Remember those early days of HBO’s Girls, back when Hannah’s naked body and tattoos made us gasp? How tame that looks now. In episode three of this series, Hannah breaks off from devouring Adam’s face to go for a pre-sex wee, which she announces to him with no embarrassment. She pads into the bathroom and screams. For standing before her is Adam’s sister Caroline, wrists bleeding. But never mind the blood loss, she’s completely bottom half naked, luxuriant forest of pubes proudly out for all to see. It gives a whole extra resonance to Adam’s earlier comment on his own coiffure: “I don’t care about hair, it grows; it shrinks. I can’t get attached.”
With her magnificent untrimmed thicket, Adam’s sister is part of the movement rejecting immaculate femininity. The lack of inhibition that sees Caroline biting Shoshanna’s beleaguered ex-boyfriend Ray in the bar after an exuberant dancing ritual extends to her lady-garden grooming policy. Why should she tame it? These women are through with pretending they have no bodily functions or are completely smooth beneath their knickers.
A similar logic saw American Apparel giving its mannequins pubic hair that escapes from their minuscule pants, and Cara Delevingne reject all notions of pristine prettiness; leaving the house in pyjama bottoms with grease-slicked unwashed hair. Central Saint Martins student Lili Murphy Johnson has even designed period-inspired necklaces for Topshop. They’re called On The Rag.
And this unabashed griminess is all rather appealing. Take one couple I know who are in the midst of a serious shared crush. The object of their affection, Detective Saga Norén, has un-brushed hair and her idea of office small talk is to announce the arrival of her period and smell her armpits — when they are too minging she changes T-shirts, revealing her grubby bra to all her colleagues. She’s too busy solving crimes to get a blow-dry and when she’s staying late at the office she unbuttons the top of her leather trousers.
“Saga is so cool,” says my male friend. “And fit,” adds his girlfriend. Saga is newly single but sadly she is fictional.
Embracing the slightly scutty is liberating. Saga doesn’t give a fig if she offends colleagues by asking about their sex lives or whether their ex-wife’s breasts are real, so it makes sense that she doesn’t care who sees her bra either.
Actress Sofia Helin says playing Saga has “been good for me. Women are generally so good at thinking what other people want from them and also at hiding their sexuality and what they really want. Usually I am very nervous about things. Now I sometimes ask, ‘How would Saga think? What would she do in this situation?’, and it makes things much easier.”
Actress Gaby Hoffmann, who plays Caroline in Girls, is also on board with her character. She has fanny form. Those pubes play a starring role in the film Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus. Hoffmann says: “If I just stay true to what I like, every decade or so I come into fashion. I grew up with a lot of naked women with big bushes, it never occurred to me to remove it. I was going to a friend’s wedding in southern France. I knew she would be tickled if I showed up with my bikini line waxed. I got it, and it was a first. I find it uncomfortable.”
A friend says: “It’s actually all quite sexy. I remember being on the beach and seeing a bunch of stray hairs escaping from a woman’s bikini bottoms. It was the most exciting thing.”
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Artist Petra Collins was outraged when Instagram deleted her proud shot of hair down there. Her beautiful photographs of women, complete with unwaxed armpits, are an inspiration to anyone dithering over grooming routines. Meanwhile comedian Rob Delaney is “horrified by the absence of pubic hair”.
Not to mention the money and time that muff maintenance requires. When one Londoner stopped £20 waxes she saved enough money to buy an iPad. As she observes: “It’s an honour for anyone to be allowed to see my vagina, they should be happy with that, not examine it. Do what you like with your body hair. I have better things to do than agonise over mine.”
Long live the dirty pretty things. As long as you follow Saga and change T-shirts when necessary.
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