Yippee, The Bush Is Back!

The afro is back, so are platform shoes, corduroy trousers and patched jackets. But more importantly, the bush is back - yippee! 

Throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, women had bush down there. It was a thick patch of fuzz that they didn’t tamper with. Nor did they shave it, trim it or neat the edges. They let it be - to grow wild, uninhibited and daring with not a care in the world if the odd strand of hair poked out of the side of their underwear.

What’s more, we men loved the bush. In my teens, we first saw bush in Playboy Magazine and we liked. We were brought up knowing that women of age have bush and it’s the way of life – just like going to church and giving offertory, is the way of life.

We saw bush as a ritual passage from boyhood into becoming men and finally crossing that frontier into the unknown. Bush was different from looking at breasts. Even though we had yet to see breasts in the flesh, we had an idea about them because we ‘saw’ them every day. We looked at them as the girls strutted around in their blouses or swim suits and knew that some girls had big busts. Others had small ones. Some had round ones. But with bush, it was different. You couldn’t imagine bush because it was not a shape or a form like breasts that you could see. Bush was almost illicit and tucked well out of sight.

Bush when we eventually got a chance to feel and delve into it, was everything and more than we thought it would be. It held a mystical aurora – almost like a first time drive through Kibaale forest in the dead of the night - all terrified and heart thumping.

Looking at bush also increased our sexual anxiety. Feeling it gave us uncontrollable palpitations. The message that bush conveyed was clear enough – that the final frontier was finally right there in front of us and beyond it, there lay nothing else but, IT – sex!

In the 80s when the afro, platform shoes and flayered trousers disappeared, so did the bush because somebody in South America declared the bush dead and shaved it all off or left a ‘landing strip’.

Women with no bush, was a shocker. I was petrified. In that clumsy fumbling feel before getting undressed, when I felt around and there was no bush to feel, it was a sexual flat – almost like buying a top of the range Mercedes Benz and finding it’s not equipped with air-conditioning.

No bush stifles our sexual imagination and desires. Foreplay was also limited because there was no bush for our fingers to play with. With no bush, men become mere sexual slaves to women because as soon as the underwear comes off, the sex is right there in our face with no bush to hide it and feel we have to start performing almost immediately.

Of course women have every right to decide what they want to do with their bush. But in the grooming of it, they don’t put us into the equation. They ask if we think they are fat or if we like their eyebrows, nails or shoes. They ask if we like the scent of their perfume or if we find them attractive. However, they never ask us to comment or pass judgement on bush and suffice to say, some men see bush tampering as an ‘infringement’ of our sexual rights.

In my case, feeling bush reaffirms my belief that I am with an adult and removes any paedophilia notion and reassures me that what I am doing is legal and above board.

Kathy Lette, an outspoken writer who is a voice of contemporary feminism is my kind of woman especially when she says: “I like my pubic hair. It’s like having a little pet in my pants and I say Bring Back Bush!”

She goes on to argue that full bush allows women to attract men through the aphrodisiacal scent in their body hair. “The great irony of Brazilian waxing is that pheromones - that invisible, secret, aphrodisiacal scent which attracts men and women to each other, is captured in the body's hair. So, ironically, women shave everything off are chasing away the men.”

I am buoyed that the bush is back and that I can confidently stride down Kampala Road knowing that a good number of women walking past me, are not bare or, have landing strips. They have a full wad of bush! 

The Bush Is Back, is published in the November, December, January issue of Flair Magazine