Mowing the Lawn

Staying up late as kids with whoever was around, glued to the late-night stuff on TV, drinking cola to keep awake. The appeal was obvious: breasts, bodies, the whole forbidden thing. But the actual threshold, the moment you knew you cared, was seeing pubic hair. That was the marker. That meant you were looking at a woman, not some image.

Then somewhere in the last couple of decades, that changed. Someone decided to razor it all off and the decision somehow rippled through the entire culture like infection—magazines, porn sites, what everyone else was doing—until shaved became the standard and hairy became the exception. Suddenly the ideal was smooth, young, almost childlike. And we all just went along with it.

The logic doesn’t really hold if you stop and think about it. The whole cultural push is basically telling women to look younger, less adult, more like a child. It’s something we’ve absorbed without ever really discussing, just let it seep in through osmosis until it seemed natural. But it’s not natural. It’s just what everyone’s doing.

A woman who doesn’t do it, who just lets her body be what it is, ends up looking almost radical now. Maybe she’s made an actual choice about the whole thing. Maybe she’s just lazy or doesn’t care. Doesn’t matter. Either way there’s something honest about it, something that isn’t performing the script everyone else is following.

But none of it really matters in the end anyway. Get drunk with someone you actually like and you’re not thinking about any of this. You’re just there, and either it works or it doesn’t.