Admit it–haven’t you wondered about this?  What IS the effect of all that hair removal down there on the local flora and fauna?  Fortunately, scientists have answered that question. Sort of. For women in Leeds, England.  (Maybe.)

Armstrong, N. (2006). Did the “Brazilian” kill the pubic louse? Sexually Transmitted Infections, 82 (3), 265-266 DOI: 10.1136/sti.2005.018671

I’ve seen this paper cited over and over, but what you don’t realize until you actually read it is that….it doesn’t actually have any significant conclusions.  The authors looked at the occurrence of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and pubic lice between 1997 and 2003 in people showing up at a public GYN clinic.  While clap and chlamydia increased significantly, the frequency of pubic lice declined significantly during the same period.

The graph itself is deceptive. The second Y axis actually shows the percentage decreasing from 0.5% of cases seen to 0.15% cases seen.  So, a rare thing got…more rare.  Additionally, all the numbers are reported as a percentage, so there is no information at all about just how many total cases we are looking at.  The total group seen has to be at least 200 people/year, since otherwise the percentages indicate sexually active headless torsos.  But we really have no idea if this is any sort of a representative sample of the general population.

There is a much larger issue with this study, however. They have no data on what the waxing rate is in either the population of women showing up in their clinic, or the population at large.  None. All they have is anecdotal stories that waxing became more popular during that time period.   So, they aren’t even able to show a correlation; they just speculated that there would be a correlation, if there was any data.

There is a certain logical beauty in linking the destruction of Ho-Ha forests by clear-cutting and the death of the native fauna.  (A crab louse paper from 1983 describes them as “swinging from hair to hair” rather like monkeys, BTW.)  However, there simply is no evidence for for a link between snatch waxing and pubic lice decline.

Honestly? I think the only reason this paper made it past the journal editors was because it was about pubic lice, and crotch crickets are inherently interesting because of the pastures they graze in.  (Which, of course, is exactly why -I- am writing about them!)

I did some investigating (in the library, pervs!) and found that there is actually data available on happy trail hair removal for women in the US and Australia.  The percentage of Australian college women who shaved their pudenda was around 48% during the same time period; but that means that the majority of women still had some or all of their original carpeting, whether or not it still matched the drapes.

We also know from a very detailed study of American women in 2010 that there is no dominant pattern to hair removal in the US. Women aged 18-24 were most likely of all age groups to have naked crotches, but even then only 38% of them were hair free down there.  Having a hairless muffin was actually the least common pattern of body hair in the over 2,450 women studied.  Additionally, removal of one’s No-No Fro was NOT related to having experienced an STD infection in that study–which strongly suggests that the sample used for the “Brazilian hypothesis” was not representative.

It is far too soon to say if pubic lice are an endangered species. I know that when I was teaching entomology regularly, at least one student a year would manage to collect a crab louse, so they are still out there.

As for me, I plan to keep my Map of Tasmania intact.  Hope that wasn’t overly sharing.

EDITED TO ADD NOTE: a 2013 update, since there is another press release out about pubic lice.  Still not time to list pubic lice as an endangered species, folks. The majority of the world still has intact shrubbery.