At first blush, losing weight by pulling on your pubes would appear to fall into the time-honored category defined by this cliché: If something sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. Losing weight is never that easy. You have to suffer, exert yourself, beat those extra pounds off your body. How could all that exertion be replaced by a mere “two-minute tug on the rug?” It doesn’t make sense. The sceptical mind will lump this tip into a heap with snake oil and dianetics.

The perverse mind might even take it a step further. Is there perhaps a hidden agenda lurking beneath this strange advice? For example, it would be easy to suspect that the real point is not the stated purpose (lose weight! be pretty!) but the side effect (lose pubes). Women are told not to “worry about pubic hairs that fall out and to continue yanking away” — yes, continue yanking away, because every stray pube you comb out of your bush is a stray pube that won’t get stuck in some dude’s front teeth.

Or perhaps the secret intent is simply to get women to excite themselves. Sure, let your hand loiter in your panties — it’s a cosmetic thing, a hygienic thing, no need to feel ashamed. And meanwhile if there are certain feelings or expressions of excitement, well, these are natural. Moisture is the way your vagina weeps tears of joy. Just go with the flow, it’s all right…

It is difficult not to suspect that, if the two-minute tug makes women look sexier, it may well be because they’ve just gotten themselves horny.

There used to be a time when the human body was a sort of foreign country. A hundred and fifty years ago, the only pornography you were likely to see was on a Greek vase at an art museum. There is a story about the 19th century art critic John Ruskin that, the first time he saw his fiancé naked, he was mortified by the sight of pubic hair on her body. Somehow he’d gotten so accustomed to all those “bare down there” statues that he didn’t realize his bride, like himself, would have pubic hair.

Nowadays it’s different. Odds are some of your earliest memories may include glimpses of pornography — a Playboy magazine found under a bed, an uncle’s Penthouse or Hustler. When you were a kid, you would find one of these things and view it with a strange, panting wonder. They were exciting, even if you didn’t understand why, but they were also very mysterious. Differences in the color of pubic hair would have been precisely the type of thing to set you wondering. Why were all those blonde babes endowed with pubes the color of raccoon fur? Did they dye their hair? Probably. But if not, why was one location light and the other dark? It was almost symbolic, as though the dark pubes suggested the hiddenness of the organs they accompanied.

But now you know it’s all just a matter of chemistry. The head has its palette of melanin and the pubes have theirs. The mysteries of the body seem to be cleared up through good science, and yet good science leaves in its wake a body that just doesn’t seem as whole as it once did. It’s like discovering that one leg can be shorter than the other. Entirely separate chemical regimes govern different parts of your appearance. It almost makes you wonder if they can get totally out of sync, so that one day you wake up with white hair and blue pubes, or perhaps with a bush that resembles the fright wig of a clown.

hi should i shave my pussy’s hair off? i think it is sexy but my husband likes to take the strands between his teeth when we are having oral sex. also he likes the erotic scent of the follicles after they have been rubbing up my pussy. he also thinks it is kinky to find those curly q’s in the bathtub after i take a shower. to tell you the truth, i can’t stand his pubic hair. do you know how disgusting it is to see him wearing a speedo at the beach or poolside with pubes coming out of swimsuit at the top and thigh region. boy, does he have a lot. and would you believe, he has the nerve to yank at those buggers — consciously. sometimes he will give me a smirk from the high dive if he knows i am watching him do that. when i was giving birth, he wouldn’t let the nurse shave me before the delivery bc he said it wasn’t necessary and what did woman back in colonial times do? well, after the birth, he was the one with the washcloth in hand removing clots of afterbirth and stuff. just thought i’d share my thoughts and comments with you all. bye.

Well, Curly, most married couples fight about money, so if pubic hair is your only source of dispute, consider yourself lucky. What’s more, the solution to your dilemma is relatively obvious. You don’t like pubes. He does. Why don’t you ask him to trim his below-the-belt beard? In exchange, offer to leave the hair on your pussy long enough to braid. In that way, you please each other. If he refuses, then he’s evidently a selfish fuck and you might as well be selfish too. If he won’t shave, then you should go ahead and do whatever it is that makes you feel good about yourself.

More generally, the question you pose points to a broader dilemma. In matters sexual, how does a person balance between the desire to please oneself and the desire to please one’s partner? Sometimes the two desires merge — if you enjoy giving head, for example, it’s win-win for both parties — and sometimes they diverge, as when you abandon all care for your partner to sprint that last few yards to orgasm. In the first case, when your desires are in unison, there’s obviously not a problem. But in the second case, when desires separate and even compete, it can be difficult to decide what to do. After all, in the ethics of sexuality, there aren’t always clear imperatives. If somebody has a loaf of bread and you’re hungry, it’s easy to see that it’s wrong (in most cases) to steal the bread from him. However, if your need to orgasm is going to cost another person his pleasure, it’s less clear what is the “right” thing to do.

Philosophy has had much to say about ethics but little to say about sexuality, at least until relatively recently, so it would be interesting to see someone attempt to work through a problem such as this. Plainly there is erotic egoism — “getting yours” — and erotic altruism, sacrifies one makes for the pleasure of others. How do they impinge on one another? What sorts of criteria govern the relationship between the two? How would they fit into the Platonic triumvirate of truth, beauty, and goodness? Can they be inferred from the deductive ethical system of Spinoza? Could you apply the categorical imperative of Kant to the problem of pubic hair?

(Thanks to tokyostory2000 for the link.)

On one hand, what the good doctor says is probably true: more people are removing their body hair because anyone who lives in a contemporary first-world nation has great freedom and encouragement to explore sexuality. Pornography is no longer the business of creeps in trenchcoats, and at the drugstore you can buy condoms right next to the cash register — in plain view of everybody. Probably people would have been mortified a generation ago to ask a doctor about permanent hair removal in private parts of their bodies. Now it’s no big deal.

On the other hand, it’s also worth pointing out that there is no intrinsic link between overt sexuality and permanent hair removal. Just because society is more open about sex does not necessarily mean that everybody has to keep it clean in-between. Obviously there are a variety of cultural norms and individual preferences affecting the contemporary trend toward shaved pubes. (And though technically butt hair is not pubic hair, it’s kind of the bastard cousin.) For example, there are men — and perhaps even entire cultures — who prefer copious amounts of hair down there.

And once you understand that shaved pubes are a sign of the times, you can’t help but wonder what forces inspire people to prefer bare to hair. Is it a desire to appear young? A repudiation of animal nature? Or just a practical effort to minimize the number of wiry black hairs that get caught in your teeth?

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

Sometimes it’s amazing that people continue to eat in restaurants. You just know that this kind of thing happens all too often. Somebody has a bad day at work — gets yelled at by the boss, burns his hand on the oven, realizes that a third of his paycheck goes to taxes. And then all of a sudden he finds himself possessed by the thought that he’ll feel better by making somebody else suffer. He spits into your grilled cheese sandwich or lays curly black hairs from his crotch across the surface of your pizza. Or he defiles the “special sauce” on your Big Mac in some truly hideous, unspeakable way.

When you think about it, it’s odd that hurting an innocent stranger should make a person feel better about their own misfortunes. William Burroughs always used to marvel at how baboons, when threatened by their peers, would turn and attack smaller baboons. Maybe there is something of the same principle in malicious tricks like this pube-in-the-pizza business. Maybe inflicting harm on a stranger is some sort of subconscious way of trying to ward off your own troubles.

It’s not utterly ridiculous to think that the shape of a person’s pubic hair might say something about him or her as a person — if, that is, the person actively chose to shave it into some particular shape. For example, a person who shaves his pubic hair off might have some underlying urge to regain childhood or innocence. And there are half a dozen other styles you can choose for your pubes — the racing strip, the Tiffany, the Beckham, etc — and wherever there is choice, you can make some inference or other about what the choice expresses.

But does the natural shape of a woman’s pubes express anything? Well, it might say something minor about anatomy or maybe even diet, but to think that it expresses anything further sounds pretty ridiculous. The researcher is a seventy-year-old guy who claims that his years of experience taught him the correlation between a woman’s pubes and her personality, but really you suspect he’s a nutcase on the verge of Alzheimer’s. What’s more, his notions of a “good wife” and so on are so clearly biased that it’s hard to give any credit to his perceived connection between bush and bitch. About the best you can say about his idea is that studying pubic hair has to be more fun than reading tea leaves or star chats.

There used to be an artist here in New York who would collect the hairballs from the drain in his shower and make them into little sculptures. The joke — and it wasn’t much more than a joke — was that it lent art’s power of eternity to the most ephemeral of waste products. For what is more ephemeral than stray hairs, fingernail clippings, flecks of skin, peeled scabs? When you see a random pube stuck to a bar of soap, you hardly imagine it persisting through the centuries to end up in a museum somewhere — lovers of literature coming along to see it and say, “Yes, pubic hair wasn’t much different in those days…”

You have to wonder what the line is between common sense and curatorial zeal. Maybe these pube trimmings had a sentimental value to Byron, but what value could they possibly have today? Are they to be preserved simply because the tumultous poet himself once esteemed them? Or should they just be tossed in the trash, like the trimmings from anybody else’s old rag? What use are the tokens of passion when the passionate themselves have long since turned to dust?

You have to be pretty stupid — er, culturally conditioned — to believe that thick pubic hair is a sign of fertility. Do people with long hair think better? Do men with beards enjoy their food more? Do women with hairy legs run faster? Do people with nose hair enjoy a more refined sense of smell? Pubic hair has little to do with fertility and much to do with hygiene. Thick pubes are a crab trap, a mite nest, a lice lounge — not a baby carriage.

Then again, where there is superstition, there is business opportunity, and you can’t blame this surgeon for offering pubic hair transplants, however ridiculous they may be. If you lived in Korea you would probably receive — alongside spam for penis enlargement, enhanced sexual potency, and bigger breasts — email promising thicker pubes, a forest of fertility.

(Note to self: no more cunnilingus for Koreans. Who needs all that hair caught in his teeth?)

Given the immense popularity of body modification, tattoos, piercing, and so on, pubic hair will no doubt become the Next Big Thing, the medium of choice for the body-art vanguard. Using tools and instruments like this new Remington shaver, people will become veritable painters of pubes, creating noble works of art out of little black hairs. You can already imagine the bold new creations they’ll render in their fuzzy little crotch carpets. They’ll have names like the Trompe l’Oeil, which makes the vagina look like a penis, and the Kitsch, in which the pubes are dyed pink and shaved into the shape of a crucifix. Some designs will be named after famous artists: the Mona Lisa will give the pubes a mysterious little smile, the Caspar David Friedrich will shape the pubes into an isolated figure staring off into the vaginal horizon, and the Rothko will transform the vagina into a chapel. Other designs will be named after art movements of the past: the Cubist will put the breasts on top of the vagina, the Expressionist will transform the pubic hair into an expression of suffering and angst (certainly this will prove popular with Goth girls), and the Minimalist will turn the vagina into a square box.