Sexuality

The Demise and Fall of Crabs

Written by Lina

crabsWhen you wake up in the morning with an itching sensation in your naughty bits, there's usually cause for alarm. The best case scenario is that you didn't do a good job of cleaning the filter after a lube job; the worst case scenario is that you may have a new friend for the rest of your days. For thousands of years, humans who bumped uglies put themselves at risk for catching crab lice, a species of arthropods that live in the thick, untamed wilderness of the crotch. With the rise of bikini waxing and manscaping, however, crab lice are looking more like the dodo with each passing day.

 

 

Habitat for Humanity

Everyone who has ever turned on a good old fashioned 70s porno knows that the trimming of hair down there is a very recent innovation. Up until the 1990s, the perfect beach body had lots of abs and lots of hair, since retro bikinis covered a lot more of the fun zone than today's dental-floss designs. With the advent of the Internet, however, our sexual tastes changed by a significant degree. Bikini waxing became a fad during the 1990s and intensive trimming or shaving has been the vogue since then, with 80% of college students claiming to remove all or some of their bush. With the advent of Internet porn replacing old fashioned 70s porn, high-definition viewing allowed fans of the female form to see every inch of the good stuff. The closeups have changed desire from "who cares about hair" to "bald everywhere but the head, please".

Hair Today

The lack of pubes has made life rough for the poor crab louse. The Sydney Sexual Health Center notes that the nasty bugs used to be commonplace, while today they're becoming increasingly more rare. Lice need lots of hair to live and play in for a variety of reasons: their legs cannot hold on to bare skin, they feed at the roots of hair, and they need protection from tiny predators who patrol unspeakable regions in search of meals. These lice also have evolved to live in human naughty bits, furthermore, meaning that they can't just jump ship and end up on the dog. It's great news for a number of people, including the sailors who passed on lice so frequently during WWII that the military used industrial-grade insecticide to kill them. While you still may wake up with a new unexpected addition to the biology of your crotch after banging a bar skank, the odds are shrinking that it'll be crab lice.