Sinclair wrote a great post about butch body hair that has sparked off some really interesting comparative experiences. I hung around in her comment box chattering away until I realized I’d written an entire blog post of my own, and yanked it back over here.

So. Hair. Prepare for some personal information dumping.

I’m trying to figure out where I fit in the gender galaxy. I’m content to make this a slow, meandering process; I feel no burning need, at this very instant, to figure out exactly what I am and how I fit into the boxes. At the moment, if anyone asks I’ll say I’m standing at the intersections of queer and butch and dom and quirky, staring at the street signs quizzically and wondering how to get to the nearest deli.

But I have recently changed my attitude to my body hair, and the change is, in that peculiar meandering way, somehow connected to my gender identity.

My body hair is naturally light. I don’t grow hair on my face except my thin, arched eybrows, and my arms are barely covered in tiny glinting blonde strands.

I shave my legs. I barely have to, as the hair only really grows from mid-calf downward. But I do. For three reasons: the ritual, the texture and the look. I love folding leg shaving in with a good long bath and some relaxation. And I am obsessed with texture; when my legs are smooth and moisturized they feel amazing. I like how having shaved legs makes my sheets feel slippery. Sort of hard to explain, that.

But it is also because I still connect the look of shaved legs with the cultural images of grace and femininity. I wonder sometimes if I still shave my legs because the wealth of my body hair is still something intimately private to me. Or if I’m just not brave enough to display myself grown out. Or if I’ve still got a little femme in me. I probably do, and I think I like her there.

I pluck the stray hairs that grow on my nipples. (And yes, if you didn’t know, women do grow pubic hair on their nipples.) I don’t really care about having hairy nipples, but I like plucking them in the same way I like picking at scabs and cutting my toenails. These are the weird little body quirks that interest me.

I wrote ages and ages ago that I was growing my pubic hair out. That lasted for a while. Then I trimmed it, then I shaved it. Then I grew it out and trimmed it again. Then I had some ill-fated adventures into complicated landscaping. Now I’m growing it out again. It’s longer that the hair on my head. I like it. I also found a company that sells pubic hair dye, and am flirting with the thought of turning it blue. Because hey, why not?

The major result of my change in attitude is that I’ve grown out my underarms. I’ve never done this before. My underarms have been shaved smooth since they first started sprouting fifteen years ago. But again I thought, what the hell, why not?

The first thing I noticed of these budding new hairs is that they’re very different in texture that I expected. I had thought my underarms would sport the same wiry, rich brown hairs as my vagina. But no. They’re thin and soft and silky. They feel a bit like having a tiny, expensive fur muff wedged under each arm.

The second thing I noticed is that my smell has changed. I bear odd resemblances to the people whose smells fascinate me: Maymay, Stitch, Bear. In short, I smell like a boy. It was a disconcerting experience at the time. Standing in our kitchen I’d turn my head expecting Maymay to be standing next to me, and find no one. The scent of skin and powder has vanished, replaced by sweat and light musk.

I loved how boys dressed, and then realized I could dress the same way. I loved how boys sat in chairs like little sprawling kings, and then began to sprawl myself. I loved how boys smelled, but I always thought that particular smell was something that didn’t make it into my portion of the biological soup.

I was wrong.

And right there, teetering at the very top of my textured, tactile love, is hair. Long hair that curls around my fingers. Short hair that tickles my palms. Stubble, curls, silky fronds of pubic hair escaping from between my fingers. And of course, it does help that running my hands through someone else’s hair is both intimate, and, to me, dominant.

Last night I went to the shopping center by my workplace and bought mascara, a length of ribbon, and an electric shaver. I went home and gave myself a three-quarter-inch buzz cut. I learned several things, besides how to operate a shaver:

That my skull is remarkably round and smooth.

That I can carry this butch look with confidence.

That the line of my cheekbone is at the same angle as the line of the front of my ear.

And that I cannot keep from running my hands over the crown of my head and feeling that soft, erotic tickle. Does that count as a masturbatory impulse? At the very least, it is delicious.

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.