The bush may be back, but I’m just grateful mine never really left

According to a flood of recent TikTok videos, the bush is back.

This public service announcement on social media comes after a year of momentum, seen steadily through Maison Margiela’s Spring 2024 Show featuring visible merkins on the runway, Emma Stone’s character in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and Julia Fox’s pubic hair-printed bikini bottoms during last year’s New York Fashion Week.

But even before its most recent resurgence, I’ve always felt most comfortable with a full bush.

A model in Maison Margiela’s Spring 2024 Show, and Emma Stone’s character in Poor Things.Credit: Getty / Searchlight Pictures

My earliest memory of the female body features my mum’s seventies-style bush. Growing up with Italian parents and grandparents, our household was one where nudity and food were at the forefront. Natural beauty was something to be appreciated, respected and devoured.

This mindset dictated my beauty standards from a young age. “You’re beautiful as you are,” was a phrase often heard and practised before my eyes at each developmental stage. My family showed me that body hair was normal by simply walking around with their own. But outside the family home – and only until very recently – I still felt compelled to hide mine.

In my early twenties, my friends were all lasering their entire bodies and I couldn’t blame them. I’d never seen a bushy bikini line on the beach – not even a stray hair on an inner thigh. I’d not come across a single photo on Instagram, in a fashion campaign, music video or sex scene in a film or TV show – including porn – that featured any sort of female body hair, not to mention a full bush.

During this time, I tried shaving my own hair off, but it never felt natural to me. I felt that to be true to my body I had to keep my bush intact, despite everything outside my family unit – society, my friends and mainstream pop culture – telling me again and again that pubic hair on women wasn’t sexy.

Like most systematic beauty standards, pubic hair removal for women isn’t an invention of the 21st century. It dates back to ancient civilisations when Egyptians, Greeks and Romans associated hairlessness with youth, purity and status. Wealthy people, especially women, removed body hair using pumice stones, tweezers or early razors.

This attitude continued in the 14th century and all the way into the early 19th century. While pubic hair was rife in day to day life during periods like the Renaissance, the Baroque and Rococo, the Neoclassical and Romantic periods and into the start of Realism and Early Modernism, pubic hair was not the ideal depicted in art and literature.

But who were the dictators at this time? The artists? The storytellers? Men.

While male body hair has been historically seen as a sign of masculinity, a woman with body hair has been historically framed as “unfeminine”. This rigid gender norm framework is still at play today.

Many modern men don’t have a problem saying that they wouldn’t date someone with armpit hair or that unshaved legs are a turn-off. In fact, I’ve heard these phrases from men I know within the past year.

But to see pubic hair as purely masculine is to overlook its entire function. Although body hair – especially down there – has been increasingly seen as “unclean” in modern times, this is scientifically known to be untrue.

Research published in 2024 outlines the role pubic hair plays in female sexual and overall health, including protection against irritation, a barrier against infection, maintaining natural moisture and pH balance, as well as containing pheromones that can enhance sexual attraction.

The narrative that pubic hair is dirty, both literally and figuratively, is linked to a wholly patriarchal idea of what it means to be an attractive woman.

Who are women really grooming themselves for?Credit: iStock

Ironically, my experiences with men have shown me otherwise.

When I decided to fully embrace my bush, I was in my mid-twenties and a few years into dating. I wanted to feel comfortable in my own body, especially within physical intimacy, and I felt that to achieve that autonomy, I needed my pubic hair.

I’m now 29 years old, and my current boyfriend exclaimed “you have a bush!” with glee when he undressed me for the first time. In fact, most men that have seen me naked have had a similar reaction – some of them surprising themselves, caught in the web of patriarchal beauty standards without actually knowing their own preferences through experience.

It’s funny that a physical trait believed to deter men is actually a turn on for them. It just goes to show how much we’re missing within sex education and just how little we know about our own primal instincts, behaviours, what’s normal and what’s not — especially when it comes to how our bodies look and feel.

We’re seeing more casual pubic hair now than we ever have before. Women are in a new kind of revolution; one of radical self-love and a realisation that male opinion isn’t necessary for success. With this newfound freedom comes recognition for our bodies in their natural form.

The question of who we’re grooming ourselves for becomes one for us only, which then leads us to ask if we’re the ones bothered by our own pubic hair. And if so, why?

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