Grab yourself a look at South Korea’s most significant cultural exports at the moment – charming girl group pop, insanely hot soda spokesmodels, and blockbuster action movies – and you’d have no idea that beneath the shiny, tech-savvy, economically booming surface of the nation lay a groundswell of people devoted to glorifying their pubic hair. Sure, “The muff is back,” has been bandied about the porn industry for a while now, but with Laurie Vargas retired and Bobbi Starr mostly behind the camera these days, pubic hair isn’t anywhere near as prominent as it was thought to be becoming. In South Korea, however…
So keen are many Korean women on the idea of sporting a voluminous pubic muff that they’re using a procedure called “bush grafting” to artificially add extra follicles down below, follicles grafted from their scalps. As detailed by Refinery29, Korean pubic hirsutism is rooted in the traditional belief that heavy follicles are a sign of fertility and a healthy sexual well-being. The bush grafting is not so traditional, however, with a study conducted by Seoul’s Arumdaun Nara Dermatologic and Plastic Surgery Clinic revealing that 74% of women undergoing the procedure did it because of “a sense of inferiority to the same sex.” In other words, other women with more lush pubic hair made ’em feel crappy. The International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery reports that bush grafting has risen a remarkable 160% between 2010 and 2012 and with the procedure starting at $2,000, that’s a lot of expensive merkins roaming the banks of the Han River.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, it’s still bald or near-bald female pubic regions as far as the eye can see. Surely there’s a comfortable middle ground to be found, perhaps after extensive diplomatic talks between our two nations. Hell, maybe we can rope Kim Jong-un into the discussions and find out once and for all if pubic hair in North Korea is as uniform and militarized as everything else.