A Place To Draw Blood Laughing

I’d like to tell a very bad story about a very good guy. His name was not Brian, but that’s what I’m calling him. He looked like a Brian. He was my first boyfriend.

Open dating and polyamorous ideas aside, in the last five years I have been single for a grand total of four months. (Before then I was chronically single stretching back to birth. I really hit the whole “dating” idea head on.) Brian kicked this pattern off, when after a summer of bizzarely dancing around one another we kissed while watching Willow on a moldy couch, started a week of marathon sex in his dead grandmother’s derelict mansion, and immediately began a vanilla, monogamous, mostly long distance relationship that would span an entire year and unfortunately coencide with my awakening awarness of BDSM in the real world, and subsequent coming out.

But, orgin stories aside. This is about specifics.

Specifically, one night we were watching television on his bed, which we did a lot of, even though the wall behind his bed was ridiculously thin and directly bordered both his younger brother’s and his parent’s rooms. We were young, what can I say. The program on that night was boring, and kissing was interesting. Clothes came off, and we got down the the business of creating our own entertainment.

How the story begins and middles is sexy, and obvious. How the story ends is with his head between my legs, attempting gallantly to get me off with his tongue while I suppressed whoops of laughter from his beard tickling the curve of my ass. He had gone down on me before, and would again, but rarely. A handful of times, perhaps, in our year together. He wasn’t good at it. I can say this now because I’ve finally been with someone whose oral acrobatics are sophisticated enough to get me off, if I have the patience for it. But at the time I figured something was up. I wasn’t wired that way, or something.

So after I wriggled and moaned and eventually lay back and practiced simply breathing deep, he stopped. He raised his head sheepishly, he shrugged, he grinned. “You’re so hairy,” he said. “It makes it hard.”

Cue five years of self consciousness.

It’s only now, five years later, that I can get properly good and miffed (muffed?) about this comment. Five years of trimming, conditioning, shaving, and plucking, allowing my bush to grow in to some crazy proportion before shaving it all off in some fit of adventurous vanity.

What makes me just a little bit angry is that it wasn’t Brian’s fault that he happened to say this, and it happened to make me self conscious. He was that kind of guy, and I was that kind of girl. This observation probably speaks the the greater issues of our relationship more than it does to my personal current curiosity in pubic hair. But regardless, it remains true that Brian’s was the first really up-close-and-personal outside opinion I got on my naughty bits, and I was self conscious from then on out.

I get pissed now because it annoys me that I have spent huge portions of my life being self conscious about the style of a patch of hair that is covered almost all the time by not one but two layers of completely opaque fabric. Like it matters whether or not I remembered to trim when a guy on the street talks to me. He’s not going down on me, and goddamnit, anyone who gets that far should be focused on the two of us having a good fucking time. Any man who gets wigged by the sight or feel of more than an inch of pubic hair is not a man for me.

Now, let’s clarify. I don’t have any aesthetic issues with trimming my pubic hair. I do have aesthetic issues with shaving, but frankly that’s because being twelve years old sucked enough the first time around. I will even grudgingly allow that short pubic hair can be convenient in sexual activities. I have a problem with it being *expected.* I have a problem with equating the relative length of my pubic hair to my attractiveness and femininity, not as a matter of personal taste but as a cultural convention.
I have weight issues, because I am alive, female, American and under the age of ninety. I have makeup issues. I have fashion issues. I have acne issues. Enough with the issues! I am sick to death of the idea that issues can just happy-go-lucky hop into my pants.

Did you know that if you don’t trim it, pubic hair just keeps growing? I didn’t know this. I figured it maxed out eventually, like animal fur. What would happen if you just let it grow? What would it look like? Would you eventually have to start tucking it if you wore short shorts? Could you braid it?
Someday, somewhere, some hippy-dippy celebrity or model is going to make a fashion statement out of beaded, braided pubic hair, and on that day I will laugh until I cry.

I got in to a wicked argument with a friend of mine one night while we were chatting in a bar over buffalo wings. He was lamenting the difficulties of keeping up a D/s dynamic with his wife, especially with a kid in the picture. “I can’t even get her to keep herself shaved!” he exclaimed. I looked him dead in the eye, all in a righteous tiff of passion and intent on defending my fellow womyn from the evils of the corporate media, and said “Do you have any *idea* how uncomfortable that is?” (It is. The itching. Oy.)
But eventually, after I came down from my demented campaign high, he defended himself. He liked it. That was his defense. He gave babble about how it was easier, and cleaner, and if I’d had a bar of soap I’d have thrown it at him, but in the end it came down to a matter of personal taste. He chose to exert his control over his submissive by having her present herself in a manner he enjoyed. I do the same thing all the time. And the ironies of defending a woman’s control over her own body when that same woman regularly sleeps on the floor beside her husband’s bed is, well, another blog post entirely.

Personal taste is a tricky, tricky devil. We’re simultaneously blasted with idealistic imagery and indoctrinated with the necessity of overcoming false idealism. “What do you like in a man’s body or a woman’s body?” is a ridiculously overloaded question. My friend likes shaved pubic hair. A guy I worked with likes super skinny girls. I got a little uptight when I heard that, too, as though saying out loud that you like super skinny girls is comparable to punching a feminist in the face. (I am not a feminist.) I had consciously acknowledge that I was being just a little bit blindly stupid.

My pubic hair is a dark espresso brown, almost black. It is straight, and wiry. It likes to grow downward in a “V” pattern, and when it’s long, like now, it tends to settle into a series of large swirled patterns. It keeps mostly to a narrow range, except for a few stray hairs on my bum and one weird, tricky hair that grows about two inches out on the flesh of my left thigh. I’m growing it out. I want to see what happens.

Also, I wear makeup sometimes, to cover the acne. And when pressed, I will admit that I like skinny girls. Skinny short girls. With nice collarbones, and big breasts.