The famous story about John Ruskin's wedding night probably isn't true
For decades writers repeated that the art critic John Ruskin fled his marriage in horror at discovering his bride had body hair, having only seen smooth marble nudes. It makes a neat anecdote about art versus reality. Yet no proof exists, and several of his biographers think something else entirely unsettled him.
The tale traces to Ruskin's biographer Mary Lutyens, who suggested he had never seen an unclothed woman before marrying Effie and rejected her as deformed; the marriage was later annulled. Journalist Gene Weingarten retold it with relish in 2004. Tim Hilton, John Batchelor and the critic Peter Fuller instead judged menstruation the likelier cause of his alarm, and nothing settles the matter either way.
Biologically, the hair in question is a secondary sex characteristic. Children have only fine vellus hair there; at puberty, rising testosterone in both sexes prompts follicles in androgen-sensitive skin to produce thicker, coarser, faster-growing hair, a milestone called pubarche. Doctors track it on the Tanner scale, from fine fuzz at stage 1 to full adult spread at stage 5, a process lasting about five years in boys. Oddly, it runs independently of fertility: adrenal hormones alone can trigger it, even when ovaries or testes do not work. Its colour usually matches the eyebrows more closely than the scalp.
Why it exists is argued over. One view says it helped fend off insects before clothing. Zoologist Desmond Morris rejected ideas about signalling maturity or reducing friction and favoured a scent-trap role. It also hosts a specialist parasite: crab lice, 1.1 to 1.8 millimetres long, whose claws are sized to grip hair of exactly that thickness. They carry no disease but die within 48 hours away from a human host.
Removal has a long history, prescribed as hygiene in parts of the Middle East for centuries. In the West, fashions shifted as public bathing returned in the early 20th century and swimsuits shrank, especially after the bikini caught on following the 1940s. A 2017 study estimated that roughly half of American men groomed regularly by 2016, less so with age. The practice carries costs: about a quarter of groomers are estimated to have been injured at least once, and dermatologists report rising follicle infections, most often caused by Staphylococcus aureus.
Source: Pubic hair
