Where do women have curly hair?

When I had a tough time recalling a student from the high school days, I posted a question about that classmate in our Facebook group.  "She had curly hair" noted another classmate.  I can't even recall who had curly hair and who had straight hair.  All I know is that they all had black hair, given that there were no blondes and redheads in that part of the world!

Later, I remembered a comedian (I think it was Mouli?) in an old Tamil movie playing on this theme of curly hair.
He asks his friend, "where do women have curly hair?"
The friend is shocked with what seemed like a question that was about the pubics.
The comedian then says, "in Africa."
Haha!

Which then got me wondering, well, why is the public pubic hair curly? Risking doing this search using my work computer, I went ahead and asked Google that.

The BBC says:

Pubic hair is quite different from hair on the head. Instead of forming a round shape, the hair is oval. It is always short and has a coarse and curly texture. The growth period for pubic hair is short. Within six months, the hair follicle dies and the hair falls out. Pubic hair never gets a chance to grow longer.

But, it does not explain why the pubes are curly.  So, off to the Scientific American.  I am stumped even with this piece of information:

After all, we appear to be the only species of primate (perhaps the only species, period) that bears this type of strange hair around our genitals.

I would have thought that the chimps would have too, especially when they have a lot more hair all over their body. Aren't we special!

[Robin] Weiss speculates that one of the main reasons that human beings uniquely evolved a “thick bush of wiry hair” around their genital regions is its visual signaling of sexual maturation. (It also likely serves as a primitive odor trap and aids in the wafting of human pheromones.) So pubic hair acts as a sort of blinking marquee, indicating for prospective sexual partners that mating with that individual could be potentially a fruitful exercise in genetic perpetuity. Weiss believes that the advertisement of our fecundity suggests that pubic hair would have arisen only after we became “naked apes,” causing it to stand out so vividly against the backdrop of an otherwise hairless body.

No kidding!  We shed our hirsute appearance, became hairless, and in the process grew pubic hair?  Evolution happens with humor, too, eh!

It’s not entirely clear why pubic hair is so distinctly thick, short and, usually, curly, but a friend of mine, the biologist Anne Clark from SUNY-Binghamton, did point out to me last week (while we were hiking on Kapiti Island in New Zealand, which made it all the more memorable) that anything else would be rather impractical. To have long, flowing, stylish locks growing down there wouldn’t be terribly convenient, especially given the logistics of sexual intercourse.

Seriously?  This is the best explanation we have on why pubic hair is curly?

Oh well. Forget it then. If even the Scientific American does not have a quick and easy explanation!

Do we at least know why the hair on the head curls?  Slate explains with a physics lesson!



How on earth did we handle such curiosities before Google and the internet?