Stop, Drop, and Pay for Your Pubes

November 3, 2025 Newsletter

Ultimate Bush SKIMS

About two weeks ago, the pop-culture puppet master that is Kim Kardashian announced the drop of yet another truly useful product that will be of great benefit to society: thongs with fake pubes.

For 32$, you can buy three pieces of string sewed together, complete with a fake bush available in twelve different variations, ranging from straight hair to curly. That way, no matter your ethnicity, you too can make Kim Kardashian richer by paying for fake hair to wear on your vagina - hair that, if desired, will in fact grow for free, all on its own.

The release of the pube underwear is just the latest iteration of Skims’ business model of selling women’s body parts back to them. In October of 2023, the shapewear brand released the “nipple push-up bra”. This bra is exactly what it sounds like: a push-up bra with built-in faux nipples, because why simply go no bra when you can spend 86$ to have Kim Kardashian give you pre-fabricated, mass-produced nipples to poke through your shirt instead?

Nipple Bra SKIMS

Other body enhancing products sold by the brand include “hip enhancing padded shorts” and “sculpting face wraps”. Remember: even though some parts of your body need to be inflated with padding, others must be chiseled and slimmed down. A woman’s body is a lump of clay, and Kim Kardashian will make you pay her to mold it.

In terms of the ebb and flow that define beauty standards, the 21st century ideal of the female form has, for the most part, been dictated by the Kardashian family. Coming out of the era of “heroin chic” and glorified anorexia during the 90’s and early 2000’s, the Kardashian family rose to dominance by cherry picking traits and features naturally prevalent in Black women, and paying for these traits to be injected onto their own bodies through the handywork of a very expensive celebrity plastic surgeon. Big boobs, big butts, hourglass hips, and plump lips achieved coveted status, and the white women of the Kardashian dynasty made themselves the face of this cultural shift towards a new ideal for women’s bodies.

Some could argue that the Kardashian monopoly on trending body parts is waning. They have all began reversing their BBLs in the wake of the pop-culture pendulum swinging away from curves and back to stick-figure skinny. However, this would be to underestimate the only real skill that the Kardashian women have: an extremely good intuition on where the culture is heading, and a nose for sniffing out what will keep them relevant (and make them more money), just early enough so it looks as though they’re the ones setting the tone. In the 2010’s, body positivity and diverse representation in media, were at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist. Therefore, it was perfect timing to capitalize on a new body ideal that shifted away from Eurocentricity, because Blackness was finally starting to be celebrated at the forefront of popular culture.

Now that we’re reverting back to a culture dominated by conservative ideals of femininity, where the ideal woman is not only white, but delicate, infantile almost, and therefore physically fragile and thin, it makes perfect sense that the Kardashian-Jenner clan have begun removing their various fillers, so as to slim down to the new ideal woman.

The nipple is the hidden, unseen yet omnipresent, signifier of “femininity”. Whether connotated with maternity, or as an object of sexual desire, the nipple is the most naked part of the torso. Through conversations surrounding its visibility, the nipple, much like body hair, has become a symbol for feminists’ fight for bodily autonomy and liberation. Bras were burnt in a dumpster fire at the ‘No More Miss America’ protest in 1968; second wave feminists grew out their armpit hair as a form of resistance to the oppressive binds of women’s beauty standards; and #freethenipple took social media by storm in the mid 2010’s.

Just as women’s bodies are subject to scrutiny and trend cycles, the bush has also gone in and out of style over the decades. Ubiquitous in the 70’s, verboten in the 80’s and 90’s, today the bush seems to be at a crossroads between taboo and edgy. Kim Kardashian’s attempt at commodifying the bush is a good example of the cultural confusion around pubic hair, and how the most superficial levels of feminism are so easily subsumed by companies in order to increase profit.

Indeed, the pube panties are above all a perverse illustration of the capitalist hellscape in which we live, where it’s better to buy your pubes than to grow your own.

Ksenija Carleton

Editorial Assistant