Many men and women no doubt believe that a guy who finds unshaved women—especially very hairy women—sexually appealing must be abnormal. Are they right? Well, as with most things concerning sex, it depends.
If finding hairy women a turn-on is abnormal—and let’s not beat about the bush (no pun intended): by “abnormal” we mean “sick” and “perverse”—is being turned on by women who are blonde, big-breasted, long-legged, or callipygian (having a shapely ass) abnormal? If not, what’s the diff?
Okay, it’s true that being a fan of blonde or big-breasted women is culturally sanctioned, more or less, and being an aficionado of hairy women isn’t, but isn’t that sanction kind of arbitrary? Why should having a thing for blondes be perfectly okay and having a thing for hairy women be a shameful secret? It’s a rhetorical question, but think about it.
Nor is this a matter of degree. Suppose a guy is only turned-on by hairy women. Sick, right? Now suppose a guy is only turned on by women who are blonde? Is that sick? Heck, no! That’s perfectly normal. Guys boast about their attraction to blondes. Women with dark hair rue the fact that they weren’t born blonde and dye their hair blonde, because “blondes have more fun.” It’s true you don’t see many women who stop shaving because hairy girls have more fun, but the situations are analogous. Aren’t they?
Well, yes and no. Yes, in one sense, of course, they are. But there’s a big difference: women who are blonde are still fully feminine. Women who are hairy aren’t: they blur the distinction between the genders, because, let’s face it, hairiness is a masculine, not a feminine, trait.
So having a predilection for hairy women inevitably raises the dread specter of homoerotic inclinations, whereas having a predilection for blonde women doesn’t. We’ll examine this issue in more detail in an upcoming essay. This, I believe, is the main reason why a guy who has a thing for blondes has no compunction about boasting about it to all and sundry, whereas a guy who has a thing for hairy women would never dream of doing such a thing. Especially because most hairy women lovers are heterosexual, have never had a homosexual experience, and would be as freaked out by the prospect as any other straight guy.
There’s also fear of the opprobrium incurred from other women. How many women believe that a woman who doesn’t shave her legs or armpits—the two potentially hairy, traditionally shaved body parts commonly on public display—is a slut? Many if not most, I suspect. And no doubt many if not most men feel likewise. And yet, if a woman has hairy forearms and doesn’t shave them, or a mustache, this evokes no such response.
But why should this be? Obviously, the egregious display of unauthorized female body hairy is freighted with symbolic significance. One psychoanalyst theorizes that pubic hair sprouts in the general vicinity of the anus, which is dirty, so the more pubic hair a woman has, the dirtier she is. To follow the logic of this analogy, culturally unauthorized hair on a woman’s legs or in her armpits is an extension of her pubic hair—her dirty sexual hair. Yet no one thinks a hairy man is dirty. That’s because hairiness in a man is “normal.” Hairiness in a woman isn’t, at least not on this side of the Atlantic. We’ll discuss unshaved women in Europe another time.
So hairy legs or armpits are, in America at least, a veritable advertisement for female sexuality. It’s as if a woman who prefers to go natural is announcing to the world: Look at me. I’m hairy. I’m dirty. I’m horny. I want to be fucked. Come and fuck me. And also, since hairiness is a masculine, not a feminine, trait: See, I have a sexual appetite just like a man—that is, I’m ready and willing to have sex at a moment’s notice, with no strings attached, just to sate my animal lust.
There actually is an evolutionary grain of truth in this. What is the function of pubic hair, after all? To draw the attention of potential sexual partners to one’s genitals. To follow this line of reasoning, then, the more pubic hair a woman has, the more she wants to advertise her sexuality to potential partners, and the more highly sexed and lustfully undiscriminating she must be. It’s as if she has no choice. It’s a biological imperative. The fact that this makes no more sense than a woman having big breasts ipso facto wanting to advertise her sexuality more than a woman who has small breasts is beside the point. These perceptions, unfounded or not, are deeply ingrained in the collective unconscious and in the culture.
Which is why many women who shave are taken aback by a woman who doesn’t. “Oh, that’s disgusting!” they may mutter under their breath. But what, precisely, is disgusting? Is it that hairy women look repulsive? No, quite the opposite: It’s that hairy women look blatantly sexual. That’s not disgusting; it’s threatening. And it would probably not be so threatening if so many men who were married to these shaved, tisking women didn’t ogle a woman with unshaved legs or armpits—not ogle her as if she were a freak; ogle her as if she were an object of compelling sexual desire.
The fact that women who go unshaved generally intend to convey no such message—and probably would be disconcerted if not horrified to learn that other people, at least unconsciously, believed they do—doesn’t seem to matter.
We’ll devote a future essay to what hairy women themselves have to say about this. But in my capacity as a journalist who often writes on human sexuality for major national magazines, my interviews with unshaved heterosexual and bisexual women consistently reveal that their sexual and other attitudes are no different from those of women who shave.
I realize that I haven’t quite answered the question I initially posed: are guys who are turned on by hairy women normal? But there are several dimensions to the answer. As such, it will take several essays to explore it more fully. To be continued …
