In 2017, Swedish model Arvida Byström received death and rape threats after posing with unshaven legs – no wonder we feel the pressure to conform. Against the backdrop of this culture, six week’s regrowth really was a challenge I shouldn’t have snorted at.Įggerue was a lively and likeable presenter. But the idea of free will is an illusion when you’re not choosing how to groom yourself but whether you’ve got the guts to be different or not. According to a recent YouGov survey, while only 56 per cent of women believe they should remove their pubes, 72 per cent do it anyway.
Here’s a sorry little statistic I googled while watching – and one I wish Eggerue had included. And by “trouble” we mean rejection by young adult men, raised on the hairless porn estimated to fill up a third of the internet. I didn’t know beauty salons offered “virgin hair” waxes to children as young as 11, falsely promising clients that if they get on top of this “problem” early, there will be less trouble down the line. Although I know the casts of TV shows like Love Island and TOWIE never leave a follicle untraumatised, I hadn’t realised how many regular, un-televised women in their twenties have been entirely “bare down there” since puberty, spending an average of £40 a month on pubic grooming.
Things are very different for millennials and Generation-Z. And I’m the same age as the jollier Caitlin Moran, who encourages more personal choice in the matter, but wrote that: “Lying on a hammock gently finger-combing your Wookie whilst staring up to the sky is one of the great pleasures of adulthood.” (How to Be a Woman, 2011) I grew up reading Germaine Greer, who rather strictly taught us that the removal of this secondary sexual characteristic rendered us “sexless and infantile”. As a busy mum in my mid-forties, my idea of “a challenge” would be to give my bikini line any consideration at all on a day I’m not going swimming.īut I’m lucky to have grown up in a time when there was less pressure on women to conform to plastic, Barbie body standards. Eggerue – a 24 year old author and social media influencer – was “challenging herself” and five friends to let their pubes grow out for six weeks.
I sighed and snorted at the show’s premise. Unsafe. It was sad and exasperating by turns listening to the young women on Chidera Eggerue’s eye-opening documentary describing their perfectly normal pubic hair like a particularly virulent form of invasive species.
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