Millennials Aren't The Anti-Pube Generation
I thought millennials were a generational outlier in anti-pubic hair sentiment. As it turns out, I was wrong.
I always had a belief about pubic hair that I regularly referenced in my jokes, but I had absolutely zero real-world experience to back it up: that millennials were the most anti-pubic-hair generation of recent history, and that the preference for pubic hair looked a bit like a hockey stick, with millennials as the ultimate dip. I believed Gen X and Gen Z were both far more amenable to some pube action than my generation.
I had some experience to back this up, but it was all based on being a millennial who exclusively dated other millennials. I remember pubic hair (especially on a girl) being such a gigantic joke that I would deliberately refuse sexual contact if I hadn’t recently shaved everything. A few guys I dated got rid of all their pubic hair (something I actually did not prefer, but I wasn’t going to bring it up.) As a result, I assumed seeing any pubic hair at all on a woman would repulse a guy to the point of dry heaving, and it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take. This might sound extreme, but for me it started when I was at theater camp in 2001 when I was about eleven. I was a relatively early bloomer, but unfortunately for me this applied not to boobs, but to…pubes.
I was goofing around with some of my friends around the waterfront when my crush at the time came over and started talking to us. Out of nowhere, one of the girls in our bunk came over and pulled down my pants (she had been doing this to everyone all day—really tired gimmick, honestly—but for the most part she only grabbed their shorts, no their underwear.) Unfortunately for me, her thumbs got caught on my Limited Too panda bear underpants and the entire waterfront (including my crush) was privy to my full bush. My crush ran off, dramatically screaming, “MY EYES!!! THEY BURN!!!” (That’s what I get for having a crush on a theater kid.)
But since I settled down young, I never really had experience with any man outside of my generation. However, I knew from what my mother told me that pubic hair wasn’t a big deal for boomers. In fact, she had repeatedly told me that it was “creepy” to shave all your pubic hair because it made you look like a child, so I figured the anti-pubic-hair thing started with my generation.
