Playboy's timeline of pubes

Liv Lindeland, 1971

There's an interesting feature on Playboy's website this month, with a 'timeline' of Playmates from the 1970's to 2008 cataloguing the evolution of the popularity of pubic hairstyles over time. The timeline isn't representative in other respects- there's a disproportionate incidence of natural boobs on the Playmates from 2002-2008 (I should know- I started buying them at the end of 2002), but it's nonetheless very interesting.

Lisa Welch, 1980.

You can see the nice-looking girl-next-door types in the 1970's, the arrival of the airbrush and dodgy hair and makeup in the 1980's, and fake boobs in the 1990's (although like I said, natural ones are overrepresented compared to what appears in the magazine), and of course the evolution of pubic hairstyles from hair with flair to barely there. Another change you'll see over time is the disappearance of tan lines- maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I think tan lines used to be considered sexy because it implied the viewer was seeing something that was normally covered up. The absence of tan lines implies that the model never covers up. Personally, I find the former sexier than the ubiquitous all-over tan.

Marianne Gravatte, 1983: note the dodgy airbrushing on the face.

The pubic hairstyle thing doesn't bother me so, as I think that's largely reflective of fashion, but Playboy's use of the airbrush is a real travesty. The girls in the 1970s are cute as hell and recognisably human; the girls of 2000 onwards are airbrushed to the point where they're barely indistinguishable from plastic barbies. You'll find the same phenomenon occurring on the cover of almost any men's magazine you care to name- women's magazines use airbrushing to the same extent, but with less flesh on display. It's a real shame- it's one thing to use the airbrush to remove a pimple or a speck of dirt, it's another thing altogether to turn an otherwise good-looking person into an alien. What's strangest of all is that people so readily accept these images as being something to live up to...

No pubic hair and all-over airbrushing: Playboy in 2008