Love In the Age of Grey Pubic Hairs
“I FOUND A GREY PUBIC HAIR.” The boyfriend was aghast.
I eyed him balefully.
Mine have been frosty for some years now. Shaving isn’t an option (unfortunately that can lead to a variety of problems, although it’s become vastly more popular, especially among those of a Certain Age, especially as the proof of how old we really are gets hard to deny when we drop our shorts).
He was in his early forties at the time. A redhead. That he’s in computer science is even worse, as he has to compete with twelve-year-olds who can’t even spell pubic hair, much less braid it, as the case may be.
I sauntered to my medicine cabinet and found what I was searching for: a package of Brown Betty, which is for the hair down there. As it were.
“Are you kidding me?” he said, eyes wide.
Whaddya think I use? I thought to myself.
He eyeballed me as though deeply suspicious that I was pushing him in that direction. “I don’t think so,” he said.
Just wait, I thought.
Why ME?
For anyone vain enough to go searching for an errant grey in the forests below, here are a few tips. If the idea of finding not one but a whole sapling grove of greys below the belt terrifies you, try getting more B12. If you smoke, that will accelerate the snow below, and perhaps even more so, stress. This is particularly true once you hit thirty.
If life is giving you the heebie jeebies, then you can expect to see winter arriving a lot sooner in the Garden of Earthly Delights.
As in the case of the BF. He’d been under considerable stress, and stayed there a long time.
Soon the fiery bush (he’s a redhead) below — which to my mind definitely proves there is a God somewhere at least, since that burning bush has been the source of a great many Oh Gods on my part- would be woven with silver.
For more on why this happens (and what, if anything, short of dying young) you can do to prevent further encroachment on your National Park, see http://www.health.com/sexual-health/gray-pubic-hair-causes.
The BF is vain. We all are. In this pre-adolescent-worshipping society the proof that we are indeed aging is bad enough. Our eyesight weakens right about the time we need it the most as we search for the errant strands with a pair of tweezers. Then it’s not just the errant strand but a whole damned park preserve full of white birches. After a while, if you pull them all out, you’re bald.
I have a massive head of very long, curly hair. For a while, I used to spend hours in front of a mirror searching for those long hairs that hid in the back of my head but had already gone grey. I wanted to avoid coloring my hair for as long as possible. As my childhood pediatrician once said, “That hair color doesn’t come out of a bottle.” No truer words. Once I got to the point where I did succumb to the monthly habit, I have never found a match.
The good news is that if you are highly motivated to hide the inevitable proof that you are, in fact, a consenting adult, and you are, in fact, at least of voting age in your county, you can completely mow the errant bastards down. In a Cosmopolitan survey (which of course is highly scientific) 46% of males preferred the nude look. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a9535211/pubic-hair-removal-trends-stats/. Many of them either shaved or at least groomed, and expected the same of their partners. In fact some claimed that if they were presented with a full bush, they might eschew sex completely.
Forgive me but I find this very hard to believe. A man’s eschewing sex because of a little walk in the woods? Puh-leeze.
That may well also be because they prefer their girls exceedingly young, or it might just be they’re tired of picking the hairs out of their teeth (as opposed to spinach, but both are pretty healthy). But I digress.
Note to the CIA
One memorable day many years ago I got the urge to try a Brazilian. I went out and purchased a waxing kit. Heated the wax up in the microwave. Stripped to the skin. Sat down in my living room with the bowl of hot wax and commenced to applying it in all the appropriate places with the handy dandy wooden applicator.
Then managed to knock the whole GD bowl over, spilling the warm contents into my crotch. It solidified instantly.
Front to back. I was now sitting on a pile of solidified wax, which now covered parts that I’d no intention of denuding.
Call me a coward, but it was some time before I could move. All I could think of was “Now THAT is gonna hurt.”
Uh-huh.
You have no fricking idea.
The decision was simple. If I ever wanted to be able to provide egress for elimination of bodily fluids, this wax hadda come off.
Along with it, all the hair, various pieces of exceedingly delicate skin and every shred of my dignity.
Who the hell needs waterboarding for torture when pubic waxing extracts the kind of agonized screaming that would terrorize the entire prison? The CIA should take note.
The BF Succumbs
The Cosmo article, which of course was likely directed at far younger people than the BF and myself (Okay, I’m 65, I have a full Arctic snowfield by this point). When he moved in this year in mid-May, he took over my basement bathroom. On the rare occasion that I find myself in there (extra-curricular activities tend to happen downstairs ) I noted that finally, he had succumbed to hair color. His temples sport the inevitability of glacial progress.
I have not, however, tried to discern whether he’s also succumbed to the temptation of either plucking or coloring his pubes. When I’m that close, I have other things on my mind rather than inspecting the local flora.
For my part, since I inherited an entire broad landscape of hirsute wilderness from my father, I do shave extensively simply because the garden wanders all over the damned place. However I don’t dare to go bare. My eyesight at this age is so bad that should I even attempt such an act I’d end up lady part-less entirely.
Besides, the hair is there for good reason. Mother Nature ain’t stupid. For us girls, pubic hair prevents bacteria from entering the vagina. There’s a very common misperception that shaving is more hygienic. It’s not. (http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/stevens/ct-most-women-groom-pubic-hair-balancing-0629-20160629-column.html) In fact the more bare you are, and the more partners you play with, the more likely you are to get STDs. Just ask a porn star how that works. In fact, porn has far more to do with our partners’ requesting us to shave than most anything else.
In a recent article about taking it all off among older partners, many claimed that they felt younger. Well yeah, it sure looks that way, in a prepubescent kind of way. If that’s your thing, have at it. My landing strip stays.
As for color, oh hell. Grey is distinguished. I realize that most folks are referring to older men when they say that but I beg to differ.
A few older trees in the forest make for a healthy forest.
