Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies. Hadley Freeman

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СКАЧАТЬ a swimsuit in public, and I decided that maybe it is, a little, but not truly. My objection to the Brazilian is that it is such a weird combination of the aesthetics of porn and paedophilia and it encapsulates so many of the very wrong ideas that exist about women, sexuality and sexiness. Bikini waxes, for me at least, have nothing to do with sex. They are about not wanting to flash my pubes on the beach, because while there are some things I don’t mind sharing with the public (my pubic hair care, apparently), my actual pubic hair is not one of them. A bikini wax is about, at the very least, privacy. Tidiness, too, like brushing my hair (on my head, that is.) And for the record, I’m not all that keen on seeing men’s pubic hair creeping out of those tiny Speedos on the beach. I am an equal opportunities prude.

      Brazilians are a whole different pubic hair ballgame.

      ‘You really should try it,’ said the New York beautician, frustrated again in her pursuit to pour hot wax around my labia, ‘your boyfriend will love it.’

      ‘If he did, he would not be my boyfriend much longer,’ I huffed, a retort that perhaps would have carried a bit more heft if I wasn’t at that point lying prone on a table wearing paper knickers.

      Why any woman would sleep with a man who likes their women to resemble porn stars or pre-pubescents is just one of the great mysteries of the modern bedroom, along with why is it called a one-night stand as surely some people must still do it lying down.

      It is so obvious that impossibly high heels are nothing but a modern-day version of foot binding and the normalisation of Brazilian and Hollywood waxes is the twenty-first-century western version of genital mutilation that it feels incredible that this even needs to be said. No, Brazilian waxes do not involve a clitoridectomy and destroy any chance of a woman experiencing sexual pleasure (although awareness that one is sleeping with a man who likes his ladies to have childlike genitals might kill the buzz a little). But they do involve pouring hot wax all over a woman’s vagina and ripping out her hair in order to turn on a man who has presumably spent at least 89 per cent of his life wanking over porn.

      When I ask my New York female friends – smart, funny, seemingly normal women – who do this to themselves on a monthly basis why on earth they bother, they always give the same two answers:

      1 ‘It’s because then he goes down on me more often. I mean, there is a lot of hair down there so it’s only fair.’

      2 ‘Because it gives me sexual confidence.’

      Both of these are, clearly, nonsense. In regard to the first answer, any guy who says he is not giving a woman oral sex because she has pubic hair is a lazy selfish jerk who is making a phoney excuse for being all take and no give, or is a paedophile. Take your pick, ladies! Yes, hair is closer to the main dish on a woman than it is on a man but I can think of other things a woman has to contend with when giving oral sex that a man does not. So next time a guy says he’ll only go down on you if you get rid of all that hair say, ‘Sure! But only if you shove a massive dildo down your throat every time I go down on you, right? THANKS.’

      As to the second point, if you need to rip out your own vaginal hair to feel confident, your vaginal hair is not the problem.

      Pubic hair is proof of sexual maturity and if your partner finds that a turn-off, you should probably reconsider that partner.

      So, in short, no, you do not have to have a Brazilian to get laid. In fact, any guy who likes a Brazilian shouldn’t be in your bed at all. So following that logic, having a Brazilian will actively prevent you from getting laid.

      Don’t be mean to your genitals. After all, they are so nice to you.

      ¹⁰ May 2012.

      ¹¹ To be fair to Cosmopolitan, its, shall we say, limited concept of feminism does mirror that of the woman most associated with the magazine. While Brown commendably encouraged women to enjoy their self-sufficiency and sexuality, the emphasis on pleasing men was soon seen to undermine the point. By the nineties she was urging women who suffered from sexual harassment, including Anita Hill – who in a high-profile case accused Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas – to ‘just shut up. Leave the poor guy alone. Did it kill them?’

      ¹² ‘I sometimes thought I was having sex with my mother when I was in bed with my girlfriend. Is that normal?’, Guardian, 29 July 2011.

      ¹³ I am sure many men feel insecure about sex, too. However, despite having been to a sex class, I can only deal with one gender at a time. I’m vanilla like that.

      Movies lie – damn it, woman, they lie!

      It took me a long time and a lot of inappropriately overdramatic dialogue before I realised that real life is not how it is depicted in the movies, and, to be fair to movies, they never claimed otherwise. To be fair to me, they just insinuated it.

      In retrospect, I should perhaps have realised that, already by the age of twelve, I took movies too seriously when I woke up the morning after being voted prom queen of my summer camp (George W. Bush is not the only American to have attained power through possibly dodgy vote counting) and felt … disappointed. It didn’t make any sense: how could I – not a popular girl ever, and certainly not at summer camp where popularity could only be bought by the double and, to me, foreign currencies of athletic prowess and sluttiness – be anything other than ecstatic after, against all odds, beating the far sportier and sluttier Tiffany Feiglestein? Even better, winning meant that I got to dance to a cassette of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack in front of the WHOLE CAMP (attention – ha!) with dreamy fourteen-year-old (older man!) Alex Zimmerman (call me!). But that was precisely the problem: that moment – me looking into Alex’s eyes as the speakers blared that we were having the time of our lives, him looking over my shoulder for Tiffany Feiglestein with whom he would spend the rest of the night making out under the gym steps while I chatted with my arts and crafts counsellor about my planned future career in papier-mâché – was the perfect climax, the point when the end credits should have rolled and a power ballad should have struck up, sung by Jennifer Warnes, Peter Cetera and Christopher Cross, three singers whose presence on a soundtrack guarantees a quality film.

      It’s not that I consciously wished for death after the prom (I am more Molly Ringwald than Sissy Spacek); rather, on some level, I just didn’t realise that the slog of life still continued after the triumph, especially after an achievement that is so frequently touted as the end goal in movies. Personally, I’m surprised more divorces don’t happen the day after the wedding. Wait, you mean there’s still more to this story? And it involves me having to go to the supermarket and pay taxes and wait for the bus? But I thought everything was supposed to be sorted and perfect now! Mother FUCK!

      There is a soul-crushing number of differences between reality and the cinematic version thereof. I’m not even talking about the sad lack of musical montages in one’s life; nor the rarity of someone (a kooky new friend, a romantic interest, a mystical old person, a wise child who will tell you where you have been going wrong all along) turning up in your life at the exact moment when you need them; nor the fact that you are probably separated by many more than six degrees from Kevin Bacon. But rather, the certain tropes movies lazily rely on that have, through overuse, become such clichés that they are part of popular culture and become a given so that they become the prism through which you see your life and, in doing so, ruin it. Let’s un-ruin your life!

       1. All men are constantly desperate for sex and women are the reluctant objects of their energetic pursuits

      As is the case СКАЧАТЬ