I remember biking to the Korean nail salon every three weeks in high school so that a woman could sear off my film of mustache and thick eyebrows, chastising me if I waited too long. Their teasing made me feel bestial. Soon my friends and I all went to liberal colleges, where we read Simone de Beauvoir and plastered posters of Frida Kahlo to our dorm walls, her unibrow and facial mustache a symbol for her hairy resistance of the white patriarchy. But if my leg hair was a statement, it was only a statement of my laziness. I like the feeling of a smooth, glistening, clean, leg like I like the smell of fresh cut grass after it rains. I like the showering shaving ritual, the lathering of foamy creams, the tropical gels smelling of pineapples and coconuts as though I am surfing on the shores of Bali, the smooth line of the razor clearing through foam like the contrail of a plane in the sky.
To shave or not to shave down there? I won't let porn trends decide
Photo by Marcel via Stocksy. Although pubic hair has become more of a political statement than who you're voting for in the election, to bush or not to bush has been on our minds for centuries. What used to symbolize a girl's introduction to womanhood, or the time where she would be able to bear children, has become a polarized topic.
I am a year-old single heterosexual woman, living in New York City. Just like thousands of other women I wonder if I will ever find The One, or if I will be a lonely old lady with cats who yells at the neighbors. I have dated a few men who have asked me to shave my pubic hair.