Writing “Bush”

Like much of what I write, “Bush” began with a series of moments in my own life that converged one quiet morning at the keyboard. The first moment was, for me, a rare getaway last winter in Florida, at the end of which I found myself in a room with five other women whom I knew casually, talking about how often we shaved our legs in the winter. Answers ranged from “every day” to “in November and again in March.” The conversation moved on to waxing and the various versions of the bikini wax, none of which (the mustache, the landing strip, the heart) I had ever heard of. None of the women admitted to having a Brazilian, but they seemed awfully knowledgeable. A few months later, baby “Cissy” came to visit with just her dad. I not only diapered her but also watched her dad and my partner expertly run wipes between the folds of her genitals. They were so in love with her, so caring of her, so completely innocent in their approach to the part of her body that would become her sexual core. At the same time, her genitals looked disturbingly like those in the full-frontal nude shots of the porn magazines I had cleaned out from under my sons’ beds when they headed off for college.

Meanwhile, near the lake cottage where we were staying last summer, a funky restaurant with evening folk rock had a pinup in the restroom of three nude women in the Sixties with dark, lush triangles of pubic hair, and I realized how quaint—and lovely—such images looked. To top off my pyramid of thoughts, I was reading Scott Turow’s Innocent and was gobsmacked by the blinkered version of the waxed woman presented in that novel. I sat down next morning and wrote the title. Bush.

My response to these moments was instinctive and intimate, but also intellectually curious. My challenge was to separate, and then recombine, cultural observation and personal revelation. I cruised the Internet for ads for Brazilians, and the psychosocial literature for explanations of why we respond so strongly to the presence or absence of a few square inches of body hair. I had the delight of learning the chewy word “glabrous” and remembering an old joke about merkins. I was particularly interested in the differences in regard to sex and pleasure between old standbys like Our Bodies, Ourselves, originally published in 1973, and more recent offerings, like Violet Blue’s Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus (2002), which struck a much less political and more strategic tone when it came to pubic waxing.

Academic papers like “Body Hair Removal: The Production of ‘Mundane’ Femininity” (Sex Roles 52, no. 5–6 [March 2005]) tiptoed delicately around what has been labeled the “porn aesthetic” and spoke instead of the “work of femininity.” Their statistical figures were impressive: I learned that 92 percent of respondents aged 17–20 have removed pubic hair, and nearly a third have shaved or waxed “beyond the bikini line.” Aside from the “dichotomous construction of gendered embodiment”—meaning we in the West think of masculinity and femininity as opposites, and of men as hairy and women therefore hairless—I found little on women’s reasons for going Brazilian. I did learn, on the other hand, that rushed and cheap procedures have resulted in a significant number of serious cases of sepsis.

In the online entries—especially first-person accounts by men and women, and promotions for Brazilian procedures—what struck me were the unabashed references to prepubescence. There were some token expressions of how “fresh” a woman felt after the pain of the procedure had worn off, but mostly the motivation—and satisfaction—of the Brazilian had to do with male gaze and the lure of forbidden turf. “It does make me wonder,” writes Annaliese Barbieri in the New Statesman, “if a whole generation of boys will grow to be like John Ruskin reputedly was: so horrified by pubic hair that he was disgusted when he saw a real-life female who actually had some.”

Those boys, I decided, would not be the subject of...