From Pompeii to Victorian erotica, pubic hair was considered sexy, healthy and youthful Yet whenever I post an image of a woman with a full bush, tempers flare. How did we get here?

There are many things we are encouraged to ‘give up’ for January. Dry January is a campaign to bin the booze, Veganuary urges festive penitents to jump on the vegan wagon, and Juice January peddles a juice cleanse as the solution to a fortnight of eating selection boxes for breakfast.

But there is a new quit kid on the block. Januhairy wants women to give up removing their body hair for four whole, stubbly weeks to raise money for the body positivity charity, Body Gossip. The campaign is doing more than raising funds, it is shining a much-needed light on our uneasy attitudes to women and body hair.

‘In Victorian erotica, women are splendidly bewhiskered with no hint of embarrassment’ i's opinion newsletter: talking points from today Email address is invalid Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription.

I am particularly interested in our current censoring of a ladies’ trouser sprouts because I have witnessed first-hand just how divisive this issue can be. Over the years, I have posted all manner of vintage photographs to my Twitter feed, and nothing causes quite the reaction that the sight of a woman with pubic hair does.

In Victorian erotica, women are splendidly bewhiskered with no hint of embarrassment. In fact, muff is very much a la mode in pornography until the early 1980s. But whenever I post an image of a woman with a full bush tempers flare. Interestingly, no one has ever commented on the state of a gentleman’s manscape as long as I have been tweeting them, but the sight of a woman’s knicker whiskers will upset someone every time.

How did we end up here?

Reactions to these images range from appreciation and nostalgia for the fuzzy-muzzy, through to outright revulsion at the sight of a lady garden gone to seed. While I wouldn’t dream of shaming anyone’s personal preference, I do want to ask how did we end up here? How did pubic hair, hair that has every right to be there, hair that we have all got, wind up being regarded by many as disgusting? When did we become so anti-fuzz?

Evidence of hair removal dates back to the Ancient World. The Museum of Nigde, Turkey and Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, Turkey, both hold examples of obsidian razors dating to 6500 BC, which are the oldest known examples of hair removal in the Muslim world.

Beneath the toga some women were smooth, and some were hairy, and some were steaming apparently

There is also evidence that wealthy Roman women had their pubes plucked by a slave called a ‘picatrix’.

It seems not everyone was a fan of a bald pubis. Written on the walls of the Roman city of Pompeii are the immoral lines: “A hairy cunt is fucked much better than one which is smooth; it holds in the steam and wants cock.” What this charming sentiment shouted at us from 79AD tells us is that beneath the toga some women were smooth, some were hairy and some were steaming, apparently.

A sign of youth, health, and sexual vitality

Our own disdain for pubic hair is even stranger when you consider that a bush you could wipe your feet on was once considered a sign of youth, health, and sexual vitality. Slang terms for pubic hair from the Renaissance are overwhelmingly positive and include ‘feathers’, ‘fleece’, ‘flush’, moss’, ‘plush’, ‘plume’ and the ‘admired abode’. Shakespeare makes a number of bawdy pubic hair double-entendres in his work, suggesting muff was de rigueur. In his Venus and Adonis, for example, he writes about ‘Sweet bottom-grass’ that lies between ‘Round rising hillocks’.

Whereas a lack a pubic hair denotes ill health and old age. The hero of Richard Head’s ‘The English Rogue’ (1665) complains that an elderly woman he sleeps with had no pubic hair: “I apprehended my danger the greater because I found no rushes growing there, which is an observation of the people; judging the bog passable which hath such things growing there on.” The Renaissance Brit, in particular, favoured a Hairy Potter. Spenser, in ‘Strange and True Conference’ (1660) laments “the Spanish mode of shaving off all the wenches’ hairs off their commodities”. And, the Earl of Rochester declared: “My prick no more to bald cunt shall resort.”

Hair loss was symptomatic of syphilis

One reason a lush bush was so prized was that hair loss was symptomatic of syphilis. Syphilis was first recorded in Naples in 1495, and in its later stages, it can cause hair loss. One treatment for syphilis was mercury, which could be ingested, injected, or rubbed on the open sores, and this most certainly would have caused hair to fall out. As a result, a tufty tuppence came to be regarded as diseased.

Whereas we may view a snatch patch as ‘disgusting’, your Elizabethan lover would have viewed a bald eagle in very much the same way. In Thomas Middleton’s Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), a character called Audrey is attacked as an “unfeathered, cremitoried quean, you cullisance of scabiosity”. In Westminster Whore (1610), one “lascivious bitch” is cursed to have “a cunt without hair and ten thousand poxes upon it”.

The must-have sexual accessory for a girl on the town

Eighteenth-century erotica continues to praise the bearskin as the must-have sexual accessory for a girl on the town. ‘Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies’ (1857-1869), an almanac of sex workers available in London, is extremely positive about “the mossy grot”. Miss Devenport is described as being well thatched, “though not yet bushy, might truly be stiled Black Heath”, and Miss Betsy has “ebony tendrils that play in wanton ringlets round the grot”.

Victorian erotica is also full of praise for the happy trail. In Romance of Lust (1875), the hero Charlie Roberts describes many furry lovers and clearly finds body hair a turn on:

“Her position brought out all the beauties of the vast wide-spread mass of black curly hair that thickly covered all the lower part of her magnificent quim, ran down each thigh, up between her buttocks, and opening out on her back, had two bunches just below the two beautiful dimples that were so charmingly developed below her waist. There was as much hair there as most women have on their mons Veneris. Her whole body had fine straight silky hair on it, very thick on the shoulders, arms and legs, with a beautiful creamy skin showing below. She was the hairiest woman I ever saw, which, doubtless, arose from or was the cause of her extraordinary lustful and luxurious temperament.”

It’s not until the twentieth century that we start to see body hair in retreat, and it is likely that this is linked to emergence of photography and to being ‘seen’. Roman and Greek women plucked their pudendum because public bathing and nudity were commonplace, but as bodies were covered up and were called ‘sinful’, there were far fewer pussies on parade. With the advent of photography and film, genitals were once again being seen on a mass scale.

Of course, the fashion industry played its part in changing hairstyles. The removal of underarm hair is directly linked to the new fashion for sleeveless dresses in the 1920s, and a cunning adverting campaign that told women they smelled bad. Leg shaving increased as skirt length decreased, and as underwear shrunk in size to the point it barely covers the entrance points of the body, pubic hair disappeared too.

Bald bodies have become our normal

Pubic hair appeared for the first time in Penthouse in 1970, and many will fondly recall the fabled 70s bush that could scour a greasy pot clean. By the 1980s and 1990s, pubic hair featured less and less in pornography. The removal of pubic hair in porn lets the viewer see more, and porn often takes the blame for our current obsession with the beetle-bonnet.

‘People react so strongly to women with pubic hair because they are not used to seeing it, and the less we see it, the ‘weirder’ it looks when we do’

But it is not just porn that cue balls its women; fashion magazines, newspapers, film, television, advertising, music videos, etc., will not show you a single trouser tendril (unless, it’s in an arty, subversive manner.) It’s like looking for a pube in a haystack. Bald bodies have become our normal. People react so strongly to women with pubic hair because they are not used to seeing it, and the less we see it, the ‘weirder’ it looks when we do.

Pubic hair is frequently placed on the frontline of feminism and growing a new band member for ZZ Top in your pants is often seen as a fuzzy fuck you to the patriarchy that leaves you literally tearing your hair out, and doubtless, there is some truth to this.

Those growing their fuzz out for Januhairy (why was it not called ‘Fannuary’?) will be seen as doing something radical. Yet, for most of our collective history, pubic hair has been regarded not only normal, but as sexy, healthy and luscious. As the fifteenth-century Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain once wrote: “a girl’s thick grove, circle of precious greeting, lovely bush, God save it.”