Female pornstars have no pubic hair. Even someone who's never seen a porno would likely tell you that. It's a fact that has been established in the American cultural psyche in the past few decades. Shaved crotches are so pervasive that cultural commentators have written tomes on about what they say about porn's attitude towards women or how much their pornographic ubiquity has influenced the rise of pubic depilation in the general public. ("No one has authoritatively established a causal connection," the porn scholar Joseph Slade told me recently, but "surveys of students in my media and sexuality classes indicated that women felt pressured [to go hairless] by boyfriends who were themselves conditioned by porn.")

But heading into that decade , heavy grooming became more and more common. By its end, the "landing strip" was pretty much the pornographic norm . And midway through the aughts, the landing strip was about as much hair as you'd find down there, with total shaving, waxing, and lasering gaining dominance. "When I got into the adult film industry" as recently as 2014, said porn star Kasey Warner , "I had a bush only on top of my pubis. I was one of extremely few girls to sport anything more than a landing strip."

Hairlessness was not always the norm in American pornography, of course. Instead, Slade noted, it was quite prominent in the 1970s and 80s "when hirsuteness was equated with virility and lubricity. Harry Reems and many male performers sported mustaches and hairy armpits and chest hair. And women sported hairy armpits and crotches." Even into the 1990s , for some in the general public, the idea of a woman fully shaving her nethers seemed odd, even a bit like a fetish.

Yet all this common knowledge and cultural debate about porn's plucked pubes misses a major beat: hair has actually made a significant comeback in the industry. That very well may be because it's back in the culture at large as well (more on that in a bit). But as hair down there creeps back into the mainstream of pornography, it could serve as an aid to help decrease the pressure to go hairless among everyday people.

There's no consensus on why porn (or the general public for that matter) turned on pubes. Some think it was a purely practical choice. Shaving allows the camera to capture more of the purely mechanical ins and outs of genitals that porn thrives on. That's why male pornstars shave their pubes as well—that and to make their dicks seem a bit larger in some shots. It also makes it easier to clean a crotch or lessen friction and hair tugging when doing tons of scenes. It may even have been part of a misguided attempt to keep things hygienic, which many in the wider public also seem to believe, despite the reality that pubic hair likely protects against disease. Not to mention that shaving or waxing, while good at preventing crabs, can cause injury or infection. "Those messy pubes of yours were seen as a haven for all sorts of bacteria, turning you into a perceived cesspool of disease," explained pornstar Hedera Helix.

Others argue that it was part and parcel with wider norms and forces, which may already have been promoting pubic grooming before it caught on in porn. Think of the progressively skimpier fashion trends, or the popularization of hairlessness by mainstream movie stars and fashion icons throughout the late 90s and early aughts. Some also argue that it was an extension of a wider infantilization of women and fetishization of youth.

Many of the performers I spoke to told me they had been shaving or waxing for years before getting into the industry due to a general sense, gleaned through cultural osmosis, that their pubic hair was weird, gross, or unnatural. Those who've been in the industry longer also noted that many booking when they started out explicitly called for a clean crotch shave. So in all likelihood, it was some mixture of practicality and a chicken-and-egg feedback loop between porn and general cultural tastes that killed hair in the adult industry and kept it down.