WHAT do celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz have in common? 

Female pubic hair.

Ms Diaz says she favours the natural look and recently suggested that trying to get rid of one’s pubic hair “is like saying: ‘I don’t need my nose’.”

While Cameron’s controversial comments have cast something of a five o’clock shadow over the downy debate, Leonardo’s character also touches on the topic albeit a tad more tenderly, as tenderly as a Wall Street cowboy can, in the latest Martin Scorsese movie, “The Wolf of Wall Street”.

Combine that with recent media frenzy over a US frock shop that adorns its mannequins with a lush tuft of pubic hair, and that little bluebird of tappy-ness is positively bristling.

From a diplomatic distant vantage point, it seems to me the mere mention of this once “unmentionable” has ladies from both camps in a foaming lather.

There have been only a few occasions on which I had to cross the “bikini line”; once when I wondered where “the Brazilian”, the name for a pubic wax, originated. I reasoned it had something to do with the association between the alarming rate of the clearing of Brazilian rain forests and the demand for a personal “clear felling”. Turns out it is just a name among many for a new trend in body care along with “the butterfly”, “the cricket pitch” and the fashionable-sounding “Hollywood” (also known as “sphinx”) where the pubic hair is completely zapped.

Males are often cast as the villain in this shave-or-save saga. One argument lays the blame at the feet of pornography. The reason for shaving pubic hair today, for both sexes, is apparently driven by the effect of the porn industry and its influence on mainstream media. Therefore it becomes normal. Society again becomes conditioned to a concept that was once an unmentionable.

I did have a close shave a few years back when I read a book by Jacinta Tynan, “Good Man Hunting”, which detailed her “napalming the nether regions”. But that was research for the radio interview I did with the talented Ms Tynan and I don’t recall us ever reaching the point of “over sharing” during our studio chat.

In “The Wolf of Wall Street” the bush debate between father and son continues as Leo’s character, Jordan Belfort, chats with his father Max, played by Rob Reiner. Suffice to say, the uncomfortable exchange between on-screen father and son is instructive from a contemporary viewpoint with dad admitting to be a bush man while his son favours the clean shave. It was, indeed, a whole new world, the old man wearily conceded.

This is an edited version from Mike Welsh’s blog “Mockery of Shockjockery, thoughts of an ex radio shockjock”.