The way people groom their private region is nobody's business and no one to concern, until they're made public.
Around the world, cultures have different norms, and apparently, they also affect how people see body hair.
For example, in many countries of the world, women are largely expected to shave their legs and underarm hair when planning to expose them. But when things involve pubic hair, how long is too long, or how short is considered bald?
How people should see pubic hair?
Do they shave it? Tidy it up once in a while? Or leave it as is?
In Japan, things down there are far from being bare.
According to Shogakukan, its team at News Post Seven created an online research to check up on how Japanese women groom their hair down there, in order to find how similar Japanese are to the West, and how the increasingly diverse culture has affected the way they style their mons pubis.
One thousand Japanese women between the ages of 20 and 69 participated in the online survey, and revealed their own habits regarding pubic hair.
The average age of the respondents was 41.9 years, placing a large number of them into the "married-with-kids category."
Here, it's realized that more than half of the women, or 53%, said that their pubic hair "grows thick."
Those women who admitted to have thick pubic hair density also provided answers to "how do you groom down there?" The most common answer was "I do absolutely nothing," making up 56.2% of the total responses. Other comments included:
- "I remove the hair outside my bikini line" (26%).
- "I trim the hair shorter" (23.6%).
- "I remove the hair up to my genital region" (7%).
- "I remove the hair up to my anal region" (5.5%).
For Japanese women, pubic hair is a sign of puberty, and removing it completely is like a sign of immaturity or a refusal to grow into adulthood.
And speaking of culture, Japanese love visiting hot springs and pubic baths (onsen), and that it's a norm for them to appear naked in front of others, and at times, seeing a person without pubic hair attracts more attention, but in a bad way.
According to a local beauty shop in Japan that offers hair removal services, including Brazilian waxing, they said that lots of woman at hot springs and pubic baths don't shave at all, saying that "the results of the survey make sense."
Even though most women in Japan shave their underarm hair, they leave their pubic hair as it is.
The beauty shop said that most customers who with to remove their pubic hair are doing so for hygienic reasons, like because "it’s hot and humid," and because they place a higher importance on the appearance of the lower half of their bodies.
What's more, it's said that Japanese prostitutes in the past shaved their pubic hair during the Edo period. Many of those women do not shave their hair in order not to be associated with prostitutes.
The result of the online survey also describes how the Japanese culture is in accordance to the adult industry.
It has been long depicted in pornography content from Japan, that women sport full bush, despite the fact that many of them in the industry are actually urged to have no hair in other parts of their bodies.
Up until the mid-1990s, any depiction of pubic hair on media was censored. According to the law, showing pubic hair and adult genitalia was once considered obscene, and those who violate can be punished by fines or imprisonment.
For this reason, genitals in Japanese media are often censored and pixelated.
It's worth mentioning that the study is made after more than a couple of decades since the publication of the large volume of sexology, "Japanese Women's External Genitalia", which contains photographs of 8,330 female genitals.
No studies have appeared that track changes in the Japanese female genitalia since that time, until this research was made.
Pubic hair and how it's styled is personal preferences, and is affected by partners or spouse, and also culture.
But of course, there are a number of other reasons why many women want to keep their pubic hair, or remove it. According to the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN) in 2012, it's revealed that pubic hair removal was uncommon among Western women before the 20th century.
It's worth noting that the presence of body hair went in and out of style for a few times, many of which were affected by the influence of fashion magazines and popular TV shows, celebrities, culture references, and personal hygiene products.
Another thing worth noting is that, another online survey found that 60% of undergraduate Australian women removed their pubic hair, 20% removed a little, 44% removed most of it, and 36% removed all of it. A similar study also found that 20% of American women between the ages of 18 and 24 reported total hair removal.