I waxed my vagina. At home. On a towel. In a room with one 60 watt light bulb. The scene was just one step up from what would typically be provided for a dog before giving birth. About the same amount of blood though.
I’ve had an issue with body hair since I was about nine years old. That’s when I let my own paranoia falsely convince me that other girls my age were shaving their legs, so I should too. For weeks I went to school with noticeable cuts around my ankles and in the government subsidized light of my classroom, noticed that without their dusting of blonde hair, my legs looked a lot like discounted lunch meat. From there I moved on to my arms, 60% of my eyebrows and, soon after learning about nocturnal emissions and birthing hips, my pubic area. My endeavor to turn myself into the surface of a bowling ball came with very little conscious effort. Most of it was simply motivated by the need to be consistent.
However, my pubic hair was an entirely different beast. I vacillated between a bush so voluminous it was noticeable through jeans and Barbie crotch. I could get away with it because, other than my tracings of rare dog breeds, no one ever saw me naked. Still, I preferred to be completely bare. Years of trial and error informed me that orgasms were easier to come by when I actually had direct access to myself and not something akin to a squirrel pelt. But since I had no real reason to be fastidious about maintaining a vagina suitable for moonwalking, I slid back into indifference.
Then I discovered oral sex and the details are hazy from there. But from that moment, I became nearly obsessed with what I could do to make my vagina more welcoming for someone’s face. I knew that my pubic hair could grow to almost inhumane lengths and I never wanted to go back, fearing that both the frequency and sensation would wane. Luckily, not even my ham-fisted attempts at shaving around my ski slopes could dissuade the shared inexperience and desperation of 17-year-olds.
Eventually I found myself in a relationship where cunnilingus was nearly a daily activity and not just something that was done when his parents left to go grocery shopping. I soon realized that my razor could no longer keep up.
Which is why, when my boyfriend suggested that I wax my vagina, I agreed. He even said he’d do it for me, all I needed to do was order the wax. The first sign that I was absolutely fucked came when he decided to slather wax on my cunt like he was buttering toast, instead of applying it in strips. By the time I looked down, the wax had already hardened and I was left there wondering why I let him do this to me, considering that I still have to find socks for him in the morning. I started panicking because I knew that, outside of melting the wax off with an iron pressed against my labia, I was now committed to having my pubes torn out en masse. Aside from being unable to find even one sock out of a collection of 50, he also lacks manual dexterity. I learned this when it took three or four pulls to successfully emancipate each portion of flesh from the wax puddle he created. The pain was immense, but I couldn’t really be too angry because I probably would’ve stripped myself of the ability to urinate if I tried to do it myself.
After each abortive yank, I had to ask him to stop so I could drain the tension out of my muscles. I also needed to make sure I still had a clitoris. During this time he would apply ice to the area that now had its own heartbeat and remind me that I could hold on to him to help with the pain. If I hadn’t been busy wiping the torture-induced tears from the side of my face, I would’ve asked him if he also goes to the Burn Ward to offer patients advice on how to crate train a new puppy. Because unless he was going to spontaneously secrete morphine, that offer was useless to me.
Somehow, after many suggestions that I pet my freshly removed hair because, ‘it feels like a cat nose,’ I got through it. I couldn’t argue with the results. My vagina felt like a handful of baby powder, but it would’ve had to start whistling The Best of Bobby McFerrin for me to consider it a winning value proposition.
I resented my boyfriend for a few days after that. I took most of it out on his face, seeking solace in the fact that he could hardly breathe. Yeah, it’s a weak victory – I go through a medieval level of pain, he gets to eat pussy. But just give me a few months, when I welcome back the Barbara Bush. And force him to formally address her. And remove her smart little skirt suit with his teeth.
