I'm glad you brought this up because it has been on my mind for a while now too. And I do agree with you - the last time I went down to the tip was about ten days ago - nothing's changed. Old washing machines, batteries leaking acid, plastic bags, anything it seems, straight into landfill.

I love Amy Poehler's comments on Saturday Night Live:

"Ladies, what's up with all the deforestation going on down there? You need hair down there! It's a backup system for underwear! ... I remember when a lady garden was as big as a slice of New York pizza!"

From Salon http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/12/31/2006_sex/index2.html

Its a wonder the SBS has not done a special on this. They like to sink to the lowest ebb and call it educational. At least everyone knows that Big brother etc is trash. More sensuality, more child molestaion, more perversion. Who really cares until they are affected.

Meredith

I agree with what you say. However, the idea of a depilated muff, in my opinion, has a great deal to do with the desire of some men to see women as pre-pubescent. The pornography industry has made Brazilians and nude genitalia mandatory. This is a reflection of the fashion industry's "size 8" for models and impractical designs for real women.

In personal terms, "vive la muff"

Good article.

Why women buy so uncritically into all this nonsense is beyond me.

I remember reading an article in one of those women's magazines by a bloke who said that he felt uncomfortable with his lover's decision to wax it nearly off. It made him feel dirty, he said. She said it made her feel clean. Eep! Clean like a little girl?

Mind you, some men seem to like it, so we have the pathologising of what nature intended by both men and women.

2007 and the uncomfortableness with the female form continues.

Good on you for writing this piece

What a waste, all of that imagery and humour just to knee men in the balls over some very tenuous links with pornography and children.

Some women need to get on with life and stop blaming men for women's vanity. Women remove hair from all sorts of places and 99.9999% of the times it is for fashion and vanity, not men. If anyone doesn't believe this just have a look at girls' and women's magazines. This could start with the January 2007 edition of Cleo, which has more bare muff than twelve months of 'girlie' mags (and no full-on 70's feminist hair).

Anyhow, some blondes can get away with things that more hirsute and darker haired women cannot and a black shadow really detracts from 'the look', as do tufts of hair poking out from bathers.

I suppose heaps of hair could go with the bib and braces overalls for the 'butch' look so valued in some circles. But some of them shave their heads instead and that really would (in the author's eyes) be reminiscent of an infant's baldness.

Has the author considered why some men are stripping and trimming mush hair from their bodies and undergoing plastic surgery? Following the author's logic that must be because women are pederasts and 'make' men do it.

When looking for the reason for something, it is never wise to disregard the most obvious.

There is huge $$ investment in personal care products including hair removal and in fashion generally. That is where the ideas and pressure are coming from, not from ordinary blokes who quite frankly are quite mystified about the trend (and are looking very uncomfortable as the personal care and fashion advertisers gun turrets are being turned their way).

It is about male and female entrepreneurs making money, not men.

What troubles you more runner - the values of SBS or the state of play on the mons pubi of women?

Tight corsets, foot binding, neck stretching, high heels, breast implants, botox and snatch grooming - it 's all the same - a mixture of anthropological determinism and socialised vanity - anything for a root - or at least to be pursued for one

I am reminded of Dr Evil in Austin Powers extolling the virtues of a shaved scrotum - it was a joke in the cinema and is a joke in real life on the various nincompoops who pursue these various forms of self mutilation

Never heard of "The Brazilian" before. Glad to admit I have not witnessed it at close quarters.
If the prime reason for it is the suggestion of pre-pubescence, then what sort of partner is the "fashionable woman" chasing? Doesn't say much for either the man or the woman.
It's got nothing to do with improving prospects in health matters. If surgeons in operating theatres are currently recommending not shaving, then partners operating in sexual activities should be abandoning it also. If the fashion-chasers want to bang-on about it being the in-thing, too bad - hopefully it will run its course earlier rather than later.
At least I have seen no evidence of the lads removing their short and curlys. Though hopefully their parents will, from an epidemiological sexual-health perspective, continue to predominantly choose circumcision.
I am resigned, reluctantly, to witness fashion continuing to dictate so much of human activity. For beach wear it has caused briefs to diminish in size to the extent of being impractical - viewing at the expense of function. But, if the fashion gods are kind to me, I might yet see girls with bushes in ribbons; and boys in New Guinea tribal-style penis sheaths of ridiculously intemerate boasting size.

Forgive me for not having first hand knowledge of this, but it appears Middle Eastern women in some parts have been of "Brazilian" persuasion for centuries. My only knowledge comes from a female friend who went to Turkey for a holiday and entered a "womens only" bath house. Women in such baths enter the water naked, which is customary apparently, so my friend followed suite. She was at one end of the baths, while a gaggle of Turkish women huddled together at the other end giggling and pointing rudely to my friend's lower region. In embarrasment, she fled the bath and proceeded to get dressed when a women from the pool entered the change area and asked in broken English just why my friend doesn't bother to wax down "there." My friend quickly discovered that it was the norm in that country to wax off all pubic hair from an early age. I asked just how that would have been performed long before the invention of modern waxing methods and although she wasn't certain, she was later told that it was done in early times using a ball of resin from a certain tree. My point is that the "Brazilian" look isn't only a recent phenomenon. Maybe it's the fashion world that's behind the times for once. Perhaps our good Muslim friends could enlighten us further?

Sheesh, with all the men who wax body hair these daze in an attempt to satisfy the ever morphing expectation that women have about male appearance and identity, one can only conclude that women have latent paedophile desires for pre-pubescent boys. All those teachers in the USA raping 12 yr old boys (and girls) certainly backs up that warped extrapolation.

Good pluck brainiacs.

I am all in favour of ladies adopting the “Brazilian” approach to hair.

I could never get over the French girls who seemed to braid their armpits a couple of decades ago when their pome sisters sported clean shaved underarms.

Armpit curls are as unattractive as bikini side burns.

Overall, I see the end to the muff as a beneficial thing, especially for those of us who floss anyway.

My other observation is, such depilitory rigour gives new meaning to the familiar term “skin diving”

My my... you ALL MISSED IT..... the most important bit in the article was not the actual subject but this:

"But what comes next?"

Now..if I, as unofficial Bible Basher had some along and said "It's partly about triggering pre-pubescent" thoughts in blokes....or..

"This is just part of a trend, and the end is not a good one"....

I'd be ridiculed off the forum facing backwards on a horse and kicked outatown.

SO...it is with some degree of evil 'I told ya so' relish that I post those words from the feminist author. "What comes next" ?

I suggest there are a number of possibilities, some of which we are seeing already.

1/ Context. Celebrity genitalia in public places.
2/ Religious connections... more and more daring use of 'satanic' themes, or.. simply connecting porn to traditional religious symbols
3/ Age related.. yep..expect porn to feaure more and more young chicks
4/ Disgusting related.. I don't even want to think about it..yuk.

BIBLE BASH.. ok.. there is a verse somewhere, I cant for the life of me find it, buttttt...it goes something like this:

"God lets us go our own way so we will eventually see we are no better than the animals and become ashamed" (i.e. when we leave God out of our lives, thats what happens.)

Isaiah 1 is kind of about that God speaking "You have left me oh Israel"
Results: All manner of injustice and corruption.

Well.. I want to underline it again, now that we have had it from 'reliable' source (as opposed to woffling wowsers like me :)
There IS a trend...and its allll downhill. Perhaps we should consider a reversal of direction with National Repentance and Renewed Faith ?

end of sermon.

col, better 'skin diving' than 'growling at the badger'

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these."
Matthew 6.25.
So let's all get naked and natural, like the bible says.
Think of the money you'll save on dental floss, Col.

Hey - what about recycling? Why ditch Beaver at a landfill?

Uses: Spin it, knit it, leave it out for the birds, compost it, fill for Fido's mattress - Oh, so many uses for ones discarded pelt.

And how inventive is that? A brand new cottage industry!

The bigger the bush, the bigger the profits!

And it's organic!

Viva la muff!

What a wonderful opportunity for salacious geopolitical allegory!

Personally, I'd rather wander blissfully through a Tasmanian forest than scour a newly denuded Brazilian jungle... ;)

More seriously, I think it's just another expression of the quest for eternal youth by the self-obsessed. And while I'm an enthusiastic lover of female genitalia, I'm less than aroused by pornographic depictions of shaved twats.

Well i must be really bent as i dont mind either way wether its waxed with l`oreals finest and latest rip off product(maybe leaving a ting "landing strip or left to grow and i mean left to grow much like the back that has been ripped off a Cocker Spaniel and glued on the old mon`s...ooh lah lah!

Hmmmm back to the wax,i wonder how or what animals are used as the crash test dummies in the pursuit of a better wax? Maybe you animal libbers out there should think about this...not all of you have mohair stockings surely.

what's next - maybe evolution would eliminate "unncessary" parts of the human body, although not precipitated by changes in environmental factors, but by money

As a gentleman of discernment, I must say that I like a nice hairy bush on my woman. Shaved pussies are a real turn-off.

Goku "what's next - maybe evolution would eliminate "unncessary" parts of the human body, although not precipitated by changes in environmental factors, but by money "

Thats what I though plastic surgeons did for a living

I do recall a TV show where some negro-american ladies had liposuction and then the removed fats reinjected into their butts, in pursuit of the "perfect bootie" (?spelling)

Someone paying for "elimination of unnecessary parts" and then buying them back to pad the derriere, at least rejection should not be a problem.

None of you have got it. It's all about hygeine. Yup, women smell. So much easier to clean the skin than wash the hair, and with all that sex going on regular washing is a must. Guys shave it off, women wax. It has nothing to do with porn or pedophilia, that's just nonesense. Have any of you out there had pubic lice? They are everywhere, especially in brothels, prisons, and hospitals. Anywhere people live together lice hang out waiting for hairy pubes to build a nest in. If there ain't no hair there ain't no lice. OK it's not fashionable to talk about hygeine when everyone's hysterical about pedophiles and pornography. However, in this instance the pro's in porn have done us all a favour with the lice population.
The future is for more hygeiene and more porn showing people how to enjoy themselves if they wish to. Not that the hysterics here seem to be much interested.
Oh. by the way, a girl does not look anything like a woman with or without pubic hair.

So where exactly does it go?

I suspect the tip is not the place. Too wasteful. For a more enlightened view on this, perhaps a quick read of Dr Suess' "The Lorax" will help out. In the absence of Trufffula Trees, I suspect the Lorax has found something else with which to knit thneeds!

Because everyone needs a thneed..

I believe that some men are keen to pressure woman to wax because they want it all...a model to hang of their arm and a pornographical partner. They are whimpy about a bit of 'dental floss' which is not where they really need to go anyway but they expect reciprocation to physical intimacy whereby I do not see a reduction of lollie pop size to make it comfortable for the woman and a plugging of any drain pipes.

Well, interesting comments! I think that the drain plug is the only place for it, as I would not like it in my mouth. Not to mention that it is not a cheap alternative to "dental floss". P.S. Did you know that I can claim dental floss on my health care card. When hair is present, you can imagine all the living organisims setting up camp in moist warm areas. Only people who have any interest in sceince would be wanting to cultivate cutlures and such things. Which brings up another point, what do you feed such living things? I am reminded by a saying, " cleanliness is next to Godliness!"
Really, each person should be judged on a case to case basis. I am more than happy to be the official judge! :p I think that all women should watch Scary Movie 1, and see what happens when nature is left on its own.