Next time I’ll write about how pubic hair is evil and reactionary. No, that would be silly.

Oh look! An article called The Naked Truth! About a subject dear to my nether parts! An article about pubic hair (the lack of) trotting out the usual clichés! Goodness, what a not-surprise. Oh The Guardian, how you disappoint me. This must have been an easy one, “Write an article about shaved pubes. You’ll find all the paragraphs you need in that box over theremarked “Women have no autonomy/Men are stupid animals”, and a few extra phrases in the BLAME IT ALL ON PORN drawer”.

You may have thought that how you styled your pubic hair was your own business, but evidently not. Pube-shaving is apparently an epidemic, with women slavishly denuding their front bottoms in order to pander to the vile desires of their men-folk, whose tiny lizard brains have been scrambled by too much porn and pedophilic fantasies. So that’s nice. There can’t possibly be any more prosaic and not so interestingly perverted explanation, could there? After all, we all know that it looks horrible, feels horrible, and takes away the thrill of getting hair stuck in your teeth when indulging in oral sex, which we all know is also a Bad Thing.

I don’t really understand the frothing at the mouth of the anti-pube brigade, unless it’s really the frothing of the anti-men or anti-porn brigade, desperately looking around for something else to bolster up their sometimes spurious arguments. Personally I don’t have a huge amount of interest in anyone else’s hair anywhere on their bodies, and find it hard to understand why my own tonsorial choices should have motives attributed to them.

I find it hard to believe that I’m in the minority of The Shaven who aren’t in thrall to the desires of their porn-enthralled lords and masters. Given that I shave off all visible body-hair apart from that on my head every day, and live alone, I find it hard to believe I’m doing it primarily for any man. Given also that none of the men I’ve had sex with has ever asked me to do it, I’m even less convinced. I must be influenced by porn all by my perverted little self, then… except that I’d done it when all the porn I’d seen featured women with bountiful bushes (yes, children, that WAS a long time ago) – and I don’t actually look at porn much, so I’m not terrible aware of what the latest trends are.

In my naïveté, I thought I did it because a) I was exposed to far too much art of a child (The Naked Maja notwithstanding (shocking! A painting of a naked woman with pubic hair! Er… barely discernible pubic hair, but a few visible strands none the less. What an excellent choice of illustration for a pro-pube rant), most of which is female-hair free); b) I am absolute rubbish at keeping my bikini line straight, and early pube-removal was actually as a result of trying to even up the sides, failing, and concluding that it was easier to take the whole lot off; c) it looks pretty, it feels nice and it makes the whole area more sensitive, d) far from being “uncomfortable, time-consuming, irritating, expensive, troubling, humiliating” it takes about two minutes in the bath, while I’m presumably also demonstrating my servility and submissiveness by shaving my legs and armpits and e) it has been my luck to mainly have sex with men who are as enamoured of my pussy as I am, and who generally appear to appreciate being able to see it.

I have gone on at length about how sick I am by the British press’s obsession with the craven stupidity of women and the brutish imbecility of men, and this article is just more of the same, with added vitriol. In media world (unlike the real world as experienced by most intelligent rational beings) men are addled by porn and women only want to please them; women are incapable of autonomous thought and shave/wax/pluck their pubic hair for men, who don’t (they don’t? Really? You mean some of the men I’ve fucked were born with shaved balls? Weird). Men also, in an imaginative twist on the old all-men-are-potential-rapists trope, are latent pedophiles according to this article (or rather, pubeless-preferring men are latent pedophiles, because the sole sign of a post-pubertal woman is pubic hair. What, you thought grown women might also be distinguished from children by hips and breasts, not to mention other body-hair?) This must be because men look at porn and think: “Ooh, no hair! She looks like a prebuscent girl. I must get myself some of that”. They don’t look at porn and think: ”Ooh, giant tits!” No, wait… I’m getting confused here. Or maybe it’s not me that’s getting confused. Maybe women (and men) in porn are shaved so that porn-viewers can see the action. Maybe some men think they’d like to see the action too. Maybe all this has nothing to do with underage sex. Maybe in the case of this and similar articles trying to throw porn and everything else a little unrepressed into the BAD basket, giant plastic breasts are the elephant in the room.

This article isn’t really about how women are oppressed by the baser sex, and how everything women do to their bodies is an expression of their servility. The premise of the article is fear of change, of pleasure, and, ironically, of autonomy. Our bodies are a part of us, like our minds, where we have free reign over our individuality. We can choose to adorn or denude our bodies, and choose our cultural influences. We get to decide how we wish to please ourselves or our lovers. Now there’s a much scarier notion than hair.