Millennials Aren't The Anti-Pube Generation
Source: Millennials Aren’t The Anti-Pube Generation Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: January 30, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026
I always had a belief about pubic hair that I regularly referenced in my jokes, but I had absolutely zero real-world experience to back it up: that millennials were the most anti-pubic-hair generation of recent history, and that the preference for pubic hair looked a bit like a hockey stick, with millennials as the ultimate dip. I believed Gen X and Gen Z were both far more amenable to some pube action than my generation.
I had some experience to back this up, but it was all based on being a millennial who exclusively dated other millennials. I remember pubic hair (especially on a girl) being such a gigantic joke that I would deliberately refuse sexual contact if I hadn’t recently shaved everything. A few guys I dated got rid of all their pubic hair (something I actually did not prefer, but I wasn’t going to bring it up.) As a result, I assumed seeing any pubic hair at all on a woman would repulse a guy to the point of dry heaving, and it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take. This might sound extreme, but for me it started when I was at theater camp in 2001 when I was about eleven. I was a relatively early bloomer, but unfortunately for me this applied not to boobs, but to…pubes.
I was goofing around with some of my friends around the waterfront when my crush at the time came over and started talking to us. Out of nowhere, one of the girls in our bunk came over and pulled down my pants (she had been doing this to everyone all day—really tired gimmick, honestly—but for the most part she only grabbed their shorts, no their underwear.) Unfortunately for me, her thumbs got caught on my Limited Too panda bear underpants and the entire waterfront (including my crush) was privy to my full bush. My crush ran off, dramatically screaming, “MY EYES!!! THEY BURN!!!” (That’s what I get for having a crush on a theater kid.)
But since I settled down young, I never really had experience with any man outside of my generation. However, I knew from what my mother told me that pubic hair wasn’t a big deal for boomers. In fact, she had repeatedly told me that it was “creepy” to shave all your pubic hair because it made you look like a child, so I figured the anti-pubic-hair thing started with my generation.
The reason I also believed it ended with my generation was that after the 2010s and going into the 2020s, I kept seeing TV shows and movies where actresses appeared to be hellbent on showing off their armpit hair—like, we saw more female armpit hair than male, to the point that it couldn’t possibly be an accident. I figured if this newfangled generation of women was letting their pit hair grow out and flagrantly flaunting it all over Netflix, surely they had fewer qualms about their pubes. I also saw lots of tweets about loving bush from people who I presumed were younger than me. In particular, I remember a viral tweet from some account with a Dora the Explorer profile picture randomly declaring that “hairy vaginas are in!” Then Skims released a bunch of merkins. So I assumed the whole pubic hair phobia began and ended with millennials.
As it turns out, this narrative wasn’t correct! Flummoxed by the fact that I couldn’t be certain about my pubic hair theory, I did what any other mentally ill person with 50,000 followers would do: I polled over 3,000 people on their pubic hair preferences.
And as it turns out, pubic hair preferences among straight men and women have been pretty consistent *after* the boomer generation, and men of my generation were never overwhelmingly disgusted by pubic hair. Nor were they significantly more anti-pube than men of Gen X or Gen Z.
Per my survey, I learned something unsurprising: men are more likely than women to prefer no pubic hair. However, that preference doesn’t differ that much by generation (Boomers were far more likely to prefer a full bush than anyone else, but there were too few of them in the survey to count.) Anyway: millennials are not significantly more opposed to pubic hair than Gen X, and in fact, Gen Z men are slightly more opposed to pubic hair than men of my generation. But either way, the difference is minor.
Specifically, I wanted to look at how well men’s pubic hair preferences matched up with the pubic hair grooming choices of their female counterparts (don’t worry, I’ll get to the reversed genders in a moment.) Overall, people seem pretty evenly matched, with most women matching the preferences of men, but generally there are more men who prefer no pubic hair than women who remove all their pubic hair. The delta is pretty small though. It’s also true that there is a slight decline in the percentage of women who remove all their pubic hair as they get older, with more than 30% of Gen Z women removing all pubic hair and only 20% of Gen X women doing the same. Still, small difference.
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Now, the men. Most women prefer some degree of pubic hair on men, although they prefer a full bush to zero pubic hair. And the men seem to be pretty consistently following this preference when they groom. In fact, as far as millennial and Gen Z men go, there are more pubeless men than women who prefer a silky smooth scrotum.
Now, gay and bisexual men, in case you were wondering. Again, not a whole lot of differentiation between the generations. Most gay and bisexual men prefer some degree of pubic hair, with a preference for no pubic hair over a full bush. Keep in mind that this is asking them about their preference *for male partners*. Bisexual men were able to answer separately for female partners.
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Now, gay and bisexual women, answering about their preferences for female partners. Also a generation-agnostic preference for “some pubic hair,” with the only exception being that there were zero Gen X lesbians or bisexual women who preferred no pubic hair on a female partner.
Now, you might be wondering…how important is this preference? Is it a dealbreaker, or a wishlist? If a guy took down a woman’s underwear and saw a landing strip, would he get to town even if he hoped for a blank canvas, or jump out the window in horror, screaming “my leg” like that one fish in Spongebob? Pubic hair preferences are pretty unimportant among almost everyone, and it doesn’t vary very much by generation. *Very few* people considered any pubic hair style a dealbreaker, although around 30% of all participants considered it a strong preference.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, straight men who had a true pubic hair dealbreaker were most likely to require no pubic hair—81% of them, in fact. For women, the inverse was true. If a straight woman said that a pubic hair style was a dealbreaker for her, 78% of the time she meant that she was only interested in men with a full bush.
So, for anyone depressed over the generational warfare, the “cringe chungus” millennial accusations and the “has only had sex with his phone” Gen Z accusations, rest assured we can all agree on something: pubes, the great generational equalizer.
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