“I tried to hide the problem from my husband, by refusing to have sexual relationships with him. I eventually realized it would just push him to another woman’s arms, so I decided to confess my problem to him. It was embarrassing, and although he understood, I wish he had been a bit more supportive. I bought the guide on an impulse. I’m so glad I did. It literally saved my marriage.”
–Isabella Johnson (London, UK)
Oh Isabella, you must be so relieved to know that it was only the foul reek of your vagina that stood between you and happily married love.
Scented tampons, vagina mints, brazillian waxes, vaginal douche, individually wrapped intimate wipes attached to the side of sanitary pads – all ridiculous products that prey on women’s insecurities. Girls, it’s up to us to stop buying these things, cause it doesn’t look like they’re going to stop selling ‘em.
I like being kissed on the lips, big soft full lipped smooches that mangle themselves into slobbery tongue tangles, oh yes. And, as those of you who have read my enthusiastic exhortations on all things cunnilingus will know, I like being kissed on the other lips too. But there are many more places I like to feel a warm mouth pressed, all sorts of little nooks and crannies that jump to life when breathed on, and, to sail myself out of the Doldrums of the Sunday night blues, I’m going to dedicate a little time to describing them.
I like to have my ears nibbled. I like to feel nippy teeth on the lobe, or a tongue tip delicately tracing its way along the sea-shell shape. A soft breath so close sounds like a moan, its warmth almost indecent. And when an ear kiss goes deep and gets licky licky, it never fails to remind me of something else.
A peck on the tip of the nose can make a girl feel so loved.
The nape of the neck is for gnawing. I like to throw my head back and pretend I’m being devoured. I read too much Anne Rice as a teenager evidently. Anyone know any good cures for hickys?
When feeling wanton, fingers make great lollipops. Suck ‘em and see. But when someone gets his nose right down to my knuckles and nibbles the spot between my fingers, all faux chivalrous and courtly, well, it’s enough to make me swoon and call for smelling salts.
I like having the skin on the inside of my upper arms pinched gently between someone’s lips. I like having it nosed and nuzzled.
Armpits are all nerve endings. They need licking. He he he, that tickles. If you can get your lover into armpit licking, you’ll never need to carry deodorant with you again, thus saving money and handbag space. An excellent strategy for these recessionary times, non?
Nipples need to be nibbled til knobbly, til they respond to touch like sea anenomes, tightening, curling in on themselves, heat radiating from them into the rest of the body and making it looser.
I like to be kissed all along my breast bone. There’s something that feels safe and reassuring about breath at my solar plexus, and about the gentle pressure when a lover’s head rests there.
God I love belly buttons. Belly buttons are built for probing tongues. Belly button kisses make me giggle and wriggle. You know the way some women go on about how they want a man who can make them laugh? Well so do I. But I want a man who can make me laugh using only his tongue and my belly button.
I like to have raspberries blown on my tummy. A playful tummy raspberry at a party is the method by which my friend Tina pulled the hottest man in the universe, and is, I suspect, a large part of the reason they just got engaged. Never underestimate the power of the tummy raspberry. It’s not just for babies who don’t want to have their nappies changed.
It’s a beautiful thing to lie peacefully on your front and have every vertebrae of your spine kissed. Gently brushing lips and warm exhalations make you tingle. So romantic. So sweet.
Bums, on the other hand, are for biting. Rude!
My inner thighs needs all the love a lover’s lips can give them. And then some. Did you know that the nervous ‘legs’ of your clitoris run into your buttocks and upper thighs? So that explains why it feels nice to have your bottom smacked and your thighs licked. Ah science, answers for everything.
Toes toes toes toes toes. This little piggy went to heaven. If you are reading this and you have never had your toes sucked, then you need to implement the following three step plan:
1 – Find a consenting adult who is willing to put your toes in his or her mouth.
2 – Bring him or her to your bedroom.
3 – Take your socks off.
Having my big toe sucked is so intense that sometimes I can’t bear it and I squirm about and nearly kick my lover in the face, but when I calm myself down and get into it, toe sucking provides the most deliciously weird pleasure. My lover says it feels like getting a blow job. He’d know.
And last but not least on my list of places I like to be kissed, it’s wonderful having lips softly pressed to my head as I curl up in the nest of my lover’s man-fuzz and go to sleep.
Do you ever have a morning where you can’t drag yourself out of your body and into your mind, where the pillows devour your head and your head lets them? You arrive, finally, in the shower, eyes still half closed, dreamy fantasies unwilling to be chased away off into unreality, only to have the water trap you instead of the bed. Cold out there, warm in here. You repeat shampoo and condition your quarter inch of hair, massaging your scalp extravagantly with every fingertip. You bury your face in the warm streams and sing little bubbely songs. You put your fingers in your ears and listen to the noise the water makes as it falls on your head.
Somehow, impossibly, you find yourself sitting towel wrapped on your messy bed. You know it’s wrong but you climb back in under the covers. The towel is damp around your body. Your bedroom smells human and sleepy. You roll over and close your eyes.
You wake up clammy and have to get up all over again. Your hair has moulded itself into new and exciting shapes. Sliding out of the covers, the air bites at your damp skin. You are naked, on your honkers, on the carpet. You are ludicrous. Your face is lined from some crease of linen.
You choose cotton things, warm things, things you can paw at and rub. You bury your hands into your sleeves and make knotted fists.
You put extra sugar in your tea and half a jar of nutella on the crust that was left. You sit and do nothing while you eat. You leave the dishes. You stretch down to your toes and up to the ceiling and over to the right and over to the left, and you spend half an hour stretching and now you’re all covered in dog hair. You have another cup of tea. Last of the milk.
You wish that the walk to college would last forever because you don’t have to think and the cold air feels sharp inside your nostils like Vicks Vaporub. Your breath plumes in front of you. You feel like some coal powered thing, just chugging along.
Reading, you can’t get through to the bit that concentrates. Your bare neck is cocking itself to be kissed by invisible lips; your back wants to be scratched all along the spine, under the shoulder blades. Your fleshy sides and flanks want to be grabbed. You’re tormented by breath that is no breath in your ear, your nipples want to be wetted, your thighs want to squeeze something. You want to be handled, held, manipulated. Yawning. Streching. You stop trying to read. Nothing’s going in. No nothing’s going in.
There is barely time to sleep. I haven’t eaten anything other than sandwiches, cereal and koka noodles for a whole week. I have no clean knickers. I have no washing powder. I have scheduled a trip to Tesco into my diary for tomorrow fortnight, but something tells me I’ll end up rainchecking it. In the meantime I have adopted a slightly less hygenic than usual undergarment routine, with the aim of getting four wears out of each pair of briefs. It goes – right way round, then inside out, then back to front, then inside out and back to front. Clever, non? Necessity is the mother of invention.
But in spite of my crippling academic, pedagogical and extra-curricular duties, I can’t let my blog curl up and die! I love it so. Here blog Gods. Take this. Take this as an appeasement offering:
My lover has gone away. Not in the ‘no milk today’ sense of the word – on a business trip. Now, as well as missing his actual corporeal form, I also miss him on the internet. How do I miss thee, let me count the ways.
I apologize for little to none of this post being about sex. It was a bit about knickers though. And there’s a horse’s willy in the blog Gods’ appeasment offering.
Roman Polanski should stand trial. I am not baying for his blood; I am not jumping on a bandwagon and screaming that he is a paedophile who should have his balls cut off. All I’m saying is that he should stand trial for the rape of which he is accused.
I’ve read so many articles and engaged with so many points of view at this stage that I don’t really know where to begin. I am going to ignore as ridiculous the idea that Polanski should get special treatment because of his iconic status. Anyone who believes this is missing a moral screw or two, and I’m not even going to entertain such dumb shit. I am going to begin instead with source material. You can read most of Samantha Gailey’s court testimony here. In it, you get the 13 year old’s account of what transpired between her and Polanski in Jack Nicholson’s house.
Now I’m not a human lie-detector or nothing, but those transcripts do not present the voice of a kid who is playing the victim. Samantha’s story is straightforward. She describes Polanski providing champagne and quaalude, but she never says that Polanski got her drunk or drugged her. She doesn’t refer to what happened to her as rape. She doesn’t pretend that she was a virgin prior to the incident, or that she’d never tried drink or drugs before. She recounts the events in the simple manner of a thirteen year old girl who has not yet begun to understand what has happened to her. Her testimony that she was ready to cry while Polanski performed ‘cuddliness’ on her is sad and unsettling – there’s such grotesque implications in her almost cute kid’s mistake. She is trying to play the grown-up, but Samantha’s childish testimony reveals to adult eyes the predatory nature of Polanski’s behaviour.
Why shouldn’t Polanski be sentenced for this (as of yet still alleged) crime? There have been myriad reasons offered. The most convincing one is that there was judicial misconduct in his original trial, with the presiding judge, Judge Rittenband, acting inappropriately. While the evidence for this is strong, Judge Rittenband is now dead, and at any rate was taken off the case years ago, yet Polanski remains unsentenced. Those who still believe that Polanski should not be sentenced offer other, more dubious, reasons.
For starters, there is Whoopi Goldberg’s suggestion that Polanski’s crime was not rape-rape. And okay, I’m shooting fish in a barrell here – claiming that Polanski didn’t ‘rape-rape’ Gailey is clearly symptomatic of a deranged mental state; all the same, I think Goldberg is saying, albeit in a disturbingly ludicrous fashion, what a lot of other Polanski apologists are thinking. Gailey was underage sure, it might have been statutory rape maybe, but she was a sexually active, sexually desiring 13 year old. She wanted to get drunk and take drugs and play with the big boys, and she should have been aware of how the big boys expected her to run.
We’re back in Lolita territory. Humbert justifies his abuse of Lolita through the fact that he was not her first lover. Polanski apologists justify the rape of Samantha Gailey in the same way: she wasn’t a virgin, so she was fair game. She’d had sex before, so she must have wanted to have sex with 46 year old Polanski. She knew what she was doing – hanging around and having her picture taken by a big star – what did she expect? Here’s the thing though, and this may come as a surprise to Whoopi and her ilk, you don’t need to be a virgin to be raped. I know, crazy isn’t it? You can have had sex with one person, and still refuse to have sex with another. And here’s the other thing, and this again might seem shocking to the coiner of the tautologically fascinating term ‘rape-rape’: Samantha Gailey was THIRTEEN. Polanski knew she was thirteen. He was never under any illusions that he was sodomising a consenting adult. Before he forced himself on her he had to ring her Mother to say he’d be bringing her home late. This was a premeditated sexual assault on a drunk, drugged, and vulnerable young girl. Goldberg’s right, it wasn’t ‘rape-rape’, it was regular old rape. And rape doesn’t need to be hypenated and repeated to be a horrible crime.
How about the rest of Polanski’s defence squad? You can read a list of the hundred plus important artsy people who think that Polanski should not stand trial for raping Gailey here. There are also some interesting comments on that page, which I’ll return to in a second. Among Polanski’s defenders are Woody Allen (are we surprised?), Salman Rushdie (whose writing I love, but whose portrayals of sexually desiring young girls have troubled me for a while), Martin Scorcese, and Peter Fonda (who thinks that it’s not important to arrest Polanski because he’s not Osama Bin Laden. Right).
Back to the comments. A fella called Noah R. encapsulates a lot of the Polanski apologist position with this argument:
I gave up defending [Polanski] the other day when some idiot repeatedly accused me of defending pedophilia, refusing to concede that I wasn’t making excuses for the deed itself but pointing out the fact that he was unfairly treated from the beginning.
Prison is meant to rehabilitate people so they can get back into society and contribute to it constructively. Polanski isn’t Gary Glitter. He’s not a raging pedophile by any means. We need to stop lumping all sex offenders under one umbrella; that’s how witch hunts start.
It’s over. We need to get over it and worry about more important things like our non-existent economy, a slowly disappearing public option, and two raging wars that need to end. How many more times does Samantha Geimer need to forgive him before we all shut up about it?
This idea that Polanski has been unfairly treated is in some ways true. However, it is not unfair to be sentenced for a crime of which you have been accused. In fact, it is just. Further, the argument that there are more important things to think about than a rape that happened 30 years ago is weak. Any legal case at any given moment can be compared to more pressing issues, more weighty crimes. It’s what Slavoj Zizek would call the ‘mathematics of guilt’. But such comparisons do not render the case at hand irrelevant. A sexual assault on a thirteen year old girl is a serious crime. It deserves the attention of the justice system.
It’s the second point Noah makes that interests me. He claims that Polanski is not a paedophile, is no longer a danger to society, and therefore it serves no purpose to make him stand trial. I agree that Polanski is not a paedophile. I agree that he is no longer a danger to society. But are the improvement of the criminal and the protection of society the only reasons we punish people? I am reminded of Hannah Arendt’s comments on the Eichmann trials. She points out that there are usually four reasons to punish people – to protect society, to improve the criminal, to deter crime, or for retribution. None of these make sense in terms of the Eichmann trial, and none makes sense in terms of Polanski. Putting the film-maker on trial is unlikely to stop middle aged men desiring and sexually agressing against young girls; Gailey is the only one who is entitled to ask for retribution, and she wants none. What further reasons can there be to punish someone?
Speaking of the trials of war criminals, Arendt says: ‘our sense of justice would find it intolerable to forego punishment and let those who murdered hundreds and thousands and millions go scot free’. Roman Polanski’s crime is obviously on a far smaller scale. I am not interested in calculating the mathematics of guilt – of working out how much the rape of a young girl is, morally speaking, worth; similarly, I don’t want to be accused of Godwin’s law – I am not comparing Polanski to the Nazis; rather, I’m concerned with the sense of justice that Arendt talks about, the idea that it is abhorrent to let certain acts go unpunished. For me, it is intolerable to think that we should simply allow the perpetrators of these acts to shirk the responsibility and guilt that belongs to them, and get off ’scot free’.
Roman Polanski should stand trial. He should not get special treatment because of his cultural and social status or the circumstances of his life. He should be tried for the rape of which he is accused in the same manner that any other person would be tried. There should not be one law for the artist célebre and another for ordinary rapists. If the sexual assault happened as Samantha Gailey described it, then any sense of justice renders it intolerable that Polanski should walk away guiltless and unreproved.
To defluff your muff or not to defluff you muff, that, for those of us living in slightly less danger of being killed by a bereaved brother or posioned goblet than Hamlet, is the question. Prompted by an insightful post by the historian and cultural commentator Harry Hutton, I have decided to put forward my own thoughts on the experience of living through one of the two great historical changes of the last 37 years – namely, the sudden seismic shift towards bare fannies.
Pubic grooming is one of those coming of age rituals that no one explains to you. I mean, when I exited the bathroom aged 14 with my legs cut to pretty red ribbons, my Mum took the cue and explained all about lady blades, shaving foam and exercising caution round the ankles. Shortly after that I asked for a bra (I didn’t need one, but all my friends had them), so, after a brief argument about whether or not I would jump off a bridge if all my friends were jumping off bridges, Mammy brought me to Ryans on Shop Street to have my entirely flat chest measured, and I went home with two training bras, which were as attractive as they were comfortable, and as comfortable as they were functional.
But when it came to tidying up my bits, I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t that bothered either, until at about 15 I went to the beach, put on my swimsuit, and realised that my still scanty, yet significantly black and stringy pubes were peeping out for all to see. And there were BOYS on the beach. And I was embarrassed enough as it was with the no boobies situation. So, to the extreme surprise of my family, I put my jeans back on and said I didn’t feel like swimming. I love swimming. Especially on my favourite beach in Connemara that has my favourite rock to jump off. Especially when I’ve brought all my snorkling stuff. My brothers looked at me like I had two heads. Mum asked if I was feeling okay.
I went home that evening and attacked my bikini line with a twice used razor. The results were catastrophic – itchy stubble and angry red blisters had a hedonistic orgy in my pants. The next day my knickers chaffed and made the rash worse. I borrowed a wetsuit to go to the beach, and waddled around in it like a cowboy, beyond caring what the local boys thought.
So it’s fair to say that I had a nasty introduction to intimate grooming. Back from my Connemara excursion, I bought a swimsuit with little shorts attached, and that solved the pubic hair problem for another year. Then I decided that it was time to start having sex. This created a dilemma. What was I going to do with the fuzz? I couldn’t afford to be going to beauticians to have it waxed off (and anyways, I’d had my legs done once and that was enough for me), and the shaving method had been proved unwise in extremis. I opted for immac.
The thing is with using immac to do your bikini line, if you move at all from an uncomfortable squat during the seven minutes the stinky cream takes to dissolve away the wool from your wooly bits, then your thighs squish the half clotted gunk all over the fecking place and you end up with clumps of hair in oddly positioned patches – less landing strip, more corn circle. I looked at my naked self in a mirror. Instead of purring like a well groomed cat, my pussy was yowling ‘I have mites and mange’. The only solution I could see was to make it a pedigree Siamese, so I immaced the whole lot off.
I did this for about two years. I can’t for the life of me remember why. It was a laboursome ritual that I never enjoyed. The regrowth was prickly and uncomfortable. I think I just thought that was what I was supposed to do.
I started going out with Toby when I was about 18, and the pre-pubescent look freaked him out. He asked me to grow some pubic hair please. So I did – occassionally trimming whenever it looked like the habitat was reverting to woodland flora. It was much easier. And cheaper. And more comfortable. I wondered why I had ever gone crazy with depilatory paranoia in the first place. I committed myself to bush, sometimes using a little immac around the edges before putting myself in swimsuit situations (a girl cant wear little shorts forever).
Last year in Dublin though, I was shaken out of my happily hirsute haze by a sudden surge of conversations about Brazillians and Hollywoods and all that they entail. Friend after friend returned from the beautician having spent fifty squids on attaining immaculately bald pubic mounds. ‘It feels amazing’ they’d say, ’so clean. It really heightens sensation during sex. And it makes it so much easier for guys to go down on you’. I remained unconvinced. ‘Don’t they, like, wax between your bum cheeks?’ I asked one friend. ‘Yes, but they’re very professional’ she replied. I wondered if she’d misheard the question. I wasn’t asking if the beauticians turned up on time, I was asking if they, in fact, parted your arse cheeks, applied a layer of hot wax therein, and then violently ripped the hairs from your burning, smarting crack. As the answer was yes, I decided to keep my hairy arse to myself. Nonetheless, I began to feel a bit inferior.
The reason I finally booked myself in for an appointment at Brazillia was a girl psuedonymed Síobhán. Síobhán used to go in for a full body wax once every six weeks. She had everything done – pits, legs, pussy. She was tiny and perfect and implike. When we were in bed together I felt like a shaggy mongrel dog. I began to think she’d got the raw end of the deal. One morning I watched her picking my pubes from her teeth with a mildly irritated look upon her face, and I asked her for the number of her waxing salon. She gave it a little too enthusiatically.
The day of the fanny torture approached. I squirmed at the thought. I tousled my pubes fondly at night time, thinking of how I would miss them (Siobhán didn’t). The day before the big event my Mum rang for a chat. I mentioned I had a waxing appointment. What kind of a waxing appointment she wanted to know. I told her I was getting a Brazillian. ‘That’s going to be very sore’ ‘I know’ ‘And expensive’ ‘I know, it’s fifty quid’ ‘Well I think you’re mad, why would you do that at all?’ ‘Everyone else is doing it’ ‘If everyone else jumped off a bridge would you jump off a bridge too?’ ‘No’. And so, beaten by the same logic my Mammy has been beating me with since the age of five, I rang up Brazillia and cancelled. Síobhán was disappointed, and who knows, perhaps it was even a factor in the demise of our short lived fling.
Self-conscious once more about my womanly crotch-mane, when I started sleeping with my lover I treated him to an unevenly immaced bikini line and a bit of a trim. He wasn’t impressed. He likes bush. He likes even more bush than I am willing to grow. At the merest suggestion of fanny waxing he starts snorting and ranting about society’s infantilisation of women and sexualisation of children. And he makes a damn good point. Why the social pressure to remove the signs of sexual maturity from the female body? Does waxing all the hair from around the pussy and anus really make sex any more pleasurable for women? Or does it simply give them one more thing to obsess, stress and be insecure about? And is there something intrinsically more sexy about a shaved pussy? Or are we just being socialised to think that? What makes sex more pleasurable for me is feeling comfortable and confident that the person I’m with loves my body and desires me. That’s what allows me to let go of any mental or physical inhibitions, and follow the pleasure to where I want to go.
So I guess insofar as fanny waxing represents one of the great social shifts of our times, I’m still stuck behind the iron curtain. The capitalistic world might be marching on, leaving Marx and Lenin behind, but there’s always going to be a few die-hard idealists. And I’m proudly one of them.
Sexual jealousy is usually cited as one of those irrational destructive things that does very little good and lots and lots of baaaad. Look where it got Othello. Or more to the point, look where it got poor Desdemona. Sometimes though, jealousy can be a friend – it can hold up a signpost indicating that something is wrong. If you’re madly jealous because last Saturday night your beau kept running off for sneaky ciggies with his ex-girlfriend and leaving you on your own, you’re probably right to be jealous. He shouldn’t be running off for sneaky ciggies with his ex-girlfriend and leaving you on your own. Even if it’s totally innocent, it’s making you feel bad, and he shouldn’t be doing it. ‘Something is awry here’ jealousy whispers in your ear. And jealousy, for all its wicked faults, is right.
So sexual jealousy has signposted a behaviour that makes you unhappy. Much like an acquaintance who thinks she might have seen your other half flirting with such-and-such’s other half in a darkened corner of rumour club, jealousy has given you some information. Now it’s up to you to decide to do with the information. Do you harbour it secretly inside, allowing the spiky balloon of it to inflate and scratch away at your insides? Do you nuture your bitterness, and slowly silently plot revenge for a crime that your lover may or may not know that he has committed? Or do you sit him down, and talk about it?
There’s nothing wrong with sexual jealousy per se. It’s healthy, normal, and part of the sweet torment of being passionately in love. I have had relationships in which partners were incapable of making me jealous – in which pictures of their ex-lovers or extended flirtations with hot strangers in bars didn’t ruffle a single tail-feather. But guess what? I wasn’t in love. Now I am, and I would go ape-shit if my lover had a picture of an ex on his wall; I would go bat-shit if any hot stranger in the vicinity was getting more attention than me; man, there’d be monkey dung and guano all over the gaf. Yep, sometimes jealousy holds up a little warning sign that reads ‘Danger! Danger! Potential threat to romantic bliss’. As I trust my lover, I usually choose to ignore it, but, if Jealousy’s jumping around like an epileptic frog, I’ll talk to my lover about whatever’s bothering me – in a jokey manner if it’s a little thing, or preceeded by a grave and serious ‘we need to talk’ if its a big thing.
There’s this funny idea that jealousy is the ultimate sin, and that an admission of jealousy somehow negates the things that your lover has done to make you jealous. I don’t buy that. Presuming that your partner is not a total head-the-ball who flies into a rage because she or he thinks you were flirting with next door’s guinea pig, then you have, I believe, a responsibility not to do things that are obviously going to make her or him jealous. My lover would not be a very good boyfriend if we went out together and he spent all night flirting with the barmaid. Even if I knew he was only doing it for my benefit, even if I was never for a minute in doubt that he was coming home with me at the end of the evening, it would still be cruel. I would be jealous and angry, and I would have every right to be. Similarly, I would be a pretty shitty girlfriend if I went around posting photos of myself and my ex-boyfriend mid-snog on facebook, or making kissy faces at his mates. We don’t do those things to each other. If we did, the resultant jealousy would be a sign that there was something dreadfully wrong.
Which brings me to the nasty events that prompted me to write this. My last post made my lover jealous. Remember the bit about me purposefully bumping into a hot girl on the tube to get a reaction? It got his goat. The spiky balloon started to inflate in his tummy. Jealousy crept up behind him. ‘There is something wrong here’ it warmly muttered. And you know what, maybe jealousy had a point. A point to which I would have been willing to listen. Instead, the whole thing escalated into a horrible row, because rather than thanking jealously kindly for its information and telling it that he would promptly discuss the matter with me, my lover sat scheming with jealousy to hatch a plan to get me back.
Meanwhile I plodded along happily, thinking that my balder half was plodding along happily too. Until yesterday evening when we checked in for our nightly Skype rendezvous, and he proceeded to regale me with a tale designed to make me jealous. A hot girl, he told me, on the pretext of slipping him a tip, put her hand deep into his pocket and felt his balls. It made him so horny, he continued, that if I’d been there when he got home I would have ended up in traction. Yes, he actually said those things. Being as incapable of hiding my emotions as I am of engaging in crazy mind games, I told him I’d had a bad day, and went to bed, where I curled up into a little bundle of confused, hurt, angry jealousy.
And then this morning I sent him a confused, hurt, angry, jealous e-mail, where I told him that I really didn’t need to hear him boasting like an arrogant twit about all the girls who fancy him, and that if he wants someone to relieve him of the horn he gets off other women, he should get himself a blow up sex doll. But he had a trump card. Would I like it if he was deliberately bumping into women on the tube to illicit a reaction and then bragging about it? Well no I wouldn’t, of course I wouldn’t. Gee, he sure made his point. I guess he wins.
Except he doesn’t really win really. Nobody wins. My lover succeeded in making me jealous with his story. But he also succeeded in making me hurt, and sad, and angry, and in instilling a sense of disbelief that rather than simply telling me that I had done something that hurt him, and allowing me to try to make it right, he would be cruel enough to try to get me back. And seeing as he loves me and wants to be with me, these are not desirable outcomes for either of us. My jealousy was a sign that there was something very wrong. I’ve discussed it with him. He has apologised profusely. I’m still hurt; I’ll be prickly for a while; I am no longer looking forward to our planned night of passion this Friday; I will most certainly not be arriving at the airport with black stockings and no brazier under my dress. Because only good boys get bad girls.
So this fight is ending where it started, on my blog. The really ridiculous thing is that I didn’t even bump into the hot girl deliberately on the tube. I did it by accident. I just thought it would make for a more saucy and colourful story if I got creative with the facts. Which he would know if he had asked.
I shaved my head last week. It feels lovely and clean, like a fresh start. The first thing people ask (after ‘can I rub your head’) is ‘what made you do that?’, and I suppose the honest answer is that I just took a notion. I’d been wearing my hair black for about 6 weeks (before which it was red, before which it was blonde, before which it was shaved), and it made me look frumpy. There’s not a whole lot you can do with black – you can’t dye over it or let it subtly change back into the mousy hues that nature generously bestowed upon you – so off the whole lot came. And it feels great.
The most interesting thing about shaving your head is the pronounced gender differences in the way the world reads you. You’re suddenly messing with everyone’s signifiers. So the group of young lads that hang out by my local shop, who usually make some comment about me as I walk by, well, their heads no longer turn. They have been conditioned to desire and aggress against people with long hair, and so my baldy head acts as yobo-repellant. They might glance, but they’re not going to let their gazes linger in case their friends think they’re weird or gay or both.
I remember last time I hacked all my hair off – about three years ago now – I was being visited in Dublin by my very good friend from Sligo, Shane. Shane’s a gay man, and, being up in the capital, he wanted to avail of some of the scenester hangouts. We hit the Front Lounge, which is ‘gay friendly’ (whatever that means), and I went up to the bar to get us some bevvies. I’m waiting for a chance to catch the bartender’s eye, when this sleazy kind of fella comes up to me and tries to start a conversation. You might think I’m being judgemental, but I’m not, I would usually have the craic with absolutely anyone, but, at the risk of revealing my Galway girl hippy dippy roots, I just didn’t like this guy’s energy, so I ignored him and waited for him to go away. Instead of going away, he said ‘it doesn’t cost anything to be nice’. Then I felt guilty, because he was right, it doesn’t cost anything to be nice, so I said ‘Look, I’m sorry, I just thought you might be trying it on, and I’ve gotten in trouble for encouraging advances in the past’, to which he replied ‘Sure it’s okay, I know what kind of a girl you are, I know what kind of a place this is, I just wanted to tell you that you look like a very sensuous woman’.
You have to wonder at the thought processes that make sleazy little pricks approach women who they presume are gay (what with their short hair and all) to make some bizarre salacious comment. What are they hoping to get out of it? A ribald description of last night’s girl on girl tryst? A life-long friend? But that aside, the experience was an eye opening example of the way in which a simple signifier changes not only the way people read you, but also the way that they feel entitled to treat you. If I had been a long haired lovely, I’m confident the cockroach would have scuttled off upon encountering my cold shoulder, but, with my shaved head, he felt it was acceptable for him to continue to ask for my attention, and moreover, that it was unacceptable for me to refuse to give it.
I’m noticing similar behaviours this time round too. A few days ago, a shy guy at a conference I organised sat beside me, remembered me by name from a research group that we both attend, and struck up a friendly conversation about what he got up to over the summer. This same fella usually sits the other end of the room from me in our research group, looks at his feet and bumbles when he tries to talk to me, has never acknowledged me around campus, and has certainly never let on that he knows and remembers my name. I can’t be certain, but I would wager that this new easy manner is because I’m suddenly shorn and non-threatening. Now that he’s comfortable I’m not trying to seduce him away from his wife or girlfriend or whatever, he can treat me like a human being instead of a pretty girl.
The unhirsute look definitely changes the way I am treated by men, but it also has the not entirely undesirable effect of bringing me lots more female sexual attention. I am setting off gaydar all over London town baby. I’m pretty sure I caused a fight between a cute lesbian couple on the tube yesterday – the cuter of whom was making eyes at me. I could not resist bumping against her as I got off so that I could smile and say sorry. She giggled, her girlfriend scowled. A cheap thrill, I know, but that’s what the tube’s for, okay?
The general rule seems to be, girls think I look great, and guys think I look awful. All my lovely lady friends are gushing about how much it suits me, while dear Tim has christened me ‘the Celtic cueball’, and my flatmate William has warned his gorgeous girlfriend (who performed the shearing) that if she follows suit they will be breaking up until her hair grows back.
Which brings me to my lover. What does he think of all this punk rock rebellion? Does he still want to tie me up and do nasty things to me, or is it just not the same if there’s no pigtails to pull? Last time I shaved my head we were just mates, and his nonchalant reaction was ‘you’re still fit, but you were fitter with hair’ (although he has since admitted that my spiky-dykey do turned him on like a sexy lightbulb). This time, in a position of considerably more importance in my life, he was forced to comment on my Sínead O’Connor tribute over webcam. ‘I’ve never seen it that short before’ he said, with a note of what I can only identify as sadness. ‘But what do you think?’ I asked. ‘You have a very round head’ he replied. ‘Yes, but do you like it?’ ‘Very round’ he said, ‘much rounder than mine. Mine’s more oval’, and, seeing his pained pixilated expression, I decided to let it drop rather than force him to lie. But, if anything, he has been more than usually romantic over the last week (he recently told me that I’m a damn good argument for intelligent design, which might be the nerdiest yet sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me), which I’m taking as proof that regardless of what I look like, my lover loves me for my mind. Either that or he’s pretending I’m Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta.
