Times, they are a-changin’…and men’s expectations for pubic hair are changing with it. A new study published in the January 2015 issue of Journal of Sexual Medicine found that 60 percent of college-aged men prefer their partners to be pubic hair-free.Eleven hundred college-aged men and women from a large public Midwestern university and a small Southern public university participated in the study. As Women’s Health explains, the survey examined both how the participants groomed their pubic hair and also what they expected from their partners.Six out of 10 men said they preferred women to be hair-free; correspondingly, half of the women actually do go bare. (Only one in five men went pubic hair-free, which frankly, sounds like a lot to me.) Overall, 95% of partipants of both genders had taken shears to their pubic hair sometime in the past month, either to trim or to remove it entirely.  The most common method of public hair removal was shaving.The majority of participants who didn’t groom at all were dudes. Not at all surprisingly, the study found that women were more likely to associate pubic hair grooming with “feelings of cleanliness, comfort, sex appeal, [and] social norms of their peer group.”  Women were also the ones who experienced the most common side effect of genital itching.To each their own, of course. But I can’t help but worry if young adults have internalized messages about pubic hair maintainance from their elders to the point that it’s just a given. Brazilian bikini waxing — that is, taking it all off — became hugely popular in the mid-1990s, before these college students were even born. Nowadays, the expectation seems to be that trimming and waxing your privately-seen pubic hair seems to be as frequent and necessary as getting your publicly-seen bushy eyebrows plucked. Even though young women are free to make the choice themselves to trim or wax, the pressure on them to join this social “norm” now is worrying.READ MORE: On Body Hair And Changing What It Means to be Feminine READ MORE: Ask a Scientsit: Does Hair Grow Back Normally After I Shave or Pluck It

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