Hold on to your short and curlies people – for our second Issue Eleven teaser, raconteur extraordinaire Ben Law discusses the pleasure and pain associated with abolishing hair from your nether region.
Want more of KYD Issue Eleven? It will be available for purchase on 10th October. Mark it in your diaries!
Like so many things in my youth, I only got pubes after everyone else did. I was a late-bloomer, which is a nice way of saying I was one goddamned bony rake-runt of a kid. Primary school was my first opportunity to compare myself to other kids, and seeing everyone else made me wonder whether I was deformed, the heir to some bona fide genetic defect.
Everyone else around me seemed physically opposite in every way. They were white; I was Asian. They were tall; I was short. And even at the age of six, they seemed prolifically hairy, while I was Teflon smooth. At the very least, they found me endearing, and my stunted development gave me an unexpectedly handy shortcut to making friends. Because I was a whole human head shorter than everyone else, boys happily rested their elbows on my scalp, and girls rubbed my smooth, smooth arms and cooed.
By high school, however, my general hairlessness came under intense scrutiny. We were only 13, but it seemed as though the guys at my school had already developed full- blown beards. Even the girls had hair in unexpected places: coarse dark hair on their arms, or soft white down on their cheeks like dandelion fluff.
I had nothing. My balls dropped and my voice lowered – It’s finally happening, I thought – but when it came to body hair, I was as smooth as an egg. Guys and girls alike accused me of shaving my arms (I get this even now), until, at long last, they came: the pubes. That’s the funny thing about pubic hair: you spend years wanting to have it, then spend the rest of your life seeking new and inventive ways to get rid of it.
***
For years, women have been plucking, shaving, waxing and trimming pubic hair with gusto and aplomb. Only now it seems that men have caught up.
You can see the trend most evidently in porn, both gay and straight. In vintage porn from the 1970s, women and men have robust and luxuriously thick bushes. Pubic hair is almost celebrated. But by the 1990s, everyone looks as though their bodies have been exposed to intense radiation from the torso down.
In some ways, it makes sense for guys: a shaved or trimmed cock always looks bigger, and shaved balls look – well, perhaps less disgusting than they already are. Personally, I’ve never understood the appeal. If you’re expecting any kind of oral sex, trimming seems like good manners. The complete shave or wax seems like a hat-tip to pederasty.
Male body hair removal isn’t actually new. For a long time, the practice was synonymous with the realm of adult hyper-masculinity. In Ancient Greece, for instance, it was standard for athletes and warriors to remove all their body hair before competition or battle. These days, no one blinks an eye at hard-core cyclists who shave their legs, or professional swimmers who clearly don’t have a single hair from the neck down. There are religious precedents, too. Under sharia law, it is recommended that Muslim men remove armpit and pubic hair every 15 days.
In the secular world you don’t hear many men speaking about pubic topiary, but if you spend enough time in any men’s gym locker room you’ll soon know the practice is widespread. Yet surveys or figures on exactly how many men out there clipper, chop, shave or rip out their pubes – and why they do it – is conspicuously missing, which is odd considering how much data there is about women’s body hair.
Benjamin Law is a Brisbane-based writer and a frequent contributor to frankie, Good Weekend, The Monthly and Qweekend. His debut book, The Family Law (2010), was shortlisted for Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs). His second book Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East is out now.
Pre-order Kill Your Darlings No. 11, or subscribe to the journal here.
