Sorry MEW, but I preferred the bare look long before they started using it in porn. First, long hair can get caught while fucking and especially during cunnilingus. Secondly, it makes breathing during cunnilingus a whole lot easier (imagine having scratchy hairs going up your nose while trying to provide oral sex). It's partly a matter of taste, partly convenience.

oh for crying out loud. there are people going hungry. the times writer and other shallow so-and-so's should get over themselves. seriously.

Not that any of you wanted to know this, but I've always groomed down there. I've never done the bald eagle, but I trim the hair and shave everything into a landing strip. I've done this since my teen years because of swimming, and just continued with it because I like the look.

I personally would like to see men trim their hair down there. There is nothing more disgusting than a guy who expects you to go down on him, and the hair stinks of urine and gets into your mouth because it's so long. GROSS! Either trim it or shave it off, guys, like women do.

What's good for the goose....

Guys, you disgust women with your lack of grooming much more than women gross you out. We just don't complain as much as you do. But consider yourself tipped off -- trim or shave your pubes. And while you're at it, try cutting your toe nails and filing your finger nails. No woman wants to be scratched by you, either. Long nails remind me of a disgusting Howard Hughes!

Too silly for words. A man once wanted me to get a Brazilian. He was, of course, extremely hirsute. Let the guy spend $75 to $100 and go through the pain. If they want us bare, the least they can do is be bare themselves before they have the nerve to ask. I always find these stories amusing. The real question is, why would anyone let "expectations" and "society" rule their behavior? Society's ideas of what I should do are the last things I think about when making decisions. Abide by a norm set by porn? laughable.

Trim if you must but a waxing requirement is downright creepy.

it's making society realize it's absurd to be spending $50 every 2-3 weeks in order to be perpetually waxed.

Badly brought up young whippersnapper! A woman is intimate enough with him that he gets to see her state of grooming down there, and he has the gall to complain?

Unless a woman has a tattoo on her mons venus, shaved or waxed makes her look prepubescent. I'm a bit older than 27, and I was similary "shocked" the first time I was with a woman who was waxed.

There are two reasons why the only watchable porn is from the 70's and 80's. They used film instead of video and the actresses usually had well groomed bushes.

At some point, maybe, we'll have grooming and shaving to be the norm to such an extent that a full bush will be a shocking sight. And men and women who don't groom or shave will just have to start.

We're not nearly there yet.

P.S. I like looking at pictures of naked women, and porn, and I'm really turned off by all the shaving. I really miss pubic hair.

I think the biggest challenge for humans is to stay human in the face of the corporate robot-making machine.

A vagina with pubes removed looks juvenile - what does that say about our society? Fear of women's power, fear of women's sexuality - and the natural corollary of fear - control by pruning, containing, removing, etc.

Women - why submit to this unjust dominion? Show your liberation and let it grow. Same for men - hair on the head and face is magnificent. Enjoy it, show it off, while you have it.

I can understand objecting to the idea that a bikini wax is a requirement, and the columnist could have put more stress on the fact that the letter writer can dump the boyfriend if she really doesn't want to shave or wax her lady parts.

But the columnist has one thing right:

When it comes to turn-offs (and turn-ons, usually), rational arguments really, truly DO NOT WORK.

In an ideal world, they ought to work, but they don't. Sexual attraction and repulsion are simply not rational things, by and large.

I have often thought that this is more true for men than for women, and that some women tend to believe it's possible to think oneself into an attraction, or out of its opposite, when one ought to do so.** When I ran this idea past one knowledgeable, sensible woman I know (my mother), she thought for a second and said, "I think you're right."

The letter writer may want to wax - or at least trim, which hurts a lot less - to hang onto her younger boyfriend, or she may want to kiss him goodbye and wait for a man who's turned on by the natural look.

Or maybe she can see if the boyfriend's desire to get laid overcomes his squeamishness, though that will work only if he doesn't think he has better options available.

But, as regular readers of Dan Savage's column know, it's no good expecting someone to change what does or doesn't turn him on simply because it's the right thing to do. Arousal just doesn't work that way.

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** As with, for instance, women who don't understand why their husbands may not want to witness the birth process ("Well, if he expects to be allowed access down there, he can damn well be in the room for the end result") and might have problems getting aroused by their wives' lady parts after seeing them give birth. Sorry - what happens to a woman's genitals during birth is a pretty yucky thing to see, and a man simply isn't going to get over it just because he ought to. Isn't that why husbands were traditionally kept out of the delivery room?