Why am I still ashamed of showing bush?

“From puberty onwards, I’ve not heard a single woman talk about loving or embracing their pubic hair.”

Laura Roscioli is a sex writer based in Melbourne. She feels passionately about making sex (and the conversations around it) more accessible, approachable and open. She also believes that the best learnings come from lived experience, and she’s here to share hers with you each fortnight on FJ alongside other musings, experiences and questions. You can follow Laura on Instagram at @lauraroscioli.

I remember the first time I shaved my vagina. I was fifteen and in the shower, my hands shaking. Looking down between my legs, the job felt impossible. I could barely shave my knees without ending up with a cut, how was I going to tackle the sensitive and curved surface area of my vulva? 

No one had shown me how. There were no educational videos on the internet or accessible articles about why we should (or shouldn’t). There were no explainers hidden in the sealed section of the magazine I often looked to for advice like this. I couldn’t ask my mum, because I was pretty sure she’d never tackled her pubic hair with a razor – she was a teenager in the late ’70s and I’d seen her proud bush my whole life.

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I felt alone and didn’t want to go through with it. But I also didn’t want to get teased at my friends’ pool party on the weekend. Everyone would be wearing bikinis and there’d be no pubic hair in sight. All the girls seemed to talk about was how often, vigorously and triumphantly they got rid of it. So, off it came.

I stood naked in front of my bedroom mirror afterwards, looking at my body in its new hairless form. I felt stripped in a way I didn’t like. My vagina felt cold, smooth, surreal. It looked small and kind of vulnerable. Meek, in an unnatural way.

I shrugged off the feelings at the time because I couldn’t grow my pubic hair back instantly and I knew that my uncomfortable smoothness would save me the discomfort of worrying about strays finding a way outside my panty line on party day. Being hairless felt like the only option. 

Maybe that’s why, all these years later, I still feel a pang of hesitation when it comes to showing my bush off. This little ‘What will they think?’ pops into my mind when I hit ‘publish’ on an Instagram thirst trap, each time I relax my legs poolside with a friend and almost every time I’ve first gotten naked in front of someone new throughout my twenties.

I have a moment where it feels instinctual to hide my inner thighs, to crop the photo above bush height, to look at the expression on their face when it looks down to gauge if they’re grossed out or not. I feel self-conscious of my pubic hair, not in a way that makes me want to change the way I look or groom, but in a way that makes me feel aware of something about my body making someone else uncomfortable. 

In my early twenties, when I was having a lot of sex and really coming into my own sexual liberation, I decided that I didn’t want to shave down there anymore. I’d been on-and-off shaving it since that year 10 pool party and I was tired of the ingrown hairs, the endless inner-thigh prickles, pimples and the sandpaper-y texture. I didn’t want to think about shaving anymore. It didn’t feel comfortable or easy, and it didn’t feel like me. 

I liked the way pubic hair looked and felt. When I was in high school that feeling had felt super controversial because it wasn’t talked about as an option for any female who had the desire to be desirable. I thought maybe I was just weird because I didn’t care about giving my vagina a buzzcut. I liked it the way it naturally was. 

It started to make sense as I began to understand what it meant to be a woman, sexually. The more liberated I felt, the more powerful I became. The more I understood my curves, my softness, my boobs, my patience, my long nails… and my pubic hair. It felt like a part of being feminine, of being a woman. It felt sacred or something. For me, it felt natural. So, I decided I didn’t want to trim it or shave it anymore. 

From that moment on, I’ve never felt insecure about it sexually. Any man or woman that has taken off my pants and said to me “Oh, you have hair?” in a way that means they’re not into it (and honestly, I could count them on one hand), really haven’t bothered me. I’ve happily put my pants back on and kindly told them to get out of my thighs. It’s not for them, and that’s okay.

Pubic hair and shame

But for some reason, even though I stand by my pubic hair decision in the bedroom, I still stop myself from showing it to the masses. It occurs to me – more than any other part of my body – that I might need to censor it, to help others to feel comfortable, clean and unoffended. I think by others, I mean women.

When I truly reflect on the negative conversations I’ve had about pubic hair throughout my life, they’ve all been with women my age. Truthfully, I’m not really sure where the shame comes from, but it seems to exist among young women like this silent agreement we’ve all accepted as a part of glossy beauty standards, that to be an appealing woman means to not have pubic hair. Or not visible pubic hair, at least. 

“You should go get laser!” a housemate told me when I first moved to Melbourne almost 10 years ago. “We’re all doing it,” she said, referring to our other housemates. “Why?” I remember asking, knowing that once you’ve lasered it off a bunch of times, chances are it won’t grow back. It occurred to me that they might regret their decision one day, that they might miss the look of their hairy vagina, or maybe just want to try something different.

To me, it felt like committing to one hairstyle forever. “Because I never want to have to deal with it,” she said. “It’s so gross, I just want it gone.” I wasn’t that surprised at the degradation of her own pubic hair, because it was pretty much all I’d heard from other girls my age. From puberty onwards, I’ve not heard a single woman talk about loving or embracing their pubic hair.

Perhaps that’s the reason I feel afraid to embrace my own in a visual way because it feels like unchartered territory. I simply don’t know if other women on social media or in close proximity to me will feel uncomfortable at the sight of my pubic hair, and I guess I care what they think.

I want to be empowering to other women, I want to represent something aspirational in a way I think we all do. I want women to see me celebrating my body, my curves, my swollen, heavy days and think to themselves ‘Maybe I can do that, too’. I’m afraid that my pubic hair will deter them. That they won’t see me as aspirational anymore, that they’ll just see me as dirty. 

As I sit here and write out my pubic hair fears now, I’m struck by how much internalised messaging lives inside of me. I had no idea that deep down, I thought pubic hair was dirty. Or that I thought other women thought it was dirty. I didn’t realise that what I really cared about was what other women thought of my body. 

I’m not sure when it happened – probably around the same time as Hollywood happened, or porn — but ‘sexy’ female figures in the sexy stories we consume haven’t been shown to have any body hair at all. Their arms, legs, and inner thighs are always consistently smooth and hairless.

Forget the Greek goddesses, the voluptuous women whose beauty has been immortalised through paintings that live in French art galleries and museums, whose sexuality seduced the most lucrative of European artists. Women in modern representations of sexuality don’t have any hair. So much so, that men are often surprised by how much they’re into it. 

In so many of my experiences with men, they’ve responded with shock. Not at the hair themselves, but by how much it turns them on. “Wow, I really like this!” One guy said, nose deep in my vagina one day. ‘Duh’, I thought. It just makes sense to me that something so natural and ‘womanly’, would be sexy to a heterosexual man. Why wouldn’t it? It’s the same as the vehement passion that comes with a period.

Things we’ve spent our whole adolescence trying to hide because at some point we were told – whether indirectly or not – that they were something to be ashamed of, come back as actual turn-ons. As things that make us sexier, more desirable, more feminine, more divine, more ourselves.

It’s a lot to process

“I wish I still had pubic hair,” my housemate says, as I unpack this article I’m writing to her. “You do?” I ask. “Yeah. I get contact dermatitis all the time, just because I lasered off all my hair the first time someone told me that my pubic hair was gross. I really regret it.”

Her answer surprises me, and I immediately wonder how many other women feel that way. They want their pubic hair back. Or that they want to stop shaving, but are afraid of how it will be received by lovers, friends and the internet. It also makes me realise that this is a part of our body – our genitals – that’s supposed to have hair.

The skin on our vulva and our very upper thighs is some of the most sensitive skin on our entire bodies. Without hair, it can get irritated almost instantly. Laser seems to be the only way to remove hair, without getting little lumps, pimples, in-growns or contact dermatitis. 

In puberty, we grow pubic hair because our bodies are maturing, growing up, and getting ready for sexual activity. We grow pubic hair because it protects our skin from friction during sex. It keeps dust, dirt and germs away from the vagina to prevent infection. It protects our skin from breakouts. It’s basically our own little hair shield, which explains why the hair itself is so strong and wiry. Now, isn’t that amazing?

You might think it’s strange that I’ve written a whole piece on the nuance of showing my pubic hair outwardly but then topped it with a photo of me, my lacy lingerie and my pubes. But I want today to be the start of a new chapter for my pubic hair, and hopefully other peoples’. If pubic hair feels right for you, don’t be ashamed of it. Lean into the beauty of our natural bodies and all they do to protect us, without us even having to think. It’s empowering stuff. Our vaginas are powerful.

And if you’ve somehow found your way through this whole article as someone who icks at your own pubic hair (or other peoples’) it’s okay. There’s been a whole lot of complicated messaging about beauty standards out there that we’re all still very much trying to unpack. Just take a moment to sit alone with your distaste for it, and think through your fears. Is it about being attractive to others? Is it about being judged by your friends? Is it a language you heard when you were little?

It’s very likely that it’s not a thought that lives inside you naturally. I believe we’re all destined to be hairy, sexual beings and I’m going to do my best to push through my pubic-hair-in-public fears from now on. Not letting the internalised shame inform our personal choices is how we take back the narrative. 

For more on embracing the bush, head here.