Who Decided Bush Was a Problem?

Rejection and the politics of pubic hair

Photo by Billie on Unsplash

Lexus got rejected by a customer the other night. Apparently her bush was “too big”.

Any derogatory comment on your appearance when you’re naked under neon lights stings — I won’t pretend it doesn’t. And Lexus was naturally upset. In true Lexus fashion she turned to the hip flask in her locker and got absolutely hammered, spending the rest of the night showing her vagina to anyone in the dressing room who would look, demanding an honest assessment.

“Is it actually that big?”

“Be honest”

“No, actually be honest”

“Men are just c%&*!”

In our club (and most others I would imagine), the norm is definitely no hair at all or a small landing strip. That’s just the baked in culture. Partly by design and partly practical — there is nothing less glamorous than a stray pubic hair making it’s appearance outside your G-string mid shift.

But the maintenance side of it all is pretty close to a part time job.

Things like laser hair therapy have considerably lightened the load but there is still so much upkeep. Waxing, shaving, plucking ingrown hairs, grappling skin irritation. It’s finicky admin.

Personally, I have a modest strip. I don’t like the completely bare look and I also hate trends. They always feel suspicious and coercive to me so I do my best to put a (tiny) rebellious foot forward. Also, what if the full 70’s bush comes back into fashion? Then what? All that laser would have been for nothing.

It sort of seems like it might be. The super bare look that dominated for years doesn’t feel quite as compulsory as it once did. There has been a little swing back towards body hair feeling more natural and less shocking. Even fashion and pop culture have been teasing with the return of visible pubic hair again, even if the general consensus is that less is best. Apparently more and more members of Gen Z are choosing to challenge the existing standard and let their hair grow free.

Which brings me to Ruby

Ruby was the only girl in the club that not only got away with having a very full bush, I think it increased her earnings significantly. She wore ‘normal’ underwear, not the skimpy little strings we all squeeze ourselves into and when she revealed her magnificent garden of pubic hair, no one seemed to complain. If anything, it made her stand out even more. It gave her a of distinctness that worked in her favor. She rocked it. And in this environment, owning it is often half the battle.

Mind you, I hear Ruby also offered a few extra incentives in the private rooms, so I’m not saying her bush alone was doing all the heavy lifting. But it definitely didn’t hurt her business.

If anything, it made me wonder whether men’s opinions on pubic hair are a lot less fixed than they like to pretend they are. I think many of them just absorb whatever the dominant look of the time is and then mistake that for an innate preference. They act like they’ve arrived at it independently, but really they’ve just been getting repetitive signaling from porn, advertising, and beauty culture like everybody else.

Hair removal itself is obviously not new.

Humans have been messing around with body hair for centuries. But when it comes to pubic hair specifically, the really intense mainstream expectation for women to remove most or all of it is much more recent. Researchers and historians generally point to the late 1990s and early 2000s as the period when near-total removal became far more widespread and socially expected, which was then helped along by porn, celebrity culture, bikinis getting smaller, and the rise of the Brazilian wax.

By the early 2000s, the Brazilian had become one of those things women were suddenly expected to know about. Pubic hair went from being a non-issue or private preference to a thing that could apparently make or break your desirability. The Brazilian wax in the US is widely linked to the J Sisters in New York, whose salon helped popularize the look in the 1990s, and by the 2000s full or near-full removal had become very common.

Before that, fuller pubic hair was far less likely to be treated like a flaw. It was completely normal. That’s why I find the whole thing so funny now. Women have spent years subjecting themselves to painful, expensive, relentless maintenance… and for what end?

Too bare, too hairy, too trimmed, not trimmed enough, too neat, too wild. You really can’t win sometimes. I remember a past partner’s mother proudly sharing after a couple of wines, that she was booked in for her regular Brazilian wax . I found it interesting how she shared it like it was a badge of honor. Proof that she was still polished, still trying. It’s funny how that small patch of hair almost became a performance of womanhood.

The strip-club magnifies all of this because every beauty standard gets turned up to full volume. Whatever women are already expected to do out in the ‘real world’ becomes more intense in a strip club. Bigger hair. Better tan. Whiter teeth. Smoother skin. Don’t even get me started on the surgically enhanced boobs and bottoms.

So yes, there is pressure around pubic hair in that world. The girls adapt to what sells, what fits the costumes, what other girls are doing, what men seem used to seeing. Grooming trends are common enough that recent research still shows pubic hair removal is widespread among women, with shaving and trimming among the most common methods, usually for reasons like hygiene, comfort, appearance, and sexual activity.

But I also think there’s something totally ridiculous about the fact Lexus ended up in tears over a comment from a customer over a patch of hair.

How much of what we think is sexy is actually just whatever we’ve been told is currently acceptable?

How many women are spending countless hours, money and mental energy trying to keep up with a standard that is actually pretty

And why do other people get to have a say in our own beauty choices?

Anyway, for the record, Lexus’s bush was not too big.

It was just a bush.

I think that should be allowed to be enough.

Thanks for reading, I look forward to continuing the conversation with you below.

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