If you only ever saw 90s/2000s porn, you could easily be led to believe that adult human beings were completely hairless from the moustache down. Waxed and occasionally oiled, pretty much every nude body shown from that time period looked like it had been afflicted with some sort of highly specific, lower body alopecia.
But the times, they are a-changin’. Now that every second dude looks like a lumberjack and society has gotten very slightly better at not policing women’s body hair (very slightly), pubes are starting to make a comeback (although they will probably never return to the fabled Pube Golden Age of the 60s).
What’s more hygienic though? Should we be cultivating a lush, dank, fertile (sorry about these words) pubic tangle in our sacred triangles (again, sorry about these words) – or should we be keeping ourselves as smooth and sleek as the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird?
Scientists, as usual, are saying “We can’t tell you“, because that’s not really how they work, but they have found a correlation between STIs and keeping a trim and tidy sexual bush (I really can’t apologise enough).
A study in the US interviewed 14,000 people between the ages of 18 and 65 about their grooming and banging habits and found that people who regularly trimmed their secret hedge have an 80% higher chance of contracting an STI.
It turns out people with maintained pubic hair tend to have more sexual partners, but, even when factoring in age and number of partners, they still arrived at that 80% figure.
The groomers didn’t just tend to have more concurrent sexual partners either, the study found they tended to be more sexually active and to have more partners over their lifetime. Before you do some crazy reverse logic here: no, if you trim your pubes right now you will not immediately start having more sex, that is not how statistics works.
The authors of the study reckon the increased risk might be due to either a) people who trim tend to fuck more often or b) nicks and cuts from grooming efforts increase susceptibility to infection.
On the flip side of that, people who groom more often have a drastically lower chance of contracting lice, which rules, because lice are gross.
Source: Scimex.
