The news reports that girls are shaving or waxing their pubic hair at younger and younger ages these days. Including at ages so young they have not yet hit puberty, so their pubic hair has not started to grown in, distinct from other body hair. Some girls also wax their eyebrows, to look like models or actresses. The general response in this article seems to be “Why do it when so young?”
While I also wonder the same, I would ask the more general question, “Why do it at all?”
QUO reports that armpit and leg hair shaving didn’t start in the west until the early 1900s, when advertising campaigns started pushing the notion of shaving the underarms and, later, lower limbs. Like deodorant, razor marketing “arouses the psychological fear of unpopularity and exorcises it by showing how you may avoid embarrassment,” wrote early advertising experts Doris E. Fleischman and Howard Walden Cutler.
To me, shaving is a habit that’s very difficult to stop once you do it, so you’d best think about it beforehand. I have never shaved my legs, and the hair on them is generally soft, blond, and seems pleasant to the touch both for me and for my lovers. People who shave their legs regularly, however, find that the hair that grows in is thicker, and darker, and the stubbly in-between stage between freshly shaved skin and mature soft hair is highly unpleasant to touch, causing a sort of “rug burn” effect.
I do shave under my arms, every other day, and whenever I miss shaving for some reason I get quite uncomfortable under there. I can only imagine how annoying that stubble is for women who shave their legs. It also takes a lot of time. Do you perhaps have better things to do with your time? Something to think about.
Some other girls in middle school certainly found me odd for not shaving my legs, and teased me about it. My uncle commented that it was time to start shaving them one summer when I was a teen, as my lower leg hairs were turning slightly darker and more visible. Yet I never have, and I have been pleased with that experience, on the whole.
Pubic hair is something that changes quite a bit as you grow older, and hair in your body in general spreads and gets darker and more coarse. We have standards in society about covering the pubic area with clothes, and as pubic hair spreads, that becomes harder for women to do with traditional swim wear, and thus we have the “bikini wax,” designed to constrain the apparent pubic area to that which can be covered by a bikini, removing the coarse public hair that would otherwise show and—what? Hint at the sexuality of that part of the body? Oh no!
This coarsening effect includes eyebrows, and I have no issue with shaping your eyebrows as an adult, provided you retain the natural shape of them to some extent, instead of trying to look like someone who isn’t you. If you aren’t sure what your natural eyebrow shape is, by all means consult a beauty salon, but know that tweezing and waxing can be time-consuming, expensive habits that don’t necessarily make you look better, just different.
I guess that’s my issue with waxing and shaving in general. The human body is a marvelous thing as it is, and the notion that we need to make dramatic adaptations to it in order to look pretty, or to avoid embarrassment and teasing, disturbs me. If you are making a decision to change the hair on your body in order to experiment with something you might like, go ahead. If you are doing it to fit in better with other people’s expectations, to conform, well, think about it, would you?
And don’t be afraid that other people won’t like you if you have all your pubic hair. It’s a perfectly natural, naturally attractive thing to have.