mean and misogynistic comments on the site. 

There seems to be a raving spitting match of vitriol (from men) over whether a woman shaves herself bare, or allows her body to be natural. It is a deeply divided debate. About 40% of the viewers prefer an unshaved or gently trimmed bush, while 60% fall to the totally shaved/Brazilian/or landing strip side.

That ratio seems pretty accurate, I'd say, based on my gut feeling: shaving and close cropping of pubic hair has been more dominant in the last 15 or so years, and with the rise of internet porn in the late '90s through the first decade of the new millennium, the natural look fell out of favor. People called it old school, retro. It seemed to some as outdated as an avocado colored refrigerator or wood paneling on a station wagon. 

As we've posted on this site, the natural look seems to be coming back. It's to be expected: fashion is constantly swinging back and forth on a pendulum. If there's a constant in fashion, it's this fact: the trend must always be shifting; fashion abhors stasis. 

All of that is fine and good. Until some assholes miss the point. Men, alone on their computers at night, shrouded in the invincible protection of anonymity, are free to say whatever hateful things their warped mind can come up with against women. They can insult her breasts, butt, and any other body part. They seem to think that even though they don't have a vagina, they are the experts on them. Some ignorants insist that a woman who doesn't shave like a porn star is some how unclean. There are hundreds of foul comments. Clearly, these men's only interaction with women in via online porn--and maybe strippers. 

If they had any actual relationship with a woman, they'd know that hair and hygiene aren't synonymous. Hair is simply hair. It can be cut, styled, or grown out to its natural state. It's like a guy growing out a beard. Some women like it, some prefer clean shaven. The truth is: most women frankly don't care. 

That may be a let down to some of you men. But get over it. We really don't care. We like you as a person. We like your sense of humor (almost always first on the list), we like intelligence, we like kindness, we like a good listener. Bonus points for good cooks, and guys who follow their passion. We could come up with a list of the top 1,000 things we look for in a man, and at the very very bottom of the list might be (and still that's just a maybe), is how you shave, trim, or let grow your hair.

Why then do so many men not only have such a strong opinion on a woman's hair, but feel entitled to make demands and insults based on their own personal opinion? 

So, long story short: here are some images to prove a point: a sexy woman is a sexy woman--regardless of her body hair. In fact, a sexy woman can be both ways, and every way inbetween. She can go a week without razor, a month, or however the mood grabs her. Natural or bare, it's still the same sexy person. 

Here are some sexy up-close and personal photos from Isabel's first photo shoot and her second. Enjoy.

Lathered and Ready

for a fresh shave.

She Shaves She

Shave Me

A night of celebration. An anniversary, perhaps. Or just because. Cocktails and shaving cream. A razor glides. She shutters, sighs. 

Shaving Session

The sexiest memory they shared: a hotel room. They had been drinking wine, dressing up and preparing to go out. They were in the mood for sex and had been talking about it. They would have rather stayed in the hotel room to fuck, but they already had dinner commitments. 

She wanted to turn him on. She was turned on. She was thinking of going out in her dress, no underwear. She was thinking of trimming her bush. She decided to do something even more bold. She told him he could shave her pussy bald--on one condition: She would film him do it. 

Standing in front of the hotel bathroom sink, he lifted up her dress and began. Holding the DSLR, she captured their sexiest moment, which lead to more and more adventures.

Shaving Herself

I love love love a full, thick furry bush. But I also love change. And sometimes you just have to change it up.

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. 

Shaving Help

Sometimes when she shaves her legs in the shower, she props her leg up to reach better. He likes to help.

READY-WHIP

She was ready for a night of kinky sex with her boyfriend. She'd taken a shower, shaved her pussy, and then wrapped a towel around her and grabbed the can of ready-whip from the fridge. Her idea was to squirt the whipped cream in a perfect triangle where her public hair used to be. She lay back and when he came into the room, she'd have him kneel beside the bed and begin to lick between her legs. As he lapped up the cream, he'd feel only smooth skin and soon realize that she had taken it all off.

SHAVING IN THE SHOWER