The Time I Shaved My Hoo-Ha
If you have even the faintest anticipation that what you’re about to read is going to be sexy in any way whatsoever, you are about to be thoroughly disappointed. Save yourself the frustration and close your browser window right this second. Buh-bye.
For the rest of you: remember when Sex and the City was all the rage? And how half the show was vagina talk? And how they frequently discussed maintenance “down there?” There was this one episode where Carrie went for a Brazilian wax and ended up completely bald. Sarah Jessica Parker declared the word “BALD” in such memorable, exclamatory fashion that henceforth and forevermore, when I hear the word “bald,” I immediately think of vaginas. Thanks a ton, Sarah.
Well, one day during my graduate studies, I was doing some routine hoo-ha maintenance (trimming the hedges) when I suddenly recalled Carrie and her bald vajajay. And I thought, Meh… why not?
Yeah… I went for it. I’m not going to pretend it was an erotic experience. There really isn’t anything sexy about clumps of pubic hair floating to the floor like burnt tumbleweeds. Not for me anyway.
When all was said and done, I was like Damn, so that’s what’s under there, eh? I felt like I’d regressed to pre-pubescence, which creeped me out a little. But whatever. The deed was done.
Everything was cool for about five hours… until my hair started to grow back.
Maybe I have super-fast growing pubes. Maybe I have super-thick pubes. Maybe my pubes were angry at me for parting with them with such callous impulsivity. To be fair, I probably should have given the matter a bit more forethought. After-all, I’m a person who gets razor-burn of the armpit. For the bikini area, I have to shave with the hair growth, never against it.
Not only that, but I’m a hairy person in general. I have a uni-brow that requires constant attention. I routinely bleach my mustache. My chin demands regular tweezing, lest I end up being confused with one of the guys from Duck Dynasty.
My hair — all of it — is a force to be reckoned with.
Do you see where I’m going with this? After a few delicious hours of tee-hee, I’m playing pool with my friends and they have no idea my hoo-ha is bald… the itching set in.
The initial sensation was not something I would have called “pain,” though there was some mild discomfort to speak of. I probably shifted on my bar stool more than average, crossed and un-crossed my legs somewhat excessively. I tried to act cool even though alarm-bells had begun going off in the back my head. Abort! Abort! Systems failure! Retreat before the situation becomes hostile!
The burning in my nether-regions was rapidly escalating to the level of unbelievably-freakin’-itchy-bordering-on-hellfire. Sadly for me, scratching your genitals in public is like an 11 on the “Don’t EVER Freaking Do That Sh*t in Public” scale. But the more time passed, the more agony I suffered. I’m not sure if it was so much the raging itchiness that was killing me, or the fact that I was not in a position to scratch myself. Probably both. Plus, I didn’t have a car so I had to wait until my friend could drive me home. Throughout the night, I took several thousand unnecessary bathroom-breaks just so I could go give myself a good scraping. I couldn’t wait to get home so I could dump an entire container of baby-powder on my vagina-fire and put that sh*t out.
That was one of the longest nights of my life. It was truly painful. And you know how when you’re in pain, you really want to complain to someone? Well I couldn’t. I mean, Guess what? I shaved my vagina and now it’s burning like I sat naked in a bath of chili-peppers. Have you ever done that? probably wouldn’t have gone over too well with my new graduate student friends.
For two days I waited for the agony to subside. Even after the fire finally died down, I was left with severely uncomfortable man-beard stubble that would occasionally lodge itself in the fabric of my underwear and reverse-stab me like someone was poking at my girly parts with a sewing needle. WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THIS TO THEMSELVES? I’m sorry, okay? I told my vagina. I’ll NEVER, EVER shave you again. Promise.
And I’ve stuck to my promise. One of my prerequisites in choosing a husband was “must not require a bald vagina.”
Yes, aside from trimming, the vagina is off-limits. (Of course I trim; I don’t want to look like I’m hiding a guinea-pig in my bathing suit bottoms, do I?) The rest of my body is subject to all the expected lady-grooming; she is a quaint suburban subdivision subject to routine mowing, hedging, sculpting, bleaching, and other beautification up-keep. But the vagina is sacred ground; a wildlife preserve that must remain mostly-untouched aside from intermittent trimming to keep the soil composted and the grass from getting so high that the endangered birds can’t get in there and get the worms- oh dear, my metaphor has gone terribly askew.
Well, you get the point: when it comes to razors, for me, the hoo-ha is off-limits. And so is waxing, so don’t even try to suggest it. My thick-ass, evil hair has to grow back sometime.
Plus, I promised my vagina I wouldn’t.
Kristen Mae is a devoted wife and mother, ADHD momma-warrior, violist, health-nut, and writer. She is the voice of Abandoning Pretense, where her goal is to provide a community where women are free to be honest about their struggles with marriage, parenthood, and life. In addition to her blog, Mae shares hilarious and heart-warming tidbits of her life on her Facebook page, Google+, and Twitter.
