My lovely friend Dead Cow Girl is looking to put together a series called Fifty Shades of Glitter. She’s looking for fifty women willing to share their stories about sex.  If you’re a woman who has sex, you should go email her your story before the end of September.  I’m posting the things I have written while trying to figure out what to write for my Fifty Shades of Glitter post here that I’m not submitting, because quite frankly… I have more to say than just one essay.

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I remember quite clearly the first pornographic spread I saw. I opened the magazine to a set with a very hairy woman being shaved bare on the back of a motorcycle by a muscular naked man in a fetish magazine called Nugget.

Shortly thereafter, my mother tried to teach me the 101 on shaving and I panicked and wanted nothing to do with it. Shaving was something I internalized as a sexual act, and here my mother was trying to teach me about it? No thanks! I cried and screamed like I was being tortured and my mother left thinking I was frightened of razor blades (which, to be fair, I sort of was).

I would have been perfectly happy to remain oblivious to the brown hair growing if it weren’t for the fact that middle school girls have a way of making an issue of everything. The first time I had to change clothes for gym class, I didn’t get there fast enough for a bathroom stall, and had to change in the open AND I brought shorts. I was teased merclessly by the popular girls who had no issues shaving. “Why don’t you shave?” they asked, and they took turns getting up in my face and lecturing me on how weird I was.

The status of my leg and armpit hair became the butt of the joke for two years before I finally mustered up the courage to shave. I compensated by wearing sweatpants and long t-shirts to cover my undesirable hair, but then the joke became about how I never wore shorts even when it was too hot to be comfortably wearing sweatpants.  I finally caved around the time my parents both started working more, and leaving me home alone more. I couldn’t bring myself to do this most intimate of acts to myself when anyone was home… I wasn’t perfectly shaved every gym class, but I started shaving enough to not have leg hair on some gym days and could start wearing shorts again.

It took me until I was somewhere in my mid-twenties to shake the notion that shaving was somehow perverted. I agonized over whether or not my pussy ought to be shaved before I went to the doctor because I didn’t know what normal was. I eventually got over the whole “nobody can be home” thing, though to be honest…. I prefer if no one’s around.  I still don’t really like to shave more than every other week, but mostly because I’m lazy and I don’t really like to shave.  Besides, razors are fucking expensive.

Did your first pornographic experience mess with your head as much as mine did? What are your thoughts about body hair removal?