and it all feels nicer and cleaner. you girls ought to try it.

brightstar65

Her response was "Are Rebecca Traister and her bunch aware that the Taliban agrees with them that women exciting men is morally reprehensible?" Normally I abhor "Taliban agrees" "Nazis said that too" kind of arguments, except when they are dead on. My lovely and brilliant wife, dead on.

Silly me.

When I remember 1968 I think about:

Murder of RFK.

Murder of MLK.

Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague.

The Democratic Convention in Chicago. Riot cops swinging clubs and Gene McCarthy speaking in the park across the street.

The election of Richard Nixon. (I never thought we'd have a president so bad he'd make Tricky Dick look pretty good by comparison. But the GOP has pulled that off twice.)

The War in SEAsia and the loss of a dear friend, a navigator, when his plane went down in the South China Sea. Oh, and he's the one who came home and told me about the ilegal bombing in Laos and Cambodia. A secret I kept until 1972 because I swore I would.

There are days when I think I need to have my memory erased.

I suppose you could get pretty creative with those.

Perhaps I twisted the knife a bit too much there.

I am not trying to blanket the entire left with my statements. Just the righteous (you and your spouse are pedophiles if you shave your privates) SOBs posting here.

They sound an awful lot like some conservatives I know.

I disagree with your conclusion, minimus, but appreciate how artfully-- albeit wrongheadedly-- you managed to slip in some gratuitous "liberal bashing" into an argument over genital grooming.

It is funny how so many of these enlightened left leaning liberals find pubic shaving morally wrong.

Feminists are all about free choice.

Just so long as you pick your choices from the list they have made of the “right” choices.

If it is not on the list then it is the wrong choice and some law must be made to limit the choices.

How ironic that, on a website so rightly and staunchly devoted to promoting a woman's right to choose, that a presumably grown woman's right to engage in personal grooming can be so derogated. Freedom of choice-- seems to me that if you want it, you need to be willing to accept the free exercise thereof by others.

...you could have let Broadsheet readers miss out on this "gem", Rebecca. What, is Sarah Goldstein on vacation so you've got to fill in the celebri-trash item of the day?

Were they actually shaved (depilated) into the cutesy designs and then photographed, or was it all Photoshop? If the former, it's time for PETA to get busy.

Salon, thanks for giving 50 of us the opportunity to share how we treat our pubic hair! I only wish the letters section allowed head shots, so I could put faces to names to bushes!

...with a razor or nads, should be aware that the hair will grow back eventually, and it will be very prickly and uncomforable while it is growing. Very, very uncomfortable. Just trust me on this. Don't try it.

This whole discussion of pubic hair, or lack thereof, is taking place on a web page that has a picture of Bin Laden in the top right corner. Bin Laden, complete with his huge, straggly-ass beard. It's part of an ad for a CNN special called "In the footsteps of Bin Laden".

Joan Didion has a line about the Summer of Love that says something about how in that weird, jingly-jangly summer of 1968, seemingly random connections made as much sense, if not more, than a conventional narrative.

Deja Vu!

I have officially reached the point where I don't want to hear another word about anyone's pubic hair. Do whatever the hell you want with it - why do I have to keep hearing about it?

"It's taking another entirely normal female characteristic and turning it into a kind of defect that must be 'managed', at great cost and time and inconvenience."

I bought a $20 electric shaver and it takes me 5 minutes to trim my hedge. I don't see anyone bitching about men shaving their beards. Those are "entirely normal male characteristics" which have been turned into "a kind of defect that must be 'managed'.." If you went up and told some man how stupid he was for shaving his beard, you'd be out of line. Telling someone what to do with their pubic hair is even more out of line.

In conversation with the readers who have mentioned the posible discomforts of shaving down there, it's actually very easy to shave the fine hairs around the vagina and asshole, because they're very fine hairs. The only place most people really have to worry about razor burn is in the crevices where crotch meets thigh. I can tell you the reason for leaving a patch of hair on the front, though, is that the hair on the front is very coarse and the skin very thin. You're just begging for razor burn if you shave the front - the mons, I think it's called. Thus the "landing strip" and triangles and any other shape actually serve a very practical purpose. And it's not the hair on the front that most women get tired of; it's the easier-to-remove hair on the labia that gets period blood stuck in it (yes, I went there), and it's also that same hair that muffles contact with the sensitive labia skin during intimate moments. Even if it did start out as a man's idea for getting a better view, I'm sure the first woman to shave her vagina lips and then have sexual intercourse noticed right away, "WOW I didn't know I had so many nerve endings covered up all this time!"

I highly recommend trying it before judging it.

Personally I think the gals at Broadsheet are just bored and want to stir up another letter storm, since obviously pubic hair is the topic du jour on Salon.

When the day comes that women are forced to wax their pubes, I will consider this a feminist issue. Otherwise, I really see no reason for all this anger and rage. Its your pubes and you can do what you damned please with it, and if some guy really would like you to wax and you really don't want to.... well then clearly he is not the guy for you. Duh. Sorry, I just don't see the violence inherent in the system.

I mean come on: giving someone the finger because they produce a product that you don't want to use?

Pullllleeeasee, Broadsheet, isn't it time to find a real issue to talk about?