And as of Wednesday, if the force of cosmic, global will (and the democratic process) has any power, the joke won’t be a joke any more. It will just be a reference to the goodness of pubic hair. Which, of course, remains controversial. A painful topic, even. The last time I had a bikini wax was well before the Brazilian dominance of the scene, and – I have to say: Brazilian? Have you seen their soccer players’ hair ‘styles’? I’d rather let Edward Scissorhands trim my topiary.

Being the academic that I am cursed to be, I can rehearse the aesthetic/political dimensions of bush: waxing renders women’s genitals pre-pubescent in appearance, with all the attendant psychoanalytic nastiness for both parties; on the other hand, Freud refers to pubes (women’s only) as "a woven mat to cover their shame," which makes me want to razor it all off and go around flashin’ my chicken-skin shame. He also says (and I don’t credit Freud further than I can throw the 24-volume hardbound set of his work) that this "woven mat" led women to invent the art of weaving, the only art originated (in his opinion) by women. Sadie Frost, in her brilliant book Zeroes and Ones, argues a direct connection between the art of weaving and the art(s) of cyberspace, in an attempt to restore women’s agency in the online world.

Not that cyberspace is much of a "woven mat to cover [our] shame," as anyone who checks their email will know. Slews of shaved shenanigans are vomited into (and then out of) my inbox every day. Shaved, smooth, little, tight, virgin: these are the tricks of the trade. No hair nowhere. It’s all so… Victorian. Hang on, I’ll explain. When eminent art critic John Ruskin married, he had something of a (pun intended) queer turn. Upon undressing his blushing bride, he found – to his horror – that she had some kind of unnatural fungal growth between her legs. Being the Victorian gent that he was, he despatched her back to her parents in tears, and returned to his studio, where smooth-skinned lovelies posed for the male pen, and art books overflowed with many mons veneris in plain, non-fungal view. Ruskin, bless his sock garters, was a grown man who had never heard of female pubic hair, let alone seen it.

Teenage boys gettin’ their horn on with contemporary porn would be similarly in the dark. And possibly even freaked out by their own body hair. Gay porn started the hairless thing, based on those ideal classical bodies that Ruskin studied (it’s hard to carve body hair in marble), and women – second-class citizens of the sexual empire as ever – were stripped as bare as the boys. Even those non-porn stars among us like to maintain a "tidy" bush that fits the contours of a super-thong. I’ll say it loud and proud: I am not one of those girls. I wear fur-trimmed panties (warm for the Canadian winter). I’m a fun girl, fungal as Effie Ruskin, standing proud like my hirsute heroine Emily Mortimer in the lovely and amazing Lovely and Amazing (written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, ex-Sex and the City scribe). It’s a position with little validation outside the hippie community (check out <http://www.hippiegoddess.com> for grrls who are buck [naked] ing this trend), and puts me in worrying alignment with the psychos at PETA.

Because fur is socially unacceptable. Especially in the eyes of other women in the swimming pool changing room. Beach holidays can turn into a nightmare of razors, exploding shaving foam cans, topical analgesics for razor burn, itching regrowth – all in the name of what other people think. I don’t care if my pubes get a little tan action in, but I can’t take the stares. Hooray for Bravissimo <http://www.bravissimo.com>, which, as well as offering gorgeous bras starting at D (sorry, averagely-endowed ladies) and moving on up to JJ, has bikini combinations with shorts and those cute 1950s-style skirts. Because I refuse to live in an Olympic volleyball world. Thongs are further proof of Aryan ascendancy, designed for skinny blondes who barely grow enough body hair to stuff a mushroom. Is it any wonder that urban Brazilians invented the strip wax? Their country suffers from the worst deforestation, mainly perpetrated by US cattle ranching and lumber companies, destroying both indigenous populations and large chunks of the world’s ecosystem. Your body also has an ecosystem, and it needs its canopy cover. Don’t join the GW bush in global deforestation. As the panty warriors over at Axis of Eve <http://www.axisofeve.org> put it: The bush in my pants is worth more than the two in the White House.

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