Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies. Hadley Freeman

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ * Blow jobs are easy because a guy is grateful for any oral action you give him down there. But what about hand jobs – how do you do those?

      Why are you asking me? Ask the guy himself. He’s had literally decades of experience tugging at the thing. I’m sure he’d be happy to demonstrate.

       * Why are blow jobs a given but cunnilingus is a special treat?

      Because it’s harder to spell. And because you are sleeping with selfish jerks. Next!

       * Why is sex, of all physical desires and behaviours, the one freighted with so much guilt and fascination in that order?

      Yes, it is funny, that. Outside my window I can see Richard Dawkins, bless him, waggling his fists and bellowing, ‘It’s because of religion! It’s because religion freighted down sex with so much guilt and fear out of men’s paranoia about the paternity of their children and out of a way to control the populace! And they did this so effectively that even today, even people who haven’t been in a religious building since their parents made them go through the traditional infant rites to placate the grandparents feel it too! Arg! Must! Get! Angry! On! TV! Again! Soon!’

      But just before I slam down that window I lean out and shout, ‘Oi! Dawkins! You’ve only got it half right! You’ve forgotten the American Pie factor! And a man of your intelligence, too. Sheesh!’

      The American Pie factor – named in honour of the film, mind, and not the song – is the deeply embedded belief that sex proves one is a grown-up, one is desirable and one is cool. Of course, in that film the characters were eighteen whereas the large majority of the populace is not. In fact, the vast majority is older than eighteen. Nonetheless, their attitude to sex is not much more mature than that of the young chaps in that film.

      So when you find yourself stuck in the dentist’s waiting room and gazing upon the cover of another men’s magazine in which an actress promotes her latest lame movie in that time-immemorial manner – posing in a pair of bikini bottoms while twisting up her T-shirt and talking about how much she loves freaky sex and how empowered she feels – ponder upon a parallel universe in which a different physical action other than sex was fetishised. Like, oh, let’s say, defecation.

      Movies would be censored for having too many bathroom scenes (with extra parental guidance urged for actual shots of the toilet); underground orgy parties would feature laxatives and excellent plumbing, and God only knows what the fetish gear would look like. Presumably chaps would still work. And pity the Catholic priests! The terrible bowel troubles they would suffer due to their mistaken belief that God has forbidden them to defecate. Some of them, somehow, would learn to twist their internal organs into such a way so as to adhere to this inhuman commandment, but many, many others would secretly try to find outlets to relieve their urges, outlets that would offend God far more than simply using the toilet.

      The point of this little segue is not to promote coprophilia, but to point out how weird and, frankly, retrograde an obsession with sex is. To paraphrase the oracle on the subject, George Michael, yes it’s natural, yes it’s good, not everybody does it but everybody should. But, honestly, world, get over it. It’s an obsession that ultimately causes pain to millions and millions and millions of others. It feeds into religions’ cruel and weird fetishisation of it which then can damage its followers. It encourages the condescension of grown adults by pop culture. And finally, it leads inexorably, unavoidably to the Sex Therapist’s Tone. So for all our sakes, grow up.

       * So I’m about to sleep with a new gentleman caller for the first time. Should I go get a Brazilian wax?

      Well, I don’t really know. Is your gentleman caller a paedophile? A porn merchant? If so, then the state of your pubic hair is really the least of your problems. If not, no. So in short, the answer, in all scenarios, is no.

      Before we get into the nitty-gritty of ladies’ pubic hair, without, hopefully, finding anything nitty or, indeed, gritty in there, let us first get a grasp on the linguistics of the subject while struggling, ever so diligently, not to make any ‘cunning linguist’ jokes. I leave that to my local sex shop.

      The bikini wax is, as its Ronseal-does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin name suggests, a wax around the sides so that one can go to the beach without sparking too many comparisons to Grendel’s mother.

      The Brazilian is a very extreme bikini wax, leaving one with just a mere centre line of pubic hair which some people insist on referring to as ‘the landing strip’ which in turn suggests that they only do missionary position.

      And then finally, there’s the full Brazilian, where absolutely everything is removed. This is also occasionally known as ‘the Hollywood’, which tells you everything you need to know about that town: it insistently remakes foreign products with American dialogue and it prefers its women to resemble Barbie.

      Now, I am very much of the belief that, as long as it’s legal, a woman should be allowed to do pretty much anything if it makes her feel happy and confident in herself and, yes, that does include the styling of her pubic hair. What she should not do, however, is feel pressurised to torture her genitals because she assumes that is what sexual partners and society itself expects of her. Yet at some unspecified point over the past twenty years, pubic hairlessness became a shorthand for mainstream female sexiness. Once women with hairless vaginas were something one saw on cards in public phone boxes. Now such a thought is as outmoded as the phone boxes themselves. If anything had to cross over from the porn industry, I wish it had been the commendably straightforward movie plots (‘I’m here to fix your photocopier.’ ‘Great!’) but, sadly, it turned out to be pouring hot wax around one’s labia and ripping out the hair. Oh well.

      Look, I am as susceptible to the daftest fashions as the next person who has a subscription to multiple fashion magazines and I accept that fashions and expectations change, even in the pubic hair industry, as such a thing does indeed seem to exist.

      But the advocation of the Brazilian wax and in particular the Hollywood is where I throw down my copy of Sunday Times Style, sell my flat and move to a mud hut in the Hebrides and spend my days carving recorders out of twigs and playing ‘Annie’s Song’ to passers-by. There is nothing fashionable about following a trend that is derived so wholesale from the porn industry, nor is there anything trendy in encouraging gentlemen callers to think of it as both sexy and a given.

      I never thought about Brazilian waxes much when I lived in London in my twenties. In fact, I thought the only people who had them were crazy-eyed trophy wives who were forced to submit their bodies to all manner of indignities so as to stop their piggy-eyed husband from shagging the sloaney nanny too often. This is because I believed – and still believe – that the only kind of people who dislike signs of female sexual maturity are ridiculous, repulsive people. Here’s a slogan to embroider on a pillow on a rainy Sunday: sexual maturity is an attractive quality in an adult.

      When I moved to Manhattan in my thirties, though, I could barely move without some white-coated woman trying to rip out all my pubic hair.

      Every time I went for a bikini wax I had to have lengthy discussions explaining that, no, I did not want hot wax poured inside me, nor did I want to return home afterwards with my knickers full of blood as though I’d just had a backstreet abortion. The beauticians looked at me as though I were a wholesome German hippy, explaining why I brush my teeth with a leaf and plait my underarm hair.

      I did think for a much longer time than I ever expected to muse upon the state of my pubic hair whether it is hypocritical for me to be disgusted by the rise of Brazilian waxes (THE RISE OF THE BRAZILIAN WAXES: now there’s a horror movie I’d like to СКАЧАТЬ