People Who Trim Their Bush Are Up To Four Times As Likely To Have An STD

Rob Fox8 years ago

If you shave your pubes, you are a dirty, dirty whore. And that’s not just according to the signs I hold up while quoting the Bible in the middle of college campuses to complete my court ordered community service. Science says so too!

From NPR:

Frequent removal of pubic hair is associated with an increased risk for herpes, syphilis and human papillomavirus, doctors at the University of California, San Francisco, reported Monday in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections.

People who have “mowed the lawn” at least once in their lifetimes were nearly twice as likely to say they had had at least one STD. And “extreme groomers” – those who remove all their pubic hair more than 11 times each year — were more than four times as likely to have had an infection. “High-frequency groomers,” who just trim their hair a few times a month, fell between the two extremes. They were about three times more likely to have reported an STD.

1. There’s a real life publication called “Sexually Transmitted Infections.” That’s a thing. Here’s this month’s cover, in which they combine modern, abstract art with some sort of disease you get while having sex in an impossibly wet bathroom stall in a college bar on dollar shots night.

The third story on the cover is about getting syphilis in your eyeball, and what people are doing about it (preventing it, maybe?). I have no idea what the actual contents of the story are, but for my own happiness I’m going to assume it involves wearing eye protection when working the service end of glory holes, and knowing your partner’s sexual history before letting them blast on your face. Honestly nothing else in this story matters to me as much as eyeball syphilis. Here’s a pretty solid image of what that looks like!

2. Ugh, back to the non-eyeball STD stuff. Like I even care anymore.

This statistic in no way surprises me. If you regularly groom or shave your bits, that probably means you’re doing sex on people more. More sex likely means more sexual partners, which means more chances to share something other than mutual disappointment.

There’s also this, though.

That said, it makes sense biologically that shaving and waxing could make you more vulnerable to infections, says Jennifer Gunter, an OB-GYN at Kaiser Permanente Northern California who wasn’t involved in the study.

“We know that shaving creates microtears and cuts,” Gunter says. And if men and women are doing it right before sex, those wounds might not be healed, making it easier for viruses and bacteria to enter skin.

“Pubic hair is there for a reason,” Gunter says. “It’s a mechanical barrier, like your eyebrows. It traps bacteria and debris. And there could be health consequences to removing it.”

Shaving right before sex makes you more likely to catch something, because though you can’t see it, you have a thousand open wounds on your junk. That is an eyeball syphilis level turnoff. Nothing thirteen beers and a number of shots you’ve lost track of can’t overcome, though. Also, we’ve all ignored worse. Much, much worse.

[via NPR]