I'm 26 and as long as I have been at all sexually aware, I have known that my male contemporaries expect women to be hairless. However, yet don't truly care if that is not the case.
I'm only a year older than you and my impression was that they expected a smallish patch, trimmed short (back then). I only came across full-on baldness when I went to get a wax in Germany at the age of 22 and the salon owner suggested I get it all taken off.
My sister, however, who is 19, said something that seemed to presume the necessity of hair removal (can't remember if it was legs or pubes or both, but I know she thinks total baldness is a necessity) last time I visited home.
In response, I jokingly said that I had only shaved my legs about three times in the last six months at that point, to which she immediately replied 'ugh, you're really lucky, I need to shave every [x period of time]'.
She's a bit thick sometimes anyway but she had absolutely no inkling, not even for a second, that I might not have meant that it was because my legs were naturally magically hairless for months at a time, but rather that I often chose to leave the hair alone. That that was even possible when living with a male specimen.