Dear Sexcellent,
I don’t like shaving my pubes: I get awful ingrown hairs and it’s horribly itchy. I keep it nice and trimmed but I my boyfriend wants me to go completely hairless because he likes it better. How do I make it stop hurting?
Yours,
Bush Warrior
Dear Bush Warrior
The time is currently 8.33am. It is a Sunday morning. I am in central library, still half drunk, with a productivity projection of two hours before the hangover really kicks in, so forgive me if my tether is a bit short: but your boyfriend is a dickhead.
Who the fuck does he think he is to put his visual preferences over your comfort? It’s a goddamn privilege he gets to see your pube-y area, let alone touch it, the ungrateful bastard. Pubes, like anything, go in fashion: influenced by the mainstream media and in our generation, porn. The current thinking happens to be that a woman should be hairless below her eyebrows. Newsflash boys: that doesn’t just happen magically. We grow the hair. We have to get rid of it somehow: and it’s a long, tedious, painful, temporary process. We deal with ingrown hairs and shaving burn and waxing, and this dickhead wants to add another twenty minutes and an awkward, thigh-burning wide squat to the pre-Saturday-night-shower routine? No.
Tell him that it is your body, your vulva, and your rules. He can have preferences, sure: but a) he should critically examine why he has those preferences, and b) even if he doesn’t want to look at the reasons behind his preference, he can’t impose that on you.
In any case, boys and girls, you should try out different pubic hair styles because you want to, not because some ungrateful douche is telling you to, there are lots of ways to do it. Shaving, obviously, but also hair removal cream (please though, use the stuff specifically designed for sensitive areas), waxing, laser, threading, and I’m sure a hundred other ways to remove your pubes that my poor hungover brain can’t think of right now.
Ingrown hairs are awful, but exfoliating a lot can help prevent them. If you shave, make sure your razor is shiny and new and shave with the grain. Be gentle with your bodies, and exfoliate, exfoliate, exfoliate!
XO, S