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.
One night, vaguely drunk, I ran my own survey, advertising it on Twitter, and promising anyone who participated that I would share the results. Turns out a lot of men are curious about other men’s pubes. Over 48 hours, I had roughly 500 responses from around the world. Of the men who responded, half identified as straight, the rest as bisexual or gay. Unsurprisingly, 94.4 per cent of gay or bi men said they had altered their pubes at some stage in life, but so had 76.4 per cent of straight men. Most men did it for appearances (77.6 per cent) or because it made their genitals look bigger (27.1 per cent), because their partner preferred it (22.4 per cent) or because it felt better for sex (22.9 per cent). As one respondent so eloquently put it, ‘Ladies love a neat lawn!’ There was also this memorable contribution: ‘I really enjoy pooing so much more when waxed. Feels better and so convenient!’
There were also gruesome tales of pubic work gone wrong. Because men are so reluctant to see professionals about these things, a lot of the responses contained horror stories of nicks, cuts, infected ingrown hairs and waxing injuries that left me slack-jawed and weeping. One respondent from London confided: ‘I once did nick myself on the balls with a pair of scissors, which was quite disconcerting. That part of the body gets rather a lot of blood flow…’ And this: ‘One time I got an ingrown hair so large it burst by itself and leaked through to the front of my trousers in the middle of the day…’
I’d often been told about the virtues of a completely hairless set of tackle. After the Twitter survey, for obvious reasons, I decided to see a professional.
*
I visited a man named Anthony Savva, who is renowned between Brisbane and Sydney as the king of male pubic hair removal. Day in, day out, Anthony is elbow deep in scrotums, chests, underarms, legs, necks, shoulders, backs, perineums, penises and arseholes. His menu makes him sound like a butcher who specialises in offal, but Anthony’s professional mission is to make men silky smooth with the modern miracle of wax. If you came into his studios with the body of a bear, he would leave you with the kind of pristine hairless figure from which a stranger would happily eat sashimi.
Male waxing isn’t niche any more, Anthony told me. A lot of his customers are men who work in the mines or on oil rigs. Tradies were big too, electricians, plumbers and carpenters, as well as businessmen, older men, married men, single men, young guys. Which is to say, basically everyone. When I asked whether there was a typical demographic of guys who sought out his expertise – straight or gay, younger or older – Anthony shrugged. ‘A lot of heterosexuals,’ he said, cryptically.
Anthony was going to give me what they called a male Brazilian: crack, sack and quite a significant bit of shaft. Despite my nerves, I told myself to keep an open mind. After all, what could go wrong?
‘Actually, there are all sorts of things that can go wrong,’ Anthony said, as if reading my mind. ‘Unfortunately, like with every profession, we do have our high, low and medium standards, in terms of service. For instance, a lot of other salons don’t apply baby powder, which is an integral part of the waxing treatment.’
Skipping the baby powder step was a grave error, Anthony explained. Without powder, the wax absorbed the sweat from your skin, clinging to it and ripping it clean off, along with the hair. What you needed, Anthony said, was to create a barrier between the skin and the wax, which is where the powder came in.
As he explained the entire process to me, I found myself feeling more comfortable. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s do this.’ And that’s when Savva told me to remove my pants.
He left me alone in the waxing room. He added I could leave my shirt on if I preferred. As he closed the door, I wondered what kind of person preferred to do this thing entirely naked, but when I removed my pants, I realised there were few moments in life where one just wears a shirt on its own.
When Savva returned, I was lying face-down on a combination of dentist chair and massage table. Anthony gently wiped my arse with a warm moist towel. This is not an unpleasant experience, having another man wipe the entirety of your crack and anus. It’s sort of like the comfort you get from rubbing a hot towel on your face before a long-haul Singapore Airlines flight – except, on your anus. Anthony applied powder and warm wax to my arse crack and began ripping the strips off with gusto. To my surprise, it didn’t hurt at all. Removing anus hair is swift and quick. After a small buzz, there is no lingering pain.
For the scrotum, Anthony used a different wax: a warm, blue concoction that had the texture of putty. He told me to stretch my scrotum taut to one side as he applied the goo.
Pathetically, I asked him whether this would hurt. I was afraid the process would tear off my entire sack, leaving nothing but blood and entrails and tubing. ‘For some people, it stings for a second and then it stops,’ he said. ‘It depends on how thick the hair is.’ I looked down at my pubes. Asian pubic hair grows kinky rather than curly, and is particularly coarse and thick. This would hurt, no matter what he said.
‘Okay, take a big breath –’ (I breathed in) ‘– and breathe out.’ With one fluid swipe, Anthony ripped out every hair from the right side of my scrotum. It hurt, like a quickly receding scorch, but not as much as I’d expected. When I asked to see what he’d taken off, he showed me something incredible. It looked like a primitive sea creature, a jelly-like blue blob with a million black nerves and white tips growing out of it, like little fibre-optic cables. I couldn’t stop touching it. It resembled a space alien.
Finally, Anthony said we were going to ‘clear the sides’, which was code for waxing pubes around the shaft itself. After being instructed to pull my cock firmly to one side, I obediently stretched the thing to its limits. It was possibly the unsexiest thing I had done in my life.
‘It’s a bit more … sensitive here,’ Anthony warned me. ‘Deep breath in. Breathe out –’ There was a blinding white sheet of pain. Imagine someone running a metal fruit peeler sharply alongside the side of your penis, very quickly. My mouth hung open, unable to make a sound.
*
In the aftermath, I couldn’t stop touching myself. (Not in that way: you’re told to avoid certain activities like ‘massage’ for at least 24 hours.) It was like a new world down there. Still, while my junk looked decidedly bigger, it had never looked more ridiculous either. To avoid ingrown hairs, Anthony left me with a little patch that hovered above the entire arrangement, sort of like a pubic beret or the genital equivalent of a soul patch. If Shannon Noll was a penis, he would look like this, I thought.
At that point, I was glad my partner was overseas and didn’t have to see me this way. Though it would take weeks, I decided I wanted to grow it all back, and soon. It was like being 13 years old again, with all that waiting ahead of me.
