The Smirkin’ Merkin, or Where Has All The Pubic Hair Gone?

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE, AK—(Weekly Hubris)—1/31/11—A while back, while channel-surfing, a predominantly male activity that I have fallen into (I never actually watch an entire show, just flit around, curious as to what’s on), I came upon a sitcom in which two middle-aged men were talking about “dating.”

One character, a wild and randy womanizer, was giving advice to his brother who, recently divorced, was back into the dating market. After listening to some brotherly advice and commentary, the divorced brother asked, “Say, whatever happened to pubic hair?”

“It’s gone,” said the sophisticated brother. “It went away.”

“Where did it go?” asked the naïve brother.

“It just went away,” he was told.

Hmm, I thought, and surfed on.

A few days later, I came upon a talk show with a panel of female talking-heads, who were discussing waxing and other female mysteries.

“No one has pubic hair anymore,” one woman said. The others all loudly agreed, amid great knowing laughter from the audience.

Hmmm, I thought again.

Apparently there are people who, for a living, pour wax over your private parts and then rip. Not pleasant for the client, I would think, but maybe equally unpleasant for the professional. I mean, who would want to do that for a living? My “Ewwwww” factor kicked in. I surfed on.

Then, last night, on an episode of the new comedy, “Mike and Molly,” Molly is about to bed her new boyfriend for the first time. Her sister convinces her that she cannot possibly have sex with a new partner for the first time without “trimming the hedges,” and a strange conversation then ensues about how nobody has pubic hair anymore and how she needs to trim, shave, wax—or else be, I suppose, horribly offensive to her date.

Hmmm. Now I was beginning to see a trend here. It set me to thinking about some observations that I had made recently, but had not really given much thought to until now. What is going on? What has happened to pubic hair? It does seem to have vanished. At least among the young, beautiful and trendy.

I have indeed noticed that when I go to the gym (obviously not often enough, but I digress), the old men, such as myself, are as hirsute and ugly as ever, but the guys who are under 40 now all seem to be as hairless as an alopecia conventioneers. They don’t just shave their pubes, they shave everything—except their faces. One scruffy-faced young guy, whose chin and cheeks had clearly not seen a razor for days, had completely smooth, shaven head, armpits, chest, and pubes. It is as if we now shave everything that we used to let grow and let grow everything that we used to shave. This new phenomenon has been apparent long enough for me to have, recently, gotten pruriently curious about it. Never one to shy away from inappropriate questions, I met up with the aforementioned scruffy-faced young man in the jacuzzi and flat-out asked him why he shaves his entire body.

“It helps me to get laid,” he said, as equally inappropriate as I in answering my inappropriate questions.

“It does? How?” I pursued.

“Women nowadays are totally disgusted by body hair,” he explained. “I am relatively hairy, so I have to keep it all off to keep the ladies happy.”

Really?

The “ladies” want pre-pubescent boys? Does this disturb anyone other than me?

What about James Bond, I wonder, silently. In my day, when the young Sean Connery became an international superstar for playing James Bond, the obligatory shirtless scenes in all his films, which bared his manly mat of thick chest hair, drove women wild with desire. I used to pray for chest hair. When my father told me that if I ate my spinach, it would put hair on my chest, I believed him and ate my spinach. (It doesn’t work.) No young man wanted to look like a hairless geek. We wanted chest hair. We wanted to be James Bond.

So . . . what’s happened?

I think back, still with horror, to the seventh grade. To be a 12-year-old boy in PE class without pubic hair was a curse worse than death. Those precocious boys, who already had a nice crop of pubic growth, happily strutted about the locker room, proudly  showing off their new-found maturity. Those of us who were still hairless hid behind towels and underwear as much as we could. But in those days, unlike now, kids were required to shower after PE. (Boy, have those days gone forever! Walk into any afternoon classroom in a high school or middle school today and you will be overwhelmed by the unappealing smell of unwashed adolescence.) There was no way to hide. Just as I used to pray for chest hair, I used to pray triply hard for pubic hair. When it finally came, I was elated. I was, at last, a man! I was strut-worthy. Take that, all you hairy Italian and Armenian boys. You have nothing on THIS!

But today’s 20- and 30-somethings seem to have quickly forgotten the desperate need for body hair. Maybe it’s because, in their day, showers were not required in PE and so there was nothing to prove.

It is all a bit disconcerting to me, though. Are we all attempting to look like 12-year-olds now? Is that the ideal?

Well, there is Justin Bieber, after all. Justin Bieber, from what I can tell from my middle-school granddaughters and the magazines on the newsstands now, is the latest hot, sexy, teenage heartthrob.

Justin Bieber?

I mean, he’s a cute kid, I guess, but—. I mean, he is 16, I know, but he looks 12 and he sounds 10. Does Justin Bieber have any pubic hair? I seriously doubt it. So—this is the new heartthrob? Now, I know that teenage idols have always been around. In my day, we certainly had them, too. There was Fabian and Frankie Avalon and Ricky Nelson. They were popular in their teens, but they looked like they had, at least, passed through puberty. They had manly voices; they clearly shaved their faces. They had Adam’s apples that bulged when they crooned. And the 13-year-old girls went wild. They are still going wild today, but . . . for Justin Bieber? He’s like Tintin. No signs of any secondary sex characteristics. Is this what we aspire to now?

You might say, yes, well these are middle-school girls who swoon for Justin. But there are older girls and women who seem just as silly for him as the younger girls do. I saw a picture in a magazine recently of Justin Bieber making out on a beach with a voluptuous 18-year-old girl. She clearly doesn’t mind making out with Tintin. At least she won’t get razor burn.

When Justin was asked about the photos, his response was a good one. “What’s weird about that?” he asked. “I’m 16 years old. Isn’t this what 16-year-old boys do?”

Well, yeah, but when they look like 12-year-olds, they don’t usually get the hot 18-year-old girl.

But maybe now they do. Isn’t this sort of like the long-held fantasy of making out with the babysitter? Is Justin’s lack of body hair the big turn-on here? It all seems very strange to me.

In the Middle Ages, people used to make, purchase, and wear “merkins.” Talk about weirdness. The merkin may be the weirdest of all human creations. A merkin was a pubic wig. It was designed, apparently, for women. Why would a woman need a pubic wig? Well, apparently, prostitutes wore them to 1) disguise the fact that they may have been pre-pubescent and to, therefore, appear more womanly; or 2) to hide syphilitic sores. (My “Ewwwwww” meter just went off again.) I have no idea how the merkins stayed in place. Glue, maybe? You thought a bad toupee was comical. Imagine a bad merkin. But, clearly, my point is that, for centuries, pubic hair has been considered, not only natural, but even necessary for sexual appeal.

So—what happened?

My armchair wisdom tells me that pornography might have something to do with it. In porn (or, um, so I am told) there is very little pubic hair in evidence anymore. The theory is that male anatomy looks more massive (important in porn) when it is hairless and that female anatomy is less hidden and more available when it is hairless. So here we have life imitating art, right?

I guess I am just bummed because I am so out of it here. I can grow hair everywhere now except where I want it, on my head. Clearly, I must resent it. Even the long-desired chest hair has finally sprouted, and no one cares. In fact, they are probably disgusted.

I am never all right. I was too skinny until I was about 50 and then, suddenly, I was too fat. I never got to be just right. Same with body hair: I didn’t have any when it was cool to have it in abundance; now that I have it, I am like the gorilla in the locker room. (Insert heavy sigh here.)

A few weeks ago, I had an emergency appendectomy. Just as I was going under from the anesthesia, a hapless male nurse proceeded to shave my body from the navel down, apparently to accommodate the surgeon. I woke to bandages, IV’s, a catheter, and a strangely smooth and hairless lower body.

At last, I thought, I am fashionable!

And it has taken all that stubble a surprisingly long time to grow back. Recently, emerging from the shower, I cornered my poor wife Maureen in the bedroom, and danced naked before her in all my silky-smooth (and denuded) splendor.

“How do I look like this?” I asked her, as I danced. “Am I sexy now?”

She blinked, looked briefly at my nether parts, and said, “Well, um, not so much.”

“No?” I was dashed.

“Not really a good look for you,” she added.

I guess I am about 60 years too late to be a sex god.

Oh, to be seven again!