At Christmas work drinks in a hip new bar, I chided my much younger colleagues for tweeting. They laughed: they were all on Tinder.

I was equally flummoxed by the turn in conversation as a group of young women, all accomplished and confident, talked about the pains of waxing – specifically, Brazilians.

For me, who came of age in those dark days before the internet where snatching a glimpse of pubic hair in Playboy or Porkies represented all the freedom of adulthood and the thrilling pleasures of sex, Brazilians have always been unfathomable.

Especially surrounded as we were by young guys sporting lush bushranger beards.

How could they flaunt their body hair so flamboyantly and publicly, yet expect the girls they met on Tinder to strip themselves of everything below the eyelashes?

It seemed as unfair as the way dad bods like mine have been celebrated this year, even as mum bods aren’t, or the way that men’s media and advertising seems to be aspirational, while women’s seems shaming.

It is as it ever was: ever since, with the advent of sleeveless dresses in 1915, fashion bible Harper’s Bazaar suggested that “summer dress and modern dance combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair”, alerting women to a problem they never knew they’d had before. With rising hemlines, leg hair suddenly became undesirable; with bikinis, pubic hair.

With every new freedom, another cosmetic price to pay corporations looking for growth opportunities – and, for women, at a premium.

Like many, I assumed the double standard was also down to the pervasiveness of porn, where “laminated” vaginas infantilise women and creepily suggest “barely legal” pre-pubescent sex.

But while the “male gaze” is rightly blamed and despite reports of social media shaming by boys of girls with “hairy beavers”, my young friends talked about the coercion they felt from other women – whether relatives, the media, or their peers.

Tanya*, an articulate, attractive woman, admitted how soul-destroying the constant mocking and reminding of her “unfeminine” hirsuteness was growing up; her friend Sarah* of the peer pressure to get a Brazilian “because boys were hot for them”.

It’s a phenomenon reflected in sociologist Breanne Fahs’ recent paper, Perilous Patches and Pitstaches: Imagined versus Real Experiences of Women’s Body Hair Growth.

I was gobsmacked. Wasn’t feminism – which everyone identified with, to varying degrees – about the freedom it offered women (and, equally importantly, men) to be and do and think and say whatever they want in a broad spectrum from “hot feminism” to “bad feminism” and everything in between and beyond, unshackled by the constraints of traditional gender roles and patriarchal oppression?

So why is femininity so narrowly defined? Why are so many women complicit in continuing to put this pressure on themselves and each other? Why do so many women, acknowledging the ridiculousness of such an impost, continue to do it, with over 90% reportedly removing some or all body hair? As artist and activist Petra Collins asks, why are we so disgusted by women’s body hair?

It’s not, as everyone I spoke to was at pains to point out, because women hate each other, but because of something more insidious, identified by feminists such as Phyllis Chesler, Janet Thomas and others: internalised sexism or misogyny, in which women, constantly being told how to look and act by the media, their elders or peers, are coerced into complicity in their own oppression.

It’s not only because they’re afraid of how they’ll be regarded by others, men and women alike, but as writer Erin McKee points out:

When I look at the hair on my legs, it makes me feel gross and dirty. I feel more feminine when my legs are hairless. This is an example of my own internalised misogyny at work.

I know the feeling. As someone of colour growing up in the assimilationist 80s, I was always being reminded what was wrong with the colour of my skin, and always wishing I could be – well, if not more “normal” (read whiter) – then at least not so black (an anxiety exploited by cosmetics companies in my parents’ homeland, India, most recently and troublingly with the release of vagina lightening creams).

No decent person would criticise how dark someone’s skin is today. So why it is OK to pass judgment on their body hair, or any aspect of their physical appearance?

As the son and husband and friend of many strong and admirable women, I hope that my own daughters will be free to choose how they live, without anyone else’s censure or judgment – least of all over how the hair grows or what they do to it in places most people (apart from, hopefully, those who love them) will ever see.

Hearteningly, there were signs in 2015 of a, ahem, growing trend against what researchers Angela Jones and Jemima Wright call “the Brazilian corset”, with Chinese feminist Xiao Meili launching an online campaign female body hair to “discuss the ownership of the female body and challenge the stereotyping of femininity”.

Celebrities including Cameron Diaz, Miley Cyrus, Madonna and Lena Dunham all were seen sporting body hair or extolling its virtues; and research in the UK and US reported that more and more women aren’t bothering with pubic grooming and fewer and fewer men – like me – are worried about it.

Even Gwyneth Paltrow, who once claimed a Brazilian “changed her life” now says she rocks a “seventies vibe.”

Of course, I know that a middle-aged bloke with a dad bod and back hair wading into such debates is like actually saying whether someone’s bum looks big in that or not. There’s no right answer.

But as everyone at drinks agreed, how you groom your pubes is as irrelevant as any other aspect of your physical appearance in determining what kind of woman – or feminist – you are.

Everyone laughed when I suggested a campaign for #pubeequality, similar to the way husbands in Mexico’s Huichol community supposedly share labour pains – but while it seems the pressure’s increasingly on young men to “manscape”, with more than 50% of British men admitting to some depilation, is this really equality?

All of us, men and women, succumbing to anxieties manufactured to sell more product, suffering from razor burns and wax rashes just so we don’t stick out from some imaginary, dictated “norm”?

There are myriad reasons for grooming, but ultimately, it comes down to questions of why we do it, and for whom.

We can blame social conditioning, media influence or peer pressure, but surely the most attractive thing about anyone is their confidence in themselves?

Still, what if, just as we support Movember, we could celebrate Muffember or Pubeuary? Or if there were just as many hipster bushes as hipster beards?

It might not quite end a century’s worth of hair shaming, but the ethical, cosmetic and potential charity considerations aside, it would surely hurt a lot less than the depilatory alternative, wouldn’t it?

*Some names have been changed