Women have always had plenty to worry about: stretch marks and eye bags, age spots and wrinkles, belly rolls and cellulite, butts and boobs that were too big, too small, too droopy, mismatched or asymmetrical or just plain wrong.

Feeling bad about your neck is practically a cliché.

But your ladyplace?

For a while, you could feel O.K. about it. At least, that’s what I’ve gleaned from 1980s-era novels and porn, back when the films had plots, the men were men and the women had pubic hair. These days, “Bush” might be ubiquitous in politics, but in pornography, and in real life, it’s increasingly hard to find: a special category on X-rated websites that index by fetish, listed alongside “spanking” and “pony play.”

Then there’s the matter of the mons pubis.

Back in the day, nobody worried what her m.p. looked like because nobody was seeing anyone else’s. One could go hours — days, even — without glimpsing another lady’s ladybusiness.

Now it’s all out there, right next to Good Housekeeping on the newsstands and the latest on Brian Williams on the Internet. Formerly among the most private of private parts, the mons pubis is now just another area to be pruned and policed; examined and improved, weighed in the balance and found wanting. It’s obvious, but, perhaps, worth pointing out that what regular, everyday women have in their panties does not much resemble what Ms. Davis so boldly displays. For starters, there’s occasionally hair. For another, there’s frequently a bit of padding.

There’s probably a biological reason for that. Imagine heterosexual intercourse, in the missionary position. Do men really want to thrust against something as firm and sculpted as a clenched fist?

Maybe not. But of course, there’s no profit in leaving things as they are.

Show me a body part, I’ll show you someone who’s making money by telling women that theirs looks wrong and they need to fix it. Tone it, work it out, tan it, bleach it, tattoo it, lipo it, remove all the hair, lose every bit of jiggle.

As surely as there’s a Butts and Guts class at your local gym, probably right this moment some enterprising fitness guru is coming up with techniques to improve this new area of focus. Plastic surgeons are figuring out how to do in the operating room whatever can’t be accomplished in the gym. And, somewhere, in a photographer’s studio, a far-off beach or a nearby editing suite, a model and photographer and editor are colluding, purposefully or not, on what we’ll be worrying about at this time next year. Trust me, there will be something else to obsess over; some new place that you never even noticed that you’ll end up worried about.