Summer’s come around, eventually. Time for us to run to the park to play cricket badly, burn things on barbecues while sipping lukewarm Fosters, and – if you’re me – growl with resentment at the fact that you have to show people your shaving rash if you want to go swimming.

I shave my crotch sometimes. Not all the time – in fact, one might say I’m reasonably lax about the removal of body hair. Ultimately, shaving things takes time and effort that I’d rather spend on having fun. However, I don’t mind the occasional shave because I like it when people come all over my cunt, and I get to rub it in. I’m gross like that.

So I have no problem with shaving, or hair removal, if it’s something people want to do. What pisses me off, though, are situations where I feel uncomfortable if I don’t. Situations in which I feel singularly incapable of channeling all of the angry liberal feminist rage I feel most of the time, and simply end up looking wistfully at my crotch and wondering why I give such a massive and disproportionate shit about how it looks. In this case, the thing that has made me angry is the prospect of swimming in the sea.

Caught between a rock and a hairy place

I understand that aesthetically some people prefer smooth thighs and a bald crotch, with no pubic hairs poking out of the sides of a swimming costume, but unfortunately for me (and, I suspect, a hell of a lot of other women too) this isn’t actually an option.

The choice for me is between a hairy crotch or an ugly shaving rash, ingrowing hairs, and a desire to scratch myself that’s likely to get me arrested in public places.

When I’ve confessed this to people before, their response has usually been ‘well, why don’t you wax?’ Great thinking, kids, but unfortunately waxing makes no discernible difference to whether my cunt turns bright red and causes me immeasurable discomfort for a week. What’s more, it hurts like… well… like a sadist ripping hairs out of your pudenda.

I got my crotch waxed once, so I know what it feels like. Anyone who suggests that I do this, in the same casual tone as they would if they were recommending a certain film, needs a quick, sharp lesson in empathy. Because my God, people, it hurts. A lot.

When I regaled my Mum with the horrible tale of my inaugural cunt-waxing, she summed up pretty much how I felt about the matter.

“I had it done once,” she said “and it hurt, but only slightly more than childbirth.”

I would probably have been less upset by the pain if it turned out there was a ‘gain’ from it afterwards, but unfortunately the very next day I was nursing bright red patches and itching again, still unable to wear a bikini in case people on the beach thought I was contagious.

How do you solve a problem like a hairy crotch?

I challenged myself to write this entry without recourse to my usual rage-fuelled bile-spitting about society’s expectations of presentation and body. Not because it’s unimportant (it’s very important) but simply because I recognise that no amount of raging and ranting and writing empowering blogs on the internet can magically stop someone being bothered about crotch hair.

If someone gives you an odd look when you stand on the beach, straggling pubes waving in the breeze, your discomfort won’t be lessened any by knowing that I wrote a feminist blog about it the week before. Knowing that I shouldn’t care about this stuff – that I’m intrinsically happy in my worth as a human being whether my crotch is bald or not – doesn’t make the slightest difference to my irrational, emotional insecurity about it.

When we arrive in Utopia, no one will ever have to worry about whether they have crotch hair, or a shaving rash, moles in unusual places or stretchmarks or cellulite or any of the other things that cause us to panic. We’ll all be far too busy swimming to give even the smallest flying fuck about anyone’s perceived imperfections.

But right now that’s not helpful or comforting. Right now I’m preparing for a holiday, staring mournfully at a bikini and dreading the moment I have to show it – and whatever state my crotch is in – to the world.

There’s no conclusion to this that’s in any way satisfying. In the short term I’m buying shorts. Long shorts. Swimming shorts. The really baggy ones that go down to my knees. Twinned with a bikini top and an angry stare, they should get me through this summer, at least.

And in the longer term, well. There’ll be more angry blog posts and rants about what is not wrong with you and why no one should feel compelled to shave their body hair. And I’ll keep my fingers crossed that we reach our Utopia before summer 2014, when this whole charade begins again.

Tell me I’ve got nice eyes and I’ll blush. Tell me I’ve got lovely tits and I’ll melt into a puddle of flattered joy at your feet. But there’s one compliment I find quite tricky to take, and it’s this one:

“You’ve got a pretty cunt.”

Believe it or not, this is something that my favourite boy tells me a lot. And I mean a lot. When I’m bending over in a t-shirt and he can see it framed neatly at the top of my thighs, when he’s knelt between my legs rubbing softly at himself and staring at it, exposed for him to come on – he tells me my cunt is pretty.

I don’t get it

If you’d asked me when I was sixteen I’d have told you that I thought all cunts looked roughly the same. Not exactly like the diagrams in a biology textbook, and with slightly different patterns of hair growth, but roughly the same. Naturally, as with most things I thought when I was sixteen, I was wrong.

As an adult who watches a fair amount of porn, I’m fascinated by the different appearance of different women’s cunts. They’re like fingerprints – unique in subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. The shape and colour of the labia, the length of the slit, everything.

The Pussy Pride Project

A while ago Molly (of Molly’s Daily Kiss fame) started the Pussy Pride project – aimed at getting women to talk about their pussies (I’m not a particular fan of the word, so I’ll switch back to ‘cunt’ now). And it’s utterly and addictively fascinating. The pictures that people post, and the way they all think about themselves.

Confused by the boy’s assertions that my cunt was ‘pretty’, I sat him down in front of lots of pictures of different cunts and asked him to explain what exactly it was that made one pretty. Because I am scientific and bolshy like that.

The answer came back as an unequivocal ‘how the fuck should I know?’ – there were lots that he picked out and said ‘oh, that one. Definitely’ but when questioned on why he had no explanation. For the same reason, I suspect, he refuses to appraise tits in any meaningful way because he thinks almost all of them are perfect by the very nature of what they are.

So does that mean my cunt isn’t, in fact, pretty, but is simply appreciated in virtue of the fact that it’s warm and wet and fun to stick one’s cock into? Perhaps. Or does it mean that the particular unique look of mine just appeals to the boy, in the same way as a Rothko might appeal to an art enthusiast but make me want to roll my eyes and say ‘but it’s just a bunch of lines’?

I don’t like the look of my cunt

I don’t have any particular problem with my cunt. If you offered me a free plastic surgeon, willing to sculpt my body in any way I chose, I’d turn down the appointment before you could say ‘you’re not coming anywhere near my genitals with a scalpel.’ And even if I were happy to be sculpted and shaped, I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly which shape I’d like my cunt to be. I just want it to look like a cunt.

More importantly, I want it to feel like a cunt. To be honest I don’t mind what shape it is, what colour, whether the pubes are shaved into a little heart shape (they’re not, by the way, fuck that for a waste of my time) or whether its astounding beauty has men swooning at my crotch in a lather of artistic ecstasy.

I just want guys to like it enough to put their cocks into it. Because I know damn well that the external appearance of my cunt doesn’t matter too much – it’s what’s inside it that counts.

Gentlemen, start your engines, because it’s your turn now. Pull down your trousers, hold your dicks aloft, and start wiping them with special cock-cleansing wipes.

That’s right – worry no more. Having ridiculous expectations about your body is now no longer confined to women. And in case you were wondering, there’s also a product for your balls.

Femfresh social media fail

Last week I wrote about Femfresh – that delightful ‘feminine hygiene’ product that purported to ‘woo hoo your froo froo’ with ‘PH-balanced’ wipes, cleansers and sprays. Lovely.

Since then they’ve had something of a PR nightmare, as the Femfresh facebook page has suffered an onslaught of mockery dished out by a human race which, thanks to this, I now have a lot more faith in. Ladies and gentlemen of facebook: I salute you.

If they’ve taken it down, the Wallblog has screenshots.

What’s the point of shouting?

I feel a bit sorry for Femfresh now – yes, they’re peddling a hatefully unnecessary product. But then, so are Tampax – they sell scented tampons. So are Vagisil and Carefree. And yes, so are Freshballs and Fellaswipes.

While it’s great that one of these companies has taken a bit of a battering over a product that is designed to make us feel shameful about the natural genital smells humans produce, the reporting has been a bit confused on the issue.

The lead story (on blogs like The Wall and HuffPo) has been ‘Women start a backlash because a marketing company called their fanny a ‘la-la.” And that’s not strictly the case.

Firstly, it’s not just women. Men are offended by this shit as well – and why wouldn’t they be? Men no more call it a ‘la-la’ than they’d call their dick a ‘dinkle.’ Just because the childish words used in Femfresh’s campaign are about vaginas, that doesn’t mean that you need to have a vagina to recognise how ridiculous the campaign is. There were plenty of men on their facebook page too.

Secondly, people aren’t just angry because a company referred to vaginas as ‘la-la’s. Or ‘nooni’s or ‘kitty’s, for that matter. This language is offensive and patronising, sure, but most of the comments on the page seem to be surrounding the product itself. The misery of discovering that there was yet another thing we were expected to do to our bodies to sanitize them and prettify them before we’d be allowed out in society.

The bright side of Femfresh

I am disgusted by these products – vaginal sprays, dick wipes, scented tampons – and I am disgusted that we live in a world where people are paid to persuade us that they’re necessary.

But I’m actually pretty happy that this happened. We could have watched the next few weeks go by, occasionally making angry comments about the ads plastered on phone boxes or facebook updates about being ‘proud of your pom-pom’, but we didn’t. A huge bunch of people stepped in and gave what Femfresh – in their characteristically euphemistic way – calls ‘feedback.’ They started a massive, angry, stamping kickoff, and told them that we don’t need their bullshit.

So whether you’re male or female, the next time you see an ad or a website for ‘intimate hygiene products’ that tries to persuade you your body is disgusting and unnatural, remember that you’re fine as you are. Not only do you not stink, but the people who think you do just got utterly owned on facebook.

God bless the internet.