A long line of little furry people

I like to think of myself as a girl with good ideas. Like the time I had the idea to strap scrub brushes on my feet and skate around the house washing the floor. Okay, maybe that was Pippi Longstocking but I’ve had plenty of good ideas myself.

Having all my pubic hair waxed off was not one of them.

See, I’ve got a bit of the monkey in me. I come from a long line of little furry people. I don’t have a bikini line; I have a Bermuda shorts line.

And while I’m all about overthrowing oppressive beauty standards, I’m just not there yet with my body hair.

I bleach my mustache and spend more time plucking weird hairs out of my jawline than I do… well, plucking weird hairs out of my nipples.

I wax the hair off my toes and remove the “treasure trail” from my stomach fortnightly.

I shave and I pluck and I fantasize about being rich so that I can afford laser hair removal. Oh, and so I can give money to charity. Yeah, that too.

I talked a friend into waxing my thighs for me once. That, gentle reader, is a good friend.

I’ve even tried waxing my own bikini line which, out of all the bazillions of stupid ideas I’ve ever had, is surely one of the stupidest.

So, this time when I needed to rid my thighs of unwanted hair I decided to seek a professional.

A friend recommended I call her friend who has a waxing fetish but apparently the quality of the wax job goes south as she gets excited so I figured I’d pass.

I found a place that offers a Tear Your Hair Out Tuesday special and made an appointment.

I also figured I’d try a Brazilian wax while I was at it. For the uninitiated, a Brazilian wax involves the removal of all your pubic hair except for a wee landing strip at the front.

I’ve unintentionally given myself this look on more than one occasion. I don’t mean to, I’m just a bit disastrous with the clippers.

I have the same problem with plucking my eyebrows. “I’ll just take a little off this side, okay now it’s uneven so a little off this side, well now this one doesn’t look right…”

When I arrived at the spa I started to rethink the Brazilian. The services menu also offered “bikini designs”. For Valentines Day you can get a heart-shaped lower lawn-dyed red with colour that glows in the dark! You can bring in any pattern and they’ll hook you up. Apparently the Gucci symbol is very popular.

There’s also “The Tiffany” which is a square shape and they dye it blue like a box from Tiffany’s. Ultimately, I decided that designs weren’t really my style and just ordered the full monty.

Because I’m an idiot.

I don’t know how to describe what it feels like except to say: it feels like someone is pulling out your pubic hair!

It feels like what you imagine it would feel like. I tried to just lie back and think of England but I’ve never been there so that didn’t help one bit.

I didn’t find it embarrassing or anything, though. It’s like going to the doctor only way more casual.

You know how the doctor is always saying: “You’re going to feel my fingers on your labia now… I’m just inserting the speculum now…”? Well, there’s none of that with a wax job. Just chat, chat, chat while I rip out your pubes.

Finally I heard the waxer lady say, “We’re all done!”

“Thank god,” I answered. And then she spoke the words that I shall never forget as long as I live no matter how hard I will try.

She said, “But look at how beautiful your butterfly is now!”

My butterfly!?

She kept repeating, “Look! Look at your butterfly!” and I really, really didn’t want to all of the sudden.

The word “uncomfortable” is so utterly insufficient to describe how I felt at that moment. Finally I did look down. Let’s just say that my, um, butterfly looked like it had been binge drinking for several days and been in a few fisticuffs. But you should see the other guy!

Walking home was a bit of a gong show. I had waxy remnants on me in odd places and was sticking together in new and uninteresting ways. My thighs didn’t want to be apart from each other and the sticking and unsticking was not pleasant on my ever-so-tender skin. I walked to my apartment like a mermaid.

Upon home mirror examination I found that the waxer lady wasn’t really as detail-oriented as I would have liked. There were also a few straggly hairs left that I discovered while sitting in a hot bath to break down the residual wax and unstick my pussy from itself.

This necessitated some follow-up tweezer action and, frankly, I’m not as flexible as is required for such a task.

I guess this is one of those things I can say I did once in my life. Once is probably enough. Once is certainly far too many times to hear a grown woman instructing me to look at my beautiful butterfly.