I think it was pornography that first planted the idea of shaving my pubic hair in my teenage brain. "Guys do it in porno because it makes their penises look bigger," my friend told me with fifteen year-old solemnity. I was still excited to just have pubic hair so the idea of trimming it back didn't seem intuitive at all. While shaving might make a penis look bigger, it doesn't actually make it bigger so that made even less sense. I finally started trimming back my mange in college when a new idea dawned on me: a manicured pubic lawn might make the penis seem more inviting than an overgrown junk heap of kinky brillo.
This idea made more sense to me, but in all the intervening years I haven't had any comment on my pubic hair, pro or con. One of the surprises of losing my virginity was just how nice the friction of pubic hair felt. Rocking away in the mission position I was happily taken with all the little tugs and pulls as my pubic hair became entwined with, and separated from, my partner's pubic hair. No one had ever told me about that. It's nice.
A light trim of the penis awning has become a relatively normal part of many men's daily routines under the macho posturing of "manscaping." For women, a full shave seems to be more de rigueur than a discretely appointed six o'clock shadow. I remember the first woman I ever went down on apologizing that she hadn't shaved. She barely had any hair in her crotch to begin with, and I wondered just what there was to shave in the first place. A fully shaved vagina is like a mounted deer head with a lot of my friends. It's a prized trophy that incites head nods with a lurid sneer of approval. That's what I'm talking about. Shave it all off. Nice.
It's easy to fetishize body parts with such an explicit role in sex, wanting to see them as nakedly as possible. There's certainly a large contingent of men who happily fixate on breasts. For me, sex resides in the face and the hips. Lips, eyes, chin, ears, butt, the uterine slope below the navel, the labia, inner thigh, perineum. Swoon. The way the bulges and curves come together, and give way to the inner vaginal sanctum (or mucus canal, if you will) is the most arousing sexual image I can imagine. It's hard to imagine it without hair.
I remember the first time I saw a vagina when I was a kid. My cousins were visiting and I saw one scamper from the guest room to the bathroom naked, getting ready to change into a bathing suit for an afternoon swimming session. I was in first grade. It was flat, hairless, monochromatic, and seemed almost without function. It was like looking at an alien artifact.
The first time I experienced a fully shaved vagina as an adult it reminded me of that moment. I became totally indifferent. All of the excitement I had been building up suddenly turned became disappointment. I felt like I was looking at an animatronics doll of some sort. It was as if someone had taken the hairy and rounded woman I thought I was sleeping with and replaced her with a perverse rubber molding. When I see a shaved vagina it reminds me instinctually of pre-pubescence and it's wholly uninteresting.
There is a bristling underbelly to male sexuality celebrating that perversely young, the barely legal conquest. Popular music is riddled with men in tight pants alluding to the Roman delights of underage women, from the Beatles to Kip Winger. It's hard not to see an echo of that in the celebration of the shorn snatch. Which is not to suggest that those men exchanging smug glances about the excellence of a bare yoni are pedophiles. Men are blunt instruments, we celebrate our own depravity. We burp, we fart, we brag about "getting" sex, and try to outmatch each other with how lewd we can be.
Then we slink off to our bathrooms and shave our own balls, like some private act of consideration for those who might one day appreciate the forethought.
Previous Posts:
Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating
Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble
Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy
Vote Machine: No Gay People Can't
Sex Machine: Let's Have an Orgy
Sex Machine: My First STD
Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV
Love Machine: Let's Make Babies
Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines
Sex Machine: My Kingdom for a Boner
Date Machine: Don't Make Poopy in the Office
Hooksexup Confessions: Fat and Skinny, Ugly, Pretty
Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn
Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much
Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop
Love Machine: Your Mom Will Do
Date Machine: Scary Movies or I Peed My Pants
Date Machine: Rate My Ethics
Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends
Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met
Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed
Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed
Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night
Sex Machine: Spank My Ass