10 Women On Why They Don’t Like To Shave Their Pubic Hair

It's an age-old battle that women and people with vulvas have faced: to remove or not to remove our pubic hair.

Removing pubic hair, and body hair in general, has been the standard of female beauty for a long time. If Renaissance Art and ancient Greece are anything to go by, people with vulvas have been expected to have hairless genitalia for hundreds of years, with a brief embracing of the bush in the 70s. Starting to shave, wax or laser our pubic hair when it starts to appear is often considered a rite of passage — just as our body hair starts to grow as we come into maturity, we're pressured to sculpt it, trim it down or get rid of it altogether.

But in recent years, keeping our pubic hair has become more popular, with large groups of women choosing to opt out of their old hair removal rituals in an act of defiance against the constraints and rules that have been placed on our bodies for so long. Where we once felt immense societal pressure for our bodies to look a certain way, many women are reclaiming the space to feel comfortable and attractive just the way they are.

Refinery29 spoke to 10 women about why they don't like to shave their pubic hair anymore, and what letting their natural body hair grow out means to them.