A bald proposal

The stakes are getting higher. Have you seen the movie Love Me If You Dare? This couple practically (or maybe literally, it’s a bit unclear) kill themselves in order to prove they won’t back down on a bet.

For us it started with a blowjob in the car over a lost pool game, prompted by an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm (you can tell it’s winter by my inflated number of references to rented TV). Our bets have accelerated over the past several months from predictable massages to orgasms in the shower, to handjobs on the train, to asslicking. The fun is mostly in coming up with a good dare. We aren’t so fixated on the follow-through. Lately however I was confronted with the biggest conceptual and physical challenge yet.

Among witnesses, my partner came out with the most daring of dares, if you know my life story: a full-out pussy shave. How could I back down?

I have never, ever in all my life shaved my entire pussy. I’ve never done much to it at all expect for basic trimming and the occasional edge shaving. Nothing drastic, nothing that would take away from that two circles and a triangle image of a woman we’ve been doodling on our notebooks since we were nine years old.

I don’t remember when I started growing hair there. I only remember it becoming inappropriate to share the bath water, or the bath, or the bathroom with my sisters sometime after grade four. I never thought about it all that much as I was coming out. None of my friends shaved, none of my partners shaved. The nude women I saw in movies from the early 1990s weren’t shaved and until later in life I wasn’t aware of the world of pornos that featured completely shaved pussies.

The only fully shaved pussies I’ve ever seen live were at The Brass Rail eight or nine years ago when I bartered a straight male friend for company at Clit Lit. To me at the time it looked like little-girl fetishism and felt “perverted,” although now I’m not sure what defines “perverted” and I recognize that assertion is centred on the audience instead of on the woman, a label that makes sense at a strip club but might not in the safe context of a healthy relationship.

Women who do it say they love the sensitivity a fully shaved pussy allows, the “clean” look (although I bristle at the adjective because it implies other options are dirty). Most women don’t say “I do it for my partner,” “I feel like a porn model” or “It makes me feel like a little girl.” They say, “I do it for me.” Who am I to argue? I have a family member who wants a boob job “just for her.” Who am I to argue?

I shave my armpits and my legs often enough, so far failing to completely live the dream of a liberated woman. So what’s the big deal about shaving my pussy, too? What is at stake?

Well, my role in bed, for one. I am a fairly strict “top” in the bedroom. I enjoy being in control, using my strength and my weight in fucking my partner. Pussy shaved, I would feel more vulnerable, less in control of how I am seen and less in control of how acutely I feel things, which I expect would translate into a more general loss of control. But isn’t that the ultimate question: why does more hair mean more control to me? Why does the fact that I am hairier in general than my partner mean that I make sense as the top? Why do I think that shaving my pussy would rob me of that position?

It isn’t just because men in general have more hair than women. I know there is a race story in here somewhere. I feel less delicate and less “feminine” because I am darker and/or hairier than every female model I see in every media outlet in the Western world. In bed with Andrea I love that role, but I want to believe that I chose that role as I was exploring my sexual identity, and that I continue to choose it “just for me,” and not in relation to other (white) women, or in relation to what society expects of me.

Will I be able to top with a shaved pussy? I want to believe that desire is innate and not tied to the physical presentation of my body. I anticipate feeling like I do in those dreams where I show up for school in my underwear, unable to hide or to move, unable to enjoy uninhibited that extra-special sensitivity so many women, including queer women albeit not tops in my experience, rave about. I have yet to meet a strict self-proclaimed top or a butch woman who completely shaves her pussy. Will I be the first, or will I continue to prove that the two just don’t mix?

Stay tuned; the deal is good till the end of February.