Honey, I’ll Mow the Lawn
When we were kids, the peak of forbidden excitement was staying up past midnight at a friend’s place, wired on cola, watching softcore films on late-night cable—already censored into near-abstraction, all suggestion and strategic camera angles, the dialogue genuinely incredible, the plots completely insane. But the real revelation, the thing that lodged permanently in the developing brains of every twelve-year-old in that room, was pubic hair. Just the glimpse of it. This dark, unfamiliar territory that had nothing to do with anything we knew about our own bodies yet. The marker of adulthood. The border crossing. The unofficial emblem of the entire hippie era and the forbidden fixation of every little creep like me.
And then, somewhere along the line, some woman decided to go at herself with dad’s razor. Whether it was accidental, aesthetic, or a bad idea that just snowballed out of control—the historical record is unhelpfully silent. What’s clear is that the fashion spread through men’s magazines and women’s weeklies alike with a velocity that put every actual technological innovation to shame, and suddenly body hair was dirty, outdated, wrong. The groomed look became the requirement. The natural body became the problem.
The question this raises is the same one you get when thinking about reality TV ratings or why anyone voluntarily drinks beer that tastes like liquid disappointment: is this actually what people want, or is it just group pressure that nobody ever pushed back on hard enough? Do grown women genuinely want to look like plucked chickens, complete with the razor-burn bumps? And can we men honestly say, with a straight face, that we find the prepubescent aesthetic more appealing than the alternative? Because at some point that preference, examined directly, stops being comfortable. The women in those old soft-focus films from the seventies didn’t look like children. They looked like adults. That seems relevant to the calculation.
Women who leave things alone have, by now, ended up with an accidental rebellious quality—which is absurd when you think about it. Either they’re making a principled stand against this particular flavour of manufactured expectation, which is admirable, or they simply can’t be bothered and a faint suggestion of the fishmarket at closing time doesn’t especially trouble them. The outcome is the same either way. What you don’t get is ingrown hairs and red bumps in places where you really don’t want red bumps.
The practical conclusion, as with most questions that surface at parties after midnight, is that a sufficient level of intoxication renders the whole debate moot. On reflection I think I’m good with that.