Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

The Oxford English Dictionary contains some mysterious and perplexing words, and one that has always puzzled Miss Poubelle is the word merkin. The dictionary defines it as 'a pubic wig' and dates it to the 18th century, but otherwise gives us no details of where the word comes from or how it has been used.

At least as puzzling as the word itself is the entire concept of a merkin. One naturally wonders, who would wear a merkin, and in what circumstances?

Miss Poubelle has never heard of a disease that causes the pubic hair to fall out, but there must be something that would have this effect. Syphilis? Some sort of pox? Some older people find that their hair becomes thin all over, but Miss Poubelle's gym is full of men in their 70s and 80s, none of whom are obvious candidates for merkins. Another possibility is that merkin wearers have chosen to shave their pubic hair, then conceal the shaving with the wig. But why? Some Orthodox Jewish women cut their hair very short and wear a wig on top of this, for reasons of modesty. Miss Poubelle believes the reasoning is that a man other than her husband should not see the hair of a woman's head. But the modesty theory doesn't go far to explain the merkin, since obviously the most modest thing to do is to keep the pubes covered up anyway.

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Miss Poubelle's favorite, though admittedly improbable, scenario is a queen with severe crab lice who keeps the pubes shaved to deny the critters a nesting site. Then when she shows up at the bathhouse, she wears a merkin so that it is not so obvious to the other patrons. Of course, the dating of the word presents a few problems for that theory: where were the bathhouses of the Enlightenment? 18th century England did have something called a molly house, but the descriptions of them sound more like modern gay bar with hustlers taking customers upstairs from time to time. They don't appear to have been the site for parading around in the nude, as would seem to be an appropriate context for merkin wearing.

Miss Poubelle speculates that merkins were most likely to have been worn by women working in a brothel. On this theory, they were worn by poxy, pubeless prostitutes to deceive their myopic male clients, at least long enough for a business transaction to take place.

But beyond the questions of why and where one wears a merkin, there is also the puzzling questions of how it was done. How would you get a merkin to stay on? The modern version would probably involve high-tech adhesives, but our ancestors had only belts, buckles, and string. Would there be a string around the waist and up the crack, like a modern G string, but with hair? If the purpose of the merkin is to conceal the fact that you have no pubic hair, wouldn't it be rather obvious to an onlooker that you are wearing a hair jock?

Does a merkin wearer remove the garment for sex? The vigorous demands on the pubic hair during sex would seem to make it hard to keep a merkin in place. To Miss Poubelle, it seems impossible that a gay man wearing a merkin could go undetected in a sexual situation. There is lots of contact by the hands and mouth when men go at it, and the merkin would almost definitely come off. But perhaps if they were primarily used by prostitutes, the merkin-wearing woman could keep the patron's hands away from the area long enough for him to finish without discovering the secret.

Is there any hope for a revival of the merkin? Miss Poubelle can't see much call for them these days. But one possibility might be use as a fetish object, worn at a Velco bar. The patrons, jaded by all the charted combinations, decide to shave their pubic areas and replace the hair with Velcro patches. Then they have at each other in a wild orgy of attachment and pulling away, before finally ending up stuck to their partner of the night....