The Hair Bare Bunch a.k.a Why Barbie Has No Pubes
I have a theory about men’s pubic hair preferences. I think that a young man’s first exposure to naked womanhood in a sexual context sets his subconcious expectations for what a woman should be like - and defines what he will find most attractive for the rest of his life.
I well remember as a very young man - perhaps around eleven or twelve years old - having a great attraction to and fascination with the pubic area of the various fertile young ladies around me, but, never having seen them naked, my understanding of the anatomy was a little erroneous.
Men have always tended to jump to conclusions on anatomical matters. For more than a thousand years, our main understanding of how the human body was put together came from an ancient anatomist called Galen. His collection of drawings of the skeleton, organs, circulatory system, and so on, were widely copied, much studied, and relied upon almost exclusively for 1500 years. Unfortunately, owing to the fact that Galen had based them entirely on his dissection of dogs, and more or less extrapolated from there when drawing humans, they weren’t exactly accurate.
Similarly my understanding of the female anatomy was based on an entirely logical thought process; but nevertheless it was quite wrong. For example, I was quite certain that the vagina was a vertical slit on the front of the woman’s body, just below the stomach - an arrangement which is so clearly superior to the actual design that I hardly need explain.
In any case, my education in the true nature of the female fun parts came in the form of a collection of old Penthouse magazines someone else had left in an abandoned treehouse near my home. What a revelation! But more than simply supplying the anatomical details, these magazines - from the early 80s - set me up with an indelible image of what young, sexy, confident womanhood looked like. There was a model women in my head; a girl to aspire to. She was smiling. She was spreading herself open for me to see. She had small, natural breasts. And she was hairy.
Now as is the normal way of things, it wasn’t too long before I was gaining some practical experience of these matters with girls my own age in the innocent sexual play of curious young teenagers. I quickly learned that sexiness comes in many shapes and sizes, as well as in many haircuts.
But still, there’s a part of me that likes hair. The wilder, the longer, and the denser, the better. It signals womanhood to me; I like the feel of it and the smell of it. It is animal, and crude, and a little bit dirty. It is real in almost exactly the same way that the Barbie version of womanhood, all pink plastic, baby-smooth skin, and silicon implants, isn’t. There are a thousand reasons to love it.
But honestly, I think the real reason is that the first time I gazed on the female sex, it looked more like this…
…than like this…
As a culture we are in deep denial about our animal nature. We are intensely sexual beings, but we are at war with our sexual nature. Rejection of body hair is a rejection of the animal nature of our sexuality, and an attempt to replace it with something clean, safe, and domestic. If we can think of a way to deal with the smell of our sexual fluids and the wet patch they leave on the bed, we surely will, for the same reason. We like orgasms; but we don’t really want to have sex. Really we want to play sex with Barbie in a bizarre caricature of female sexuality; huge breasts, and no pubes.
Me, I’m comfortable with real women, with real boobs and real hair. But I have to admit I’m drawing the line at underarm hair…
snzl wrote:
What you said below:
“”"
As a culture we are in deep denial about our animal nature. We are intensely sexual beings, but we are at war with our sexual nature. Rejection of body hair is a rejection of the animal nature of our sexuality, and an attempt to replace it with something clean, safe, and domestic. “”"
Is the same reason we have been slicing the foreskins off healthy males at birth. We want to contain sex, destroy the animal parts of our nature, sanitize and control our sexual nature.
At least with women, it grows back.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 4:56 am | Permalink
erik wrote:
interesting insight. raw, creepy and real all at the same time
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 5:20 am | Permalink
Feh wrote:
Animal Nature is sooooo 3 million years ago. Body hair is ancient crap … go live in a cave.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 6:37 am | Permalink
a concerned soul wrote:
http://reddit.com/info/60j0r/comments/
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 7:11 am | Permalink
KenManiac wrote:
personally, i like pit hair too. it just seems even more like a human feature. it really upsets me that you (almost) never see sexy women with hairy pits.
hairy pits are a real turn-on for me, as are small tits and tiny, Tina Fey-style glasses.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 7:18 am | Permalink
Zach Alexander wrote:
Hate to break it to you, but your last line blew your whole post.
If you’re not comfortable with underarm hair, you’re not comfortable with “real women,” so please spare us the self-righteous moralizing.
Me, I’m comfortable with real women, armpit hair included. But I don’t feel guilty about otherwise being my preference — or feel the need to bash other people’s preferences.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 7:32 am | Permalink
jason wrote:
you’re ignoring the prevalence of oral sex and the inconvenience of pubic hair for frequent munching. plus, the obsession with fully nude pubes ignores the aesthetic pleasures of a nice trim. it doesn’t have to be gone, but it doesn’t need to be unruly, either.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 7:53 am | Permalink
Justin wrote:
Do you have to be so f’ing pretentious? It’s sex; some people like hair, some people don’t. Some people think pubic hair is dirty, some people think a bald vagina is dirty. It’s subjective, a case of personal preference. Saying you’re “comfortable with real women, with real boobs and real hair,” that’s just your way of claiming superiority over us brainwashed men who prefer women groom their privates the way you prefer they groom their arm pits.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 8:28 am | Permalink
cake wrote:
No, it is because it is annoying to get hair stuck in your teeth all the time. And for pornography, it is because you don’t get to see all the good bits.
Try to look for the simple answers before filling the page with more text and less pictures.
Thanks for the pics.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 9:33 am | Permalink
MTS wrote:
The topic in general, and the pictures and comments in particular, invite extensive discussion. Limited by space and time, I’ll just go with some highlights.
Hair, pubic, underarm and leg in women, plus facial hair in men, in most cultures is a hallmark of sexual maturation and availability.
With the advent (and dominance) of porn on the internet, shaved women are becoming the pictorial norm. To me, this conflates with the culture of male control and domination: shaved = the illusion that the girl is too young to have pubes = increased vulnerability and lack of assertiveness.
Many people of both genders believe that the current trends in web porn denigrate the humanity, dignity and equality of women and removing their pubic area contributes to an implicit aura of defenselessness and submissiveness that men seem to enjoy.
It seems to me that the bovine plasticity of our shaven icons is merely a symptom of a general retreat from personal contact and the effort of making love … replaced by the desire to whack off in front of two-dimensional images on a computer screen.
All of this points to a diminished sense of sexual adequacy in men. Some of this is real – reduced libido due to lousy diet, obesity, lack of exercise, etc., is on the upswing. But much of this perception is generated by savvy marketers capitalizing upon - and perpetuating - the belief that men need pills to prove/enhance their manhood. The combination of Enzyte’s ‘Smiling Bob’ and the thousands of guys in web porn videos with massive tools has saturated the subconscious of the many contemporary men.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 10:19 am | Permalink
Sonia wrote:
Thanks. That’s all I have to say. After a shitty night, you managed to give me some hope about the male members of our distinguished species.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 12:08 pm | Permalink
david wrote:
“But I have to admit I’m drawing the line at underarm hair…”
your point is interesting, but the contradiction (although humorous) is immense. personally, i prefer the second woman … for two reasons:
1. i like a girl shaved all over! vagina, armpits, legs.
2. eating a shaved clam is much more delicious and comfortable than wading through a forest of hair. LOL
so, you can keep the hairy backed cave girls … send my way the ones who like to shave down!
cheers
david
davidsmeaton.com
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 12:10 pm | Permalink
Thatguy wrote:
We’re obsessed with shaved pubic regions because we’re not allowed to sleep with young pubescent girls. This is a repressed desired being expressed in a socially acceptable way. Youth is a component of a woman’s attractiveness, so any subconscious cues that suggest a woman is younger (IE: no wrinkles, full perky breasts, little or no hair, bright eyes, full lips) create beauty in our eyes. This isn’t a complex issue.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 3:39 pm | Permalink
alastair wrote:
Never in my years of perusing comment sections have I encountered so many people who have entirely missed the point of an article.
MTS and snzl are the only ones who got it right. As for david…well, you offered a glimmer of hope but ruined it by saying you preferred a “tastier” shaven “clam”, proving the author’s point better than almost everyone else.
PS Nobody cares about your website, david. Give it up.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 3:49 pm | Permalink
Toeachtheirown wrote:
It’s such a tired cliche that people who like shaved body hair are somehow all victims of a false consciousness brought on by some psychosocial lack or excess.
If you researched this matter a bit more carefully instead of just asserting your opinions, you’d find that genital shaving is an ancient practice that goes back at least to the Egyptians and has been practiced by both men and women throughout recorded history.
Any “analysis” that fails to note this fact is clearly not very well thought out and probably very poorly informed on matters of sexuality. If you have preferences, then wax poetic on them, but don’t immediately resort to hating other people’s preferences as your only means of expression. It’s a sad comment on ones own maturity to do so.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 3:55 pm | Permalink
Joost wrote:
Man, tastes are personal but let’s be real. The first woman looks great until you scroll down and see that wild muskus rat that is attacking her private parts. Yuk! The second picture is nasty as well I admit but the truth is somewhere in the middle isn’t it. No pun intended.
If you like hair. Great. The rest of the world has other feelings about that. It is just not sexy to see hair sticking out from under a swimsuit or having to use a lawnmower to get to where you so like to be. Tastes a different of course so I am glad there are also men out there for the cave girls out there.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 4:23 pm | Permalink
Fred wrote:
I much prefer hair. I don’t like the shaved look at all. Things have changed so much in the last 10 years.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 5:29 pm | Permalink
Joseph wrote:
I for one can live with pubic hair on a woman, and I actually find it somewhat attractive, because it actually makes her look natural and mature. Those are two traits sorely lacking in many females today, and perhaps in humanity in general. You know, there are so many fake-boobed, tattooed, belly button pierced, plastic looking girls nowadays, or at least that is the image that the media is pressing. Whatever the reason, all of these superficialities are really rather disgusting IMHO. But I guess it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that 4 decades of forcing unrealistically-proportioned Barbie dolls on girls would eventually translate into a global sickness of the female self-image.
Posted on 14-Nov-07 at 11:43 pm | Permalink
michael wrote:
sexuality has and always will be dynamic. Having someone tell me how it’s supposed to be is like someone telling me to try the dollar meal. We project how dynamic we (as males) are sexually onto females because we’re afraid of our male peers. As males, we have to be physically as strong as our fantasies (we think). Fact is, most people are relieved to hear someone say, “Hey, I once did my ferret!”
Posted on 15-Nov-07 at 8:29 am | Permalink
Noah Sri Babh wrote:
Do women who prefer men with smooth balls really want to sleep with prepubescent boys? What about the almost 2 billion people in the world whose scripture prescribes depilation of the pubis at least once a month?
I’ve been with a number of women with smooth pubes, and saw my 3 sisters when changing their diapers, and lemme tell you, adult women with smooth vulvas look nothing like young girls.
Posted on 15-Nov-07 at 8:57 am | Permalink
Jogn wrote:
Why do mean shave their faces?
For the same reason women shave everything else.
We do it to look younger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny
Posted on 15-Nov-07 at 5:17 pm | Permalink
Joe wrote:
While I could make a comment that not liking pit hair is somewhat contradictory to your point, I’ll agree that the “I like shaven clams better” comments do prove your point.
First off, if you can’t eat pussy that’s hairy without getting hair in your mouth then you can’t eat pussy right.
Secondly, the girl in the first pic doesn’t have a “jungle” or anything, she has a NORMAL AVERAGE amount of pubes. Wanna see a jungle? There are women who have it, that girl isn’t one.
Third, the frustration with us guys that like hairy women isn’t the preference thing, it’s the fact that you almost cannot find a woman with hairy pubes who isn’t either an ultra-religious, sheltered, asexual, frigid Jesus-freak, a hippie, or otherwise undesirable pubic hair aside. And the feeling that a woman “has” to shave to be accepted is bothersome. If it were just a fashion thing that some women decided to do and others didn’t, like dying your (head) hair, or deciding to go short vs. long (head hair again) it would be one thing. A woman doesn’t get called “gross” or “hippie” for deciding to grow her head hair long, it’s considered her style preference. But dare she not shave her pubic hair?! “Call the press! We have a freak here!” is the typical reaction. Sheesh.
Posted on 02-May-08 at 3:17 pm | Permalink
Joe wrote:
I too saw my first nude girls in early 80s Penthouse and Playboy mags my dad had stashed - I was about 10 and this was in 1987 or so. And in high school (early 90s) all the teenage girls I fooled around with had pubes too - so it’s ingrained in me to prefer them. In college I dated a few shaved girls and a couple hairy ones but since then, finding an unshaved woman is like finding palm trees in Alaska! The one woman I dated from 2004-2005 who didn’t shave had a very nice bush, but she was rather sheltered and repressed, wanted to wait till marriage for intercourse, and did no oral, nothing but hand jobs for me and me fingering her - wouldn’t even LET me go down on her and it had nothing to do with her pubes…she just thought it was nasty. She also had never had an orgasm and wasn’t willing to let me try new things to give her one.
Posted on 02-May-08 at 3:46 pm | Permalink