I'm Sick Of People Shaving Their Pubes! In Out Magazine, November 2006

Not like I have been sleeping around or looking at a lot of internet porn or anything, but, what is up with the trend of having your pubic area look like a racing stripe? From my perspective, it seems like a predominant amount of young gay boys are shaving as if they were women in a Vixen video porn shoot, buzzcutting until they are baby smooth, or depilating their down-there hair into creative shapes like an arrow, lightning bolt, or just a little fuzz-spot like a plucked eyebrow.

Actually come to think of it, the trend seemed to start up top with eyebrows. I first noticed the strangely plucked gay trend in 2003, when the sadistic reality show Boy meets Boy premiered. Watery, insecure James had to choose a mate among 15 gay and secretly straight men. They all wore flip flops, Hollister surfwear and tiny, maintained eyebrows. Then, when Desperate Housewives star Jesse Metcalfe became the country’s hunk obsession in 2004, everyone was going ga-ga over his body, but I couldn’t get over the architectural waxjob above his eyes. It looked as if he had two exotic caterpillars on his forehead.

I should have known it wouldn’t stop there. Now it’s as if this tweezery trend has migrated south. All you have to do is look online or go to a gay bar where gogo boys dangle their wares at you from bartops, and you will find hundreds of examples of the manicured man-lawn.

I suppose, in this era, where you CAN see so many naked bodies around you all the time, the obssessiveness with a trimmed crotch is a given. To succeed in this profile-as-person culture, where everyone has to advertise themselves to be noticed, men present their members with a gourmet flair --their pubic hair becomes a topiary-type of garnish like their genital area is going to be on the cover of Everyday Food..

It seems like a cosmetic version of the gay debate. Whether you are naturally hairy, or smooth or patchy, why not embrace this? What is more beautiful than someone who has a kind of organic hotness to himself? Aren’t we, as gay people, supposed to promote loving who we are? Why cant we just “be”? Does anyone else think a monobrow is sexy?

Of course this argument falls apart when one considers the clearly unwanted, treatable natural aspects of our bodies like warts or pimples or scars. Or, on the other end of the spectrum of attraction, how a rancid, inky sleeve tattoo on a rangy guy (or girl) is so hugely hot. Well, it turns me on.

It’s at this moment when I fear I am a stubborn holdout during some unstoppable cultural shift. Like how baby boomers can’t seem to appreciate the Mohawk, or a geriatric southerner still disapproves of miscegenation, I just do not have the ability to see the allure of a boy whose stubb;y, coiffed pubic hair resembles an Oral B toothbrush. I feel so hairy.