When I first started my sexual explorations, this type of bush was perfectly normal. It wouldn't be considered hairy or unhairy, shaven or unshaven, just a very lovely part of a lovely female. There were plenty of slang terms, of course: muff, beaver, snatch, cunt, twat, pootang... all sort of silly and juvenile.
My first girlfriends in the late '80s would only shave their bikini lines, and usually only in bikini season. Anything else was seen as pointless. By the mid-90s, we started seeing the bikini lines move in tighter and tighter into the "landing strip" in the pages of Playboy and Penthouse, but all the girls I knew (now in college) still let their bush grow natural.
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| Jen was the first to trim her bush, 1994 |
In the mid-90s, I went out with a college girlfriend for a couple years; the "long term" monogamous relationship meant we'd gotten to the point we could try anything with each other. I asked her if she'd let me trim her soft curls. At the time, it seemed new, sexy, and a little naughty. It made her seem a little less like a college student and little more like a woman I'd seen in a porn mag. Jen seemed open-minded enough to let me trim her soft golden-brown curls down to a prickly stubble, which was visually exciting for me, and painfully itchy for her.
After that relationship, I moved to a different state to go to a different university for grad school. I had a series of relationships: some casual college hook ups, some "friends with benefits" and a few girlfriends that lasted anywhere from three to seven months. Megan, Michelle, Kelly, Jen, Susan, Nancy, Coleen... some where tall, some short, some skinny as a rail and some a little softer... I genuinely liked them all, had a great time with them. They were all from different states and were different majors, and none of them seemed to alter their natural pubic hair in anyway.
Kathy was the one exception. She had a patch of dark, thick hair, that she cropped with scissors. I remember laying in bed with her after making love and by habit reaching for her to gently run my fingers through her curls. When I hit only sharp stubble, I asked, nonchalantly, why she chose to trim. She said she thought it looked more "tidy." I remember thinking that it looked fine, not bad, but not great. The original thrill I'd had of trimming my college girlfriend's curls was no longer there. Somehow it just looked like stubble, and not like breaking rules, or being like a pornstar. This was 1997.
In 1998, I met the first girl who used a razor to shave her vulva. She was a college student putting herself through school as a stripper. I remember taking a shower with her and watching her shave herself, a new sight for me. She asked, "Do you like my shaved pussy?" (Her words exactly.) It was sexy, mostly because it was new. But I had mixed feelings about her. I wasn't sure if her being a stripper was extra sexy, or just sort of skanky. I only dated her a couple times. She invited me to come see her work. I didn't, which is my only regret.
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| Rachel with curls, before shaving (2000) |
By the year 2000, the big Y2K, I'd transferred to another university, a Pac 10 School, with a whole new group of young co-eds. I dated Sarah, Jenny, Maria, and Rachel. None of them shaved. Sarah trimmed her curls, but just barely. Jenny, Maria, and Rachel, sported thick briars of curls.
By now, laptops had come to college campuses. We could get dial-up internet at home, and didn't have to rely upon the school computer labs. This was a new break through in being able to surf porn. Going through the school's network, we wondered if our searches were being tracked. Being dial-up, and before wi-fi, the images were slow loading. The websites clunky html. The was the web 1.0. Slow, painfully slow, but the beginnings of a porn explosion. In the 90s, we literally could only get porn from magazines on the back counter in 7-11. Playboy, Penthouse, Galley, Hustler. But by 2000, a college student could actually get their porn from the internet in the comfort of their own home. This seemed to create a surge of interest in shaving and a rapid evolution in hairstyles.
The "landing strip" shrank to the point of "the patch." The patch was replaced by the hot trend of the Brazilian. And by the end of the decade, the Brazilian had ben replaced by the total shave.
I wasn't imune to the trends. The long-term girlfriend I'd been dating agreed to shave her vuvla for me. Unlike the stripper, the shaved lips looked good on Rachel. We tested out different lengths of hair. I once got her to shave it all off, but it was so itchy growing back, she vowed never to do it again. Still, she kept her lips shaved and her patch of curls tidy. For the early 2000s, it seemed appropriate to the times.
After we broke up, I had another series of relationships, some girlfriends, some more like "friends with benefits." Surprisingly, I had the same experience; the girls all seemed to let their bushes grow naturally. One even didn't shave under her arms, because she claimed it irritated her skin. By now I was out of grad school and working my first "real job" in an office, with cubicles, and a water cooler where people actually did gossip. The dress code wasn't super formal (this wasn't a bank or a law office), but it was a corporate office. So to meet women who wore smart wool skirts and blouses and nylons to work, and then to see them naked with a thick patch of pubes, seemed actually pretty wild to me. I was seeing shaven girls on the internet, but natural girls in real life.
I then started dating Jennifer (the fourth Jennifer I've dated, a popular name for my generation). She had a wild thick patch of strawberry blonde curls. For the first year of our relationship, she left her curls go natural. Like my long-term relationships before, when we reached a certain point of intimacy (or maybe the initial thrill of sex diminishing) I turned to shaving. Jennifer, a willing sport, allowed me to shave her. We kept her trimmed the next several years of our relationship. Eventually, she moved to LA.
I dated a Japanese exchange student for a while. Her hair was black and silky, and naturally very sparse. We never did any shaving or grooming. She was erotic enough as is. That relationship actually lasted over two years, fairly long-term for me.
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| Sahoko never shaved, never needed to. (2004) |
As before, the end of a long term relationship sent me out to date and to develop some "friends with benefits." On a business trip, I hooked up with an old girlfriend Jenny (Jennifer #3); she was as unshaven in 2005 as she'd been in 1999-2000. I met another girl, Angie, who was working as a designer before going back to grad school. She has a nice thick patch of hair. She loved sex. Kelly (the second Kelly I'd dated) also had a nice triangle of curls. She tasted the sweetest of any girl I'd been with. I could have licked her all day.
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| Three girlfriends kept their hair cropped short. (2005-08) |
In the mid-2000s, I had two casual "friends with benefits" and both of them kept their hair groomed very short. Their hair was still in a wide triangle, but it'd been trimmed down, perhaps with an electric beard trimmer. I asked Laura why she trimmed so short and she said she felt more "hygienic" without hair. I then dated my next girlfriend for a couple years. Like my other two friends, she seemed to prefer to trim down to a coarse stubble. Sometimes she'd let her curls grow for several weeks, and then mow them back like a lawn.
It was interesting to me that what I saw on the internet wasn't exactly what I was seeing in real life. Looking at internet porn, it seemed like 99% of women shaved clean and smooth. It was actually hard to find images of natural girls, and those were often found by searching for terms like "hairy."
Unshaven, the norm of the 20th Century, had become a fetish in the new millennium.
Yet, the actual girls I met, seemed to contradict what was being shown online. From 2000-2010, I dated a dozen girls. Four of those girls kept themselves trimmed by their own choice. Two of them had been natural by their own choice, but had allowed me to trim and shave them. And six let their hair grow naturally before, during, and probably after our relationships. Basically, the internet told me that 99% of women shaved. Admittedly, my sample size is not large enough to be statistically conclusive, but as first-person experience, I found that 50% of the women I'd been with between 2000-2010 didn't shave at all and let their curls grow natural and untamed.
I realize that we're in a relatively conservative time period. Far from the hippie movement, the average girls I see on the street wear makeup, highlight their hair in salons, pluck their eyebrows, and shave under their arms. Based on this outward grooming and contemporary internet porn, it seems that shaved pubes is the mainstream. Yet in actuality, it may not be as prevalent as one would think.
Fashion is always in flux. If not in constant change, fashion would cease to fashion. Yet it is also obvious that as much as fashion changes, its motion is so often cyclical. There's the old saying, wait long enough and your clothes will come back in style. And its' true. Today's vintage stores are filled with neon mini-skirts and plastic sunglasses of the 1980s.
Levi jeans and Raybans have been around since the 50s. They never really went out of style. Perhaps just stayed around quietly as new trends came and went. Perhaps pubic hair is like this. The natural bush had all of the 20th Century. Now, in a new internet era of the 21st Century, the shaven look is in. Bush never really went away. And, in time, it's bound to make a comeback.
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| Current girlfriend, letting it grow. 2011 |
