To Shave or Not to Shave

When Americans talk about sex, we like to use nomenclature to dress up ideas that might otherwise sound unappealing.

Do you want to take a piece of hard, thick flesh that occasionally secrets urine (and may or may not have been washed since the last time it was used for this purpose) and jam it down your throat until you’re practically gagging, then bob your head up and down for three to five minutes while your jaw gets tired, only stopping after you’ve swallowed a wad of salty human excrement? No? Well, would you like to try fellatio? How about oral sex? Or head?

But one reality of sex (and life) seems to have escaped the redeeming moniker: pubic hair. We all have it. Most of us don’t like talking about it.

It makes sense that girls wouldn’t want pubes or bushes any more than they’d want genital warts, so most shave it off and act like it never grew in.

But do we ever stop to think about why?

Our obsession with the bare-down-there goes hand in hand with most girls’ ideas about what physical attributes turns guys on.

If you were to ask an average woman if she thought the body men fantasized most about belonged to a prepubescent 12-year-old boy, she’d probably laugh at the absurdity of your question. But if you then asked her to describe the woman she sees as a man’s ultimate fantasy lover, here’s what you’d probably hear: “Well, she’d be, like, super skinny. Like, stick legs like Blake Lively on Gossip Girl. No hips, no butt… she could stand sideways and hide behind a twig and no one would be able to see her. Ummm… totally shaved, down there, and—oh! Bangs. She’d definitely have bangs.”

That stick-thin, hairless “ideal” body sounds more like a 12-year-old boy’s than a Sports Illustrated model’s.

We’ve talked about this before: girls tend to think that guys want to sleep with waifs, while guys plaster their dorm-room walls with pictures of big boobs, thick thighs, and shelf asses.

That isn’t to say that guys don’t appreciate a smooth landing strip. In fact, most guys we talked to said they preferred a shaved pelvis.

But, for the most part, they also said something along the lines of, “I mean, it doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s not too out of control.”

The bottom line is: when you’re naked, the guy with the view isn’t checking for stray hairs. He’s so happy to be there that his brain can’t even conjure up criticisms. So while a shaved vagina might turn him on more, an unshaved one won’t turn him off.

This doesn’t mean you should stop shaving if it makes you feel more comfortable. But what it does mean is, if you’ve got a five o’clock shadow, don’t feel self-conscious about it.

In an earlier post, we talks about the two things that turn men on most in bed: confidence and enthusiasm. So, ideally, you really shouldn’t be feeling any self-consciousness when you’re getting horizontal. The best way to project confidence is to feel confident, even if you have to fake it by acting like you’ve never felt sexier.

But it might help to know that your bikini line is one of those things that really can’t break the deal. When Indiana Jones finally found the Holy Grail, he didn’t say, “Eh, no thanks. That thing has a little dust around the rim.”

So don’t start acting shy because you forgot to shave. Don’t stop him from removing your thong or demand that he turn off the lights. That type of behavior will turn him off a lot more than a little stubble ever will.