Ashley Graham’s a gorgeous model, she’s smart, she’s successful … and she’s also not afraid to divulge some very personal details.
She’s willing to be super direct about how she grooms her crotch.
In the same interview where she shared her horrifying experience with sexual harassment as a minor, she opened up about much more lighthearted topics — like personal grooming.
A reader question came from a single woman who stopped getting bikini waxes after a breakup and wonders if she’s the only single woman with pubic hair.
Ashley Graham doesn’t beat around the bush — sorry — and straight-up tells the world that she doesn’t shave her privates:
“Honey, I have a full bush. Period. It’s about your preference and your partner’s preference.”
That’s super straightforward, but we’d expect nothing less than directness from this well-spoken, body-confident model.
The worst thing about conversations about personal grooming are the opinions, and we can all be guilty of taking our personal preferences or tastes and turning them into guidelines for the world to follow.
Let’s not be Kim Jong-un with his list of approved, legal hairstyles, okay?
Some people like themselves, or their partners, perfectly smooth. Some people like them untamed. And then there’s everything in between.
Like everything to do with a person’s body, it should be a personal preference — just as Ashley said.
It can totally be informed by a partner, but it should just be a statement of opinion, not a mandate.
If a guy demands that his girlfriend shave or not shave or whatever, she should just leave him.
Anybody else remember those “The only Bush I trust is my own” shirts?
I had a high school classmate who wore one to school. I think she covered it in front of teachers she didn’t trust, because she didn’t get into trouble. One teacher pulled me aside conspiratorially so that we could talk about how entertaining it was.
Point is, that wasn’t so long ago.
More recently, though, pubic hair has been very out, at least as far as women’s fashion is concerned. To such a degree that people have been talking about pubic lice dying out.
There are a whole bunch of factors behind that, but basically it’s because of the internet. Not just social media, not just porn, but both of those and more.
Some people like to think that any kind of hair-removal is just the invention of the fashion industry to sell products or keep women cages for their patriarchal masters or prepare us for our hair-averse lizard overlords.
The reality is that removing body hair, including pubes, is older than the pyramids. Actually, Ancient Egyptians specifically associated body hair with non-human animals, so at least some grooming was expected of everyone.
Dedicated priests removed every single hair, and this was in an age before Nair.
Like everything else in the fashion world, personal grooming trends come in and out of fashion.
What matters isn’t whether it’s fashionable, though — what matters is what individuals want to do with their own bodies.
As always, we should avoid body-shaming people for being “hairy” or “childlike” or whatever insults people want to sling around.
It’s hair and it’s not a big deal.
It might, like, make some bikini shoots mildly challenging for Ashley, but clearly she has a way to work through it.
And while we’re glad that she didn’t hesitate to be honest, like, this definitely wasn’t anybody’s business.