Some thoughts about Sophie Monk's missing vagina and absent pubic hair.

I spent about 30 seconds this morning peering at a couple of photos of Sophie Monk’s vagina.

I will never get those 30 seconds back. And yet they provided me with ample food for thought.

A friend had emailed me a link to a site, which had published all the photos from Monk’s recent Playboy shoot (You can see the photos here. NB: You are leaving us for Playboy and you should know the photos are NSFW) and here were the things I noticed. In order.

1. She has beautiful breasts. I wonder if they are real?

2. Why do women posing naked always look so serious? If I had breasts like that I would be smiling all the time.

One of the images from Sophie Monk’s Playboy shoot.

3. Is it hygenic to straddle a motorbike? Oh hang on, she’s laid down a towel over the seat. Phew.

4. Are naked women straddling motorbikes still a sexy thing in 2014? I’m so out of touch.

5. Sophie has no pubes. None. None at all.

6. WAIT, WHAT HAPPPENED TO HER VAGINA? IT APPEARS TO BE MISSING.

We’ll get to Sophie’s AWOL vagina in a moment, I just wanted to go back to the pubes for a sec.

This is the second pubeless famous vagina I have seen in a matter of weeks and I have some questions. Does nobody have pubes anymore? I don’t see a lot of vaginas in the course of my day or my life. I don’t go to public swimming pools or gyms and I don’t watch porn, so the only vaginas I have seen in the past little while are those belonging to myself, Kim Kardashians and Sophie Monk.

Kim Kardashian’s censored shoot for Paper magazine.

As that ol’ Sesame Street song used to go “One of these things is not like the others! Can you guess which one!”

I’ll give you a clue. Mine. Because I am the proud owner of pubic hair.

Even writing that word I feel I need to add that my pubes are neatly trimmed into a triangle. I used to wax but now I use laser to keep things nice and tidy. Ironically, when I was in high school, one of the worst insults that could be hurled at you was “baldy” – a reference to someone too young to have pubic hair yet.

Now  – according to the small but significant sample size of two famous vaginas I have seen this month – pubic hair is over. I kind of thought it might come back, no? Or have all those who jumped on the no pube trend that began more than a decade ago, removed their hair with laser and now have no choice but to remain bald.

Unless they buy a merkin.

I did do the bald thing once, in my very early twenties, as a birthday present for my then-boyfriend. I found it kind of creepy and was relieved when he said he didn’t like it either. “It’s not womanly” he said. “You look like a little girl.”

He was right and I don’t think I’ve ever felt less sexy. But this was before porn was mainstream and before bald vaginas were the new normal.

I asked a few guys I know who have daughters whether they were troubled by the whole bald thing.

“Isn’t it a bit weird and child-like?” I said.

Nah, they replied. It’s not a young girl thing – at least not for them. They insisted it was more just about variety.

“It’s different, that’s all. I like the variety.”

I honestly have no idea how many bald vaginas are in the real non-porn world. Is it an age thing? A phase? Do some people get lasered in their youth and then change their minds after having kids? How do you explain to a pubescent daughter that pubic hair is a normal, natural part of being a women if mum doesn’t have any?

These are all genuine questions.

As for Sophie’s missing vagina, this is a censorship issue. Mamamia has written about it many times and it still comes as a shock to many people the first time they hear about it.

Men’s magazines like Playboy are REQUIRED by the censor to Photoshop every vagina on their pages and “heal it to a single crease”. What a totally surreal and insulting term. Our vaginas need to be ‘healed’? Why, are they sick?

In practice, “healing” means erasing anything externally visible (labia majora, clitoris etc). In the nude photos of Kim Kardashian and Sophie Monk, not only have they been ‘healed’ they’ve been kind of smudged so their vaginas look kind of…..fluffy.

Like bald cotton wool if you can imagine that. It’s odd though because is that sexy for a guy when he can’t even see a place where he could put his penis?

Take a look through some things that look like Vaginas: