Bush, Bare, and Everything Between: Who's Really Deciding What You Do With Your Pubic Hair?

Bush, Bare, and Everything Between: Who's Really Deciding What You Do With Your Pubic Hair?

Let's start with a simple question: when you last made a decision about your pubic hair — wax it, shave it, trim it, leave it entirely alone — whose voice was loudest in your head? Your own? A partner's? A memory of something you saw in a movie or a magazine or on a screen at 2 a.m.?

If you're honest, the answer probably gets complicated fast. Because pubic hair has never just been pubic hair. It's been a political statement, a hygiene myth, a porn industry product, a feminist symbol, and a multi-billion-dollar waxing appointment — sometimes all at once. And the pendulum has swung so hard and so fast over the past 50 years that it's worth slowing down to actually ask: what do you want, separate from all of that noise?

The Full Bush Era Wasn't Really About Freedom Either

There's a tendency to romanticize the 1970s as some golden age of body hair liberation — women striding around in their natural glory, completely unbothered. And sure, culturally, the full bush was normalized in ways it simply isn't today. Playboy centerfolds were unshaved. Mainstream movies didn't airbrush. Nobody was booking bikini wax appointments like they were dental cleanings.

But let's not pretend that was entirely autonomous either. The 1970s had its own rigid beauty scripts — just different ones. The point isn't that one era was more enlightened. The point is that every era has handed women a template and called it a personal choice.

What changed in the late 1980s and accelerated through the 1990s was the collision of two massive cultural forces: the mainstreaming of pornography and the global spread of the Brazilian wax.

The Brazilian Wax and the Porn Pipeline

The Brazilian wax arrived in the United States in 1987, courtesy of seven Brazilian sisters who opened a salon in Manhattan and introduced American clients to the concept of removing virtually everything. For most of the late '80s, it stayed relatively niche — a runway model thing, a Miami Beach thing.

Then the internet happened. And with it came an explosion of widely accessible pornography that, almost uniformly, featured hairless vulvas. Researchers who study media influence on body image have documented what happened next with uncomfortable clarity: as porn consumption became a near-universal part of American sexual culture, the aesthetics it promoted — including hairlessness — migrated from the screen into the bedroom and then straight into people's personal grooming routines.

By the mid-2000s, the Brazilian wasn't niche anymore. It was the default. Salons reported that clients — some as young as their mid-teens — were coming in specifically because partners had requested or expected it. The language shifted too. Keeping pubic hair became something you had to justify. Removing it was just... normal.

The Hygiene Myth That Refuses to Die

Somewhere along the way, a particularly stubborn piece of misinformation got attached to all of this: that removing pubic hair is cleaner. More hygienic. Better for your body.

It's not. Full stop.

Pubic hair exists for reasons. It provides a physical barrier against friction and abrasion during sex. It helps regulate temperature in the genital region. It traps moisture and particles before they reach more sensitive tissue. Dermatologists and gynecologists have repeatedly noted that shaving or waxing the pubic area can actually increase vulnerability — to folliculitis (infected hair follicles), to micro-abrasions that make skin more susceptible to STIs, to contact dermatitis from wax ingredients or shaving products.

A study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that roughly 60% of women who groomed their pubic hair reported at least one health complication as a result. Cuts, burns, rashes, infections. The irony of removing hair in the name of cleanliness and ending up with an infected follicle is not subtle.

And yet the hygiene narrative persists — in casual conversation, in locker rooms, occasionally even in doctors' offices where it absolutely should not. It's worth naming this clearly: the idea that a hairless vulva is a cleaner one is a myth with no scientific backing, and it has been extraordinarily useful for selling waxes, razors, and laser packages.

Designer Vaginas and the Grooming-to-Surgery Pipeline

Here's where the pubic hair conversation stops being just about hair. The same cultural forces that normalized the Brazilian wax also contributed to what critics have called "designer vagina" culture — a broader aesthetic project aimed at making vulvas look a very specific way: hairless, symmetrical, tucked, minimized.

Labiaplasty rates in the United States have climbed sharply since the early 2000s. Researchers and plastic surgeons themselves have noted the timing is not coincidental — it tracks almost directly with the rise of hairless porn aesthetics, which made labia visible in ways they hadn't been in previous decades of more heavily groomed adult content. When hair is removed, more anatomy is exposed. When that exposed anatomy gets compared to heavily edited images, insecurity follows. When insecurity follows, surgeons get calls.

This isn't to say every grooming choice leads to the operating table, or that every person who waxes is on a slippery slope. It's to say that these things exist in a connected cultural ecosystem, and pretending they don't helps no one.

The Pluralism Moment — And Why It's Still Messy

Something genuinely interesting has happened in the last several years. Pubic hair has, to some degree, come back. Younger generations are more likely than millennials to report leaving hair at least partially intact. Mainstream media — including fashion magazines that spent two decades airbrushing everything — has published pieces celebrating body hair. Some pornography platforms have leaned into unshaved aesthetics. The "70s bush" has been referenced in beauty trend roundups with enough frequency to feel almost cyclical.

But here's the thing about trend pluralism: it can create the illusion of freedom without actually delivering it. If the current message is "any choice is valid," that sounds liberating. In practice, though, people still navigate partner preferences, social comparison, workplace norms (yes, even for body hair — think: what you feel comfortable wearing to the gym), and an enormous commercial apparatus that profits from grooming regardless of which direction the trend swings.

Waxing salons haven't gone out of business. Laser hair removal is a booming industry. And "natural" has become its own aesthetic category being sold back to people through specific products and specific looks.

So What Does an Autonomous Choice Actually Look Like?

It probably looks quieter than most of us are used to. It doesn't come with a partner's expectation attached. It doesn't arrive from a porn aesthetic you absorbed before you had the framework to contextualize it. It doesn't come from a hygiene myth your aesthetician repeated while applying hot wax.

An autonomous grooming choice might mean asking yourself some genuinely uncomfortable questions: Do I actually like this, or do I like that other people like this? Would I make this same choice if I were single? If I'd never seen pornography? If nobody had ever commented on my body hair one way or another?

None of this means waxing is bad, or that keeping a full bush is more feminist, or that any particular choice is wrong. Bodies are personal. Preferences are real. Some people genuinely love the feeling of being waxed bare. Some people genuinely love leaving everything alone. Both are fine.

The goal isn't to land on the "correct" pubic hair choice. The goal is to make sure the voice making that choice is actually yours — not a porn industry's, not a wax salon's marketing budget, not a partner's offhand comment from three years ago that you've been quietly honoring ever since.

Your pubic hair. Your call. Just make sure you're the one making it.