Pubic hair: natural, trimmed or smooth

Three in four gay and bi men have taken a razor or clippers to it. How many men groom, why they do it, and why hairy still wins the preference studies

Pubic hair is the only part of the package you can restyle in five minutes with something from the bathroom drawer. Unsurprisingly, a lot of men do. And gay and bisexual men do it a lot more: in a 2023 national survey in the United States, three in four had removed some pubic hair at some point, against fewer than half of straight men.

There is no right answer. There is a full bush, a tidy trim and the bare look, and each has fans. What the studies add is how many men pick each one, why, and one or two health notes that are worth knowing before you pick up the razor.

Natural, trimmed, shaved

Most men fall somewhere on a simple scale. Natural means left alone: hair over the pubic mound, around the base of the cock and on the balls. Trimmed means the same area kept short with clippers or scissors. Shaved, or waxed, means removed down to the skin, often including the scrotum and the shaft.

In practice men mix and match. Among American men who groom, 87% work on the hair above the cock, 66% on the scrotum and 57% on the shaft. So the classic combination is a trimmed top, smooth balls and a bare shaft, with the full shave a step further.

How many men groom

A national survey published in 2017 asked 4,198 American men aged 18 to 65 about it. Half of them, 50.5%, groomed regularly, and the habit was strongest in men in their twenties and early thirties and faded with age. A newer survey from 2023, built to be representative of the whole country, found that 46.7% of men had removed pubic hair at some point and 29.2% had done it in the past month.

Why do they bother? Sex comes first: grooming was linked to giving and receiving oral sex, and most men said they did it to get ready for sex. Hygiene came next, cited by 61%, and plain routine by 44%. Being sexually active in the past month nearly tripled the odds of having groomed in that month. In other words, a freshly trimmed bush is a fairly honest signal that someone has plans.

Gay and bi men groom more

The gap between gay and straight men is big. In the 2023 survey, 76.5% of gay and bisexual men had removed pubic hair, against 44.6% of straight men, nearly three times the odds. Turn it around, though, and one gay or bi man in four had never removed any at all. Porn aesthetics, the importance of oral sex, gym culture and simply knowing that the other guy will look closely all probably play a part, though the survey did not ask.

Grooming also comes with some small print. In a San Francisco sexual health clinic, where most of the men were gay or bi, 82% of patients had groomed in the past three months. Recent grooming as such was not linked to infections. But patients who removed all their pubic hair more than six times a year had more genital STIs, and men who groomed around the anus were three times as likely to have a rectal STI. That is an association, not proof that the razor causes anything: men who groom often may also simply have more sex. Still, freshly shaved skin can have tiny nicks, so it is worth giving it a day before sex.

Hairy is hot

If all this makes it sound as if gay men want everything smooth, the preference studies say otherwise. In a study in Brazil and the Czech Republic, gay men preferred hairier faces and bodies than straight women did, and tended to like partners with beards similar to their own. When 106 people rated pictures of penises, the ones judged most attractive were wider, longer and moderately hairy, not bare.

Hair also turns up in the top and bottom debate. A study of 429 gay and bisexual men tested hairiness alongside height, muscle, weight and penis size as possible markers of who tops; in the end only penis size and masculinity really mattered. The fur, it seems, is a matter of taste, not of role.

Does shaving make it look bigger?

It is the oldest grooming claim in the book. Trimming does not add a millimetre: the cock is measured from the bone, through fat and hair alike, so a ruler cannot see the difference. What trimming can do is uncover the base, which makes the visible part look longer than it does in a thick bush. If that matters to you, the honest numbers are in Length and the honest method in How to measure.