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When I was in seventh grade, my teacher, Mrs. Jones—a profusely hairy woman if ever there was one—would sit cross-legged on the floor and read us stories. I could almost always see up her skirt and, though she wore hose, the hair on her legs was always clearly visible. Beginning at her knees, the inside of her thighs sprouted hair that grew thicker as it traveled up her leg. On some days I could see all the way up and her body seemed to disappear into a forest of hair. I was intrigued by what might lie within that forest, just as I was fascinated by how dense that forest actually was—not particularly turned on, but fascinated.
So, what’s the deal with hairy women? Specifically, what is it that attracts men to hairy or unshaven women?
“I would say that we might call hair a fetish,” Jennifer Bass of the Kinsey Institute explains to me. “Why do people have fetishes? Well, that’s the million-dollar question. Is it something that comes from an experience in early childhood? We don’t know.”
Kim Nielsen of ATK Hairy & Natural (amkingdom.com/hairy) subscribes to the logic of the influence of early childhood experience. “Having read thousands of email comments from customers who are members of our sites,” he says, “I believe that preferences for the state of hairiness perhaps derive in part from what one is exposed to during puberty and through early sexual experiences.”
But is that all there is to it? While it’s true that some men proclaim they simply like women with the “natural look,” and we’re all affected to some degree by what happens early in life, there also seems to be something deeper, more primal going on.
David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington—someone with an extensive knowledge of evolutionary psychology and human sexuality and author of numerous books, including “Gender Gap” and “The Myth of Monogamy,” co-authored with wife Judith Lipton—posits two arguments. One is the tendency for males of our species to prefer more diversity; thus the attractiveness of hairy women represents something out of the norm in a society that values hairlessness as a sign of femininity. The other argument is—and he assures me he’s “just bullshitting here”—the idea of pheromones and “the dissemination of odors.” There is, Barash says, “growing data for the evidence of pheromones,” and studies have found that men can often tell what stage of ovulation a woman is at by her smell.
The concept of odor as an aphrodisiac is not new, as Barash points out. People have coifed and perfumed themselves with scents for ages. It would stand to reason that natural odors would be a turn-on as well. This seems to be proven in scores of Internet postings praising the “mustiness” of hairy women and websites touting women “so hairy you can almost smell them!”
Who among us hasn’t buried their face in a pillow to retrieve the scent of an absent lover? Is it so strange that someone might want to bury their face in the musty “full-bush” or armpits of their lover? It may be odd, but some people like it. As Barash says, laughing, “when you have over six billion people running around, you’re going to get all kinds of things.”
The reality, like all great truths in life, probably lies in a combination of answers. Besides, who really knows why they prefer any given thing—from a particular flavor of ice cream, to a pair of pheromone-soaked hairy legs? Still, the appeal of hairy women to heterosexual men is fascinating. Hairiness can be seen as a sign of virility in men. But women? What is it about that? The mysteries may be buried deep, like the hirsute thighs of Mrs. Jones.
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