The Truth About Having A Bush

This past Sunday HBO’s little sitcom, ENTOURAGE, closed out its episode with porn star Sasha Grey walking buck naked into a ridiculously ostentatious swimming pool. The following day the brain-dead (or rather brain-controlled) public lit up the internet with comments of outrage. Ms. Grey being naked wasn’t a problem for the zombies. No. Nudity is her forte. Kudos to her for it! The backlash was focused on that most egregious of sins committed by her…she had pubic hair! People were aghast, repulsed, horrified, disgusted, and just plain hurt that Ms. Grey would allow herself to be shown with that symbol of sexual maturity…pubic hair.

What the fuck is wrong with you people??!!

Well, I guess I need to answer that, but before I do let me just say that Sasha’s performance is actually better than any of the other actresses cast on the show. She is something of an odd bird that seems to fly in the opposite direction to conventional perceptions. Here is a bona fide porn star that doesn’t look like she was created in some fucking silicone factory. What, no idiotic tattoos? No retarded belly button or clit piercing? What the fuck is she thinking? And, unlike every other Hollywood actor getting their break on a big, popular show, she doesn’t seem to push everything in terms of her performance. She appears to be quite comfortable with just being there in front of the camera. She doesn’t appear to be afraid of silence. The biggest barrier for an actor is self-consciousness. It leads to all kinds of awfulness, both on the stage and screen. Grey, however, has those demons conquered. I mean what is there to be self-conscious about when doing a scene with Vince and Turtle about some stupid tequila when just a few months ago you performed analingus on a guy while jerking him off, then had anal sex for 30 minutes, followed by a pop-shot swallow? And lest you think I am being a smart-ass here and making some kind of moral judgment on her porn work, I’m not. Most people aren’t brave enough to do that stuff in their own bedrooms with their spouses let alone in front of the camera. The way we justify our insecurity is to cast aspersions at the people who are able to do it based on…morals. Fuck that! Okay enough with the diversion.

What the fuck is wrong with you people???!!!

With regards to pubic hair we as a society have become completely averse to it. A good while back I put up a question on a popular interactive news forum thingy (maybe the very one you found the link to this article) that simply asked if people preferred pubes or clean-shaven. Almost unanimously the votes came in from men and women that they required genitals to be clean-shaven.  Here is a sample of the kind of responses I got:

SILVERBACK:

Pubes down my throat are fucking nasty.

DRIFTBUS:

My gf has recently started to grow pubic hair again. I hate it. Sex is just that slightly bit harder, it gets in the way, feels rubbish on my teeth, and smells different.

Shave it all off.

Valientjedi:

Gag. I’ll take shaved ANY day over a hairy one. The smell..the hair in your mouth.. ugh

Mountainman:

Gak, all the stank and skank in the fur there. No thanks

artsy:

I (F) shave and keep it clean. Not only do I shave, but about once every 2 months or so I get the entire area waxed clean. Hair = odor…and odor on the vag is disgusting beyond belief. I don’t know how any woman with a hairy cooch could find herself attractive.

arceliyeah:

I’m a female and I shave all, don’t like hair down there at all. 

cheshireisback:

I am female and I shave, I am not completely bald but I want to keep myself trimmed, I would feel weird having a bush.

Madonna’sAbortion:

I’ve been shaving since my pubic hair started growing. It’s never ever gotten very long. When it was the longest it was though, I despised it. I hated hair down there. It feels disgusting around the inside of my legs when I’m walking. It starts smelling if I don’t shower for one day.

If there is one thing you glean from this list of comments it’s that men and women alike fucking hate pubic hair with a passion. According to this slice of society pubic hair is equated with gross.

So how did this happen? How did the human form in its natural state suddenly get relegated to the fetish section?  “Oh, you like pubic hair? It’s down that hall, through the metal door, and around back. You’ll find it on the shelf under the amputee and scat videos.”

My goal here is not to prove whether shaven or unshaven is better. My curiosity is sparked rather by interest in how shaved became not only the norm, but the preferred.  My gut tells me that this is a perfect example of social engineering.

First off, let’s take a look at the incredibly vast list of functions pubic hair performs. First off, its predominant function in humans is as an indicator of sexual maturity. Second…uhmm…that’s pretty much it. You can make up a whole bunch of shit about it acting as winter hat for the genitals, thus the term “muff”, but that’s just plain silly. No, its sole function is to say to potential mates: “Hey, looky here! I’m ready to procreate!!”

As a kid growing up in the 1970’s a woman’s bush held a mystical spell over me, akin to the Arc of the Covenant for Christians. A trip to the beach or even the local pool back in those days was like walking into some hidden Indiana Jones cave, wonder of wonders just on the other side of that small panel of fabric. It could be black, brown, red or blonde. It may betray what the owner wore upon their head, or be its twin. It could be naturally flowing, or trimmed into inviting shapes. Its diversity was the key to its compelling magic. The same trip today doesn’t hold the same magical appeal because you know that no matter how beautiful the woman, the vision on the other side of the Lycra is all the same featureless landscape. For many, the magic died when the bush died.

But, once again, I have rolled off onto a tangent. My goal was not to mourn the eradication of the bush, but rather to let all of you shaved bare beauties out there know that despite all of the wonderful and inventive “reasons” you have come up with to justify your propensity for the bare crotch, I’m here to tell you it wasn’t your choice. You were programmed and you are simply following your program.

Western culture (which to a large to degree has become ALL culture) has a downright hatred for anything natural. We live in communities built atop slabs of concrete, asphalt and steel. Look out your window and try to discern what is natural. The trees? The grass? Anything that we haven’t planted and groomed is deemed a weed and must be eradicated with concoctions of poison.  Well, “The sky”, you might offer.  Perhaps…in the daytime. But what about the night sky? With the exceptions of portions of Africa, our globe is so polluted with redundant light that most of us have never had a glimpse of the Milky Way. No. There is no nature in our societies. We live in controlled, maintained, manicured cities and towns and only know the word “natural” if we look it up in the dictionary. Nature is far too independent and…free. The natural world is far too dangerous for society’s citizens to get a glimpse of. Those few remaining pockets of the natural world out there awaken in people what freedom really is all about. Society can’t have that.

Excuse me, I just fell off this friggin’ soapbox. Might have broken an ankle. Okay…there we go. Well, this actually does relate to the subject of pubic hair, I promise. Human beings, by nature, are a wild, lusty, creative creature. If left to their own devices they tend to do whatever the hell they want. You can have a perfectly controlled, unnatural city for your subjects to live in, but it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing if they aren’t tamed.

How do you tame them? Well, first off you have to treat them like children. However, you can’t just treat a bunch of adult humans like children and expect them to take it. No. You have to make them covet childishness. You have to subliminally program them to worship youth in every facet of their lives. Once you have the people worshipping youth, and despising maturity, you can then work on dehumanizing them. In essence, they become your child-like worker mannequins.

Oh, I can hear you out there screaming that this is such bullshit. I assure you it’s not. Take an honest look at the past 20 years. Is there a primetime show on the air that stars a woman over the age of 25? A popular musician? In the U.S. our favorite pastime is sports. And, of course, professional sports are the domain of youngsters. Last year Brett Favre was regarded as a freak of nature because he was still doing the only thing he knows how to do (play football) at the age of 40. As if the age of 40 was the same as being a paraplegic. Youth is the only thing that matters to our popular culture. We are a Botox, MTV, Plastic surgery, liposuction, teeny-bopper, video game playing, internet surfing collection of people who rarely look beyond the surface of a given topic.

Fine, but how does this relate to bush, you may be asking. Here you go. Ours is a culture that, aside from what I just mentioned, is really terrified of sexuality. So much so that the majority of the kids in our society still get their sex education from pornography. Oh, what a place to subliminally seed agendas. Heterosexual anal sex, piss play, etc. would never have reached their current level of popularity without pornography. Now, with regards to bush, starting in the early 1990’s the popular porn actresses began to show sign of alopecia in the nether regions. First it was “trim,” followed by “landing strips,” and then all out bald. In the early 2000’s, to the horror of most porn purveyors, the men followed suit.  What was behind this new trend? A vitamin deficiency? A disease? Was this a result of AIDS? Hardly. This was a well executed plan to slowly marginalize the image of the sexual maturity. Anyone over the age of 26 was sent to the MILF/Fetish cue.

And as the sex acts depicted in the scenes became crazier (DP, ATM, piss) the sexuality itself became more sterile. The performers had to be of a certain body type: thin, with large breasts (either real or fake, but preferably fake), without a hair on their bodies except the long locks streaming from their heads. Sex mannequins, if you will. Porn effectively excised the majority of the human element of sex and turned it into “sex acts” performed by interchangeable sex robots who all look the same: youthful and hairless. And the kids bought it and made it the standard model for the “real world”. If Jenna Jameson, or Katie Morgan, or ___Fill in the blank___ was shaved then, by god, so should everyone’s girlfriend.  Shaved became the norm, so much so that even those MILF performers are hairless as well, lest they be considered…old.

That is not to say that if you are attracted to a shaved woman, or man, that you are a pedophile just waiting to pop. But what it does is say is that the media we take for granted is extremely powerful at controlling our decisions. And not just with regards to selling us shit, but, more creepily, how we view ourselves. If you were to ask a heterosexual man back in the 1960’s if he thought a woman’s bush was gross he would have looked at you like you just told him you were born on Neptune. Today the opposite is true. And that would not have been the case if it were not for the medium of porn and the agenda behind it.

Which finally brings me around to Ms. Grey from the beginning of this piece? While watching her on Entourage, The Girlfriend Experience, and even in the free porn clips I found of her on the porn-tubes out in internet-land, there has always been something…different about her. There is something in that perpetually wry smirk of hers that seems to say that she knows something more about the game than most. The do anything porn actress who made into the mainstream doesn’t seem to be trapped by society’s gravity of acceptance and normality, and is therefore free to present the truth, even if that is just to show a thick patch of pubic hair on prime time television.

Her response to the retarded (and surely marketing based) uproar about her bush? “That’s what an adult woman looks like.”

She’s right folks. Like it or not.

SGH-August 2010