Photo by Flickr user Joan Thewlis. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Oof, here’s an interesting conceptual turnaround from Holly of The Pervocracy

It’s kinda funny to me when people talk about shaved pubes being suggestive of prepubescence, because I’ve shaved mine since about age 16. I was hairy when I was innocent and just growing into my womanhood, then as an adult I was bare.

I can’t help but associate childhood (well, jailbaithood, at least) with having pubes.

She said it here.

It’s kind of like, woah! Good point. I mean, being surrounded as I happen to be with children in the earliest throes of puberty it’s… pretty darn clear their bodies (9-12) begin to develop long before their autonomous, independent sexualities begin to (13-16.)

Which means if you think a boy or girl is ready for sex just because they’ve got pubic hair you’re… um… a sexualizer? Pedophile? Clueless moron who ought to refrain from expressing your opinions, let alone dispensing advice, in the presence of children under maybe age 18?

Oh, and just to be clear? Anyone who thinks a grown woman’s vulva, or man’s penis looks juvenile without pubic hair a) has never changed diapers and b) has very little experience with grown women’s vulvas or grown men’s penises. Because, hello? Adult genitals aren’t just children’s genitals slightly larger and with hair any more than adult’s faces are children’s faces after the tooth fairy gets done with them.

Please don’t take any of this to mean I think anybody ought to do anything with his or her pubic hair. At any age. Seriously, to dictate what anybody should do with the hair on their body would be as… as… stupid as telling them what to do with the hair on their heads. (And as far as I know the people who care most about the latter would be… oh, say… the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, for women, and the Taliban for men and women. Just to name two.)

But!

_hile I’m not saying what anyone should or shouldn’t do with their hair, pubic or otherwise, I am saying that Holly makes perfect sense: healthy, non-sexual, non-sexualized children are probably going to be way into puberty… and therfore have quite a lot of pubic hair… before they really decide what they want to do about it.