Paleo Retiree writes:
Young people today seem entirely grossed-out by body hair. My old-codger mind makes sense of the phenomenon this way: Either (for whatever reasons) today’s young adults have remained developmentally at the level of 12 year olds; or they’ve been affected on such a deep level by the glossiness of today’s media (and especially Photoshopping) that real bodies (flesh, hair, textures, etc) don’t look alluring to them, they look like a failure to be fantasy-perfect.
The old push-pull tension between fantasy and reality that previous generations learned to take as an important aspect of real erotic experience seems to elude them entirely. They expect the fantasy, darn it, and nothing but. They can’t even imagine that cultivating a taste for flipping back and forth between fantasy and reality can enhance erotic experience overall. It’d just spoil their fantasy-lovin’ (and, to my mind, solipsistic) fun, I suppose.
Hey, is it a total coincidence that fantasy spectacles (especially sci-fi) are ‘way more central to today’s pop culture than they were to the pop culture of many earlier eras?
All that said, I can definitely remember encountering a few ’70s bushes that even in those funky years struck me as needing a little judicious pruning …
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
OTH I find the whole tattoo thing incredibly grungy and unappealing. How can they be grossed out by hair but OK with these slime-colored scratchings?
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“Slime-colored” is great. They really are slime-colored.
I don’t find tattoos appealing either. I’ve got some theories about those too!
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I think it’s easier to connect it to larger, broader trends toward bland appearances and insisting that things that’re supposed to stimulate you, not be so stimulating.
Bland appearances — no more long, big hair on girls’ heads (or guys’). Restricted color range in clothing, minimal use of striking / contrasting colors, no more “accessorizing” (jewelry, etc., placed everywhere one could fit it), no more make-up, and so on.
Should-be stimulating things that hardly are — movies, pop music (especially dance music that keeps you still), slang (very little alliteration or rhyming anymore, and more autistic acronyms), highly regimented drinking games at parties, the attitude toward sex of “welp, might as well get it out of the way,” i.e. so we can get back to our regularly scheduled program of playing video games and liking comments on Facebook.
Kids these days are obsessed with being in control and not getting too excited. Shaving their bush (since most younger dudes take a clipper to their balls too) is just another outlet for their OCD behavior, another design choice to keep them from feeling any emotion during what should be a powerful experience.
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As for the timing, I took a stab at documenting the change over time here:
http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2011/06/mowing-her-lawn-or-not-1985-to-2010.html
Judging from a quarter-century of Playboy Playmates — which I sacrificed my time for to study in the interest of Science — the deforestation struck around the early 1990s. It wasn’t an ’80s thing. I think they may have started to shave their bikini line more during the ’80s, as the underwear and swimsuits were incredibly high-waisted, to give the longest leg-line possible, and that exposed more of the bikini line. But otherwise, there was little pruning.
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Agnostic — I like your idea about blandness. Hadn’t given that angle any thought before, but it certainly seems plausible. But don’t we need to figure out why kids today have such a strong penchant for blandness?
As for dating the advent of pubic-hair pruning, I think you’ve got it right. The ’70s were the era of the totally-wild bush; the ’80s saw bikini lines start to get hacked back; and the ’90s welcomed the landing strip. (I remember the audience’s shock and arousal when they got a glimpse of Deborah Kara Unger’s landing strip in Cronenberg’s 1996 “Crash.” And of course Sharon Stone’s widely-noticed crotch in the 1992 “Basic Instinct” had some fur on it.) As far as I can remember, the totally-nude crotch didn’t start becoming dominant until the 2000s, do I have that right?
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Is it possible it’s a reaction against increasing gender equality? As men and women life the same lifestyles, get the same jobs, get (sometimes) the same pay, and often the same kinds of clothes, perhaps they are subconsciously emphasizing their physical differences. Women have less body hair than men so they shave it all off. Men are more muscular so they crowd the gyms to get ripped. Or perhaps we are all just increasingly infantile and want our sexual characteristics to be indicators of a time when bodies can’t get pregnant. We’re all doomed.
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I think waxing, tattoos, body modification, etc. has a connection to individualism and extreme self-love. People want to noodle around with their bodies in the same way they used to noodle around with their MySpace pages — adding doo dads and sparklies and music. It’s all an expression of ME.
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