Shaven, lasered, plucked, waxed

D succumbed to summer and shaved her armpits. So one of my special joys in her has gone. But the greater loss is hers; she delighted in herself unshaven even more than I did. She felt sexier. She was sexier. What, though, is a woman to do, working out at the gym, going to the beach, or on a cruise-ship for a week with her mother and daughters?

Sexual dimorphism is mild in humans compared to most other primates. Girls and boys differ hardly at all, men and women remarkably little. Hairiness is one of the very few aspects of bodily appearance in which there is a significant divergence between the sexes after puberty. Through plucking and shaving, waxing and trimming, this divergence is accentuated and extended. While the boys become hairy men, the girls do their best to remain hairlessly girlish.

Studies of depilation in the US, Australia, and the UK show very high rates of body-hair removal or minimization. Eyebrows are plucked, pubic hair trimmed back to the bikini-line or further, legs and underarms are shaved bare, and facial hair removed. The onset of puberty immediately confronts girls with a clash between their own bodies and the cultural ideals of femininity, and most women begin removing or minimizing body-hair at or before the age of sixteen. An excellent study, 'Body hair removal: the 'mundane' production of normative femininity', published in the research journal Sex Roles, gives the following figures for hair removal or reduction among women in the UK: underarms, 98.6%; legs, 93.6%; pubic region, 85.6%; eyebrows, 82.4%; face, 41.3%; nipples or breasts, 12.5%; stomach, 11%; arms, 8.1%; toes, 2.3%. Anything done by more than eight women in ten is clearly culturally normative, so men like me, who prefer women unaltered, are out of luck.

D's armpits are still sexy if she eschews deodorant, so that I can still go down on them with my mouth, licking and sucking and nipping, tasting her sweat. And they remain for her an erotic zone - I triggered three or four orgasms while fucking her by working them with my mouth just a couple of days after she shaved. But none of that compensates entirely for the sad look of her armpits bereft of the dark, wiry hair that I so loved.

D has recently had much of her leg-hair removed by laser, leaving her thighs and calves smooth and soft. She loves them this way, having hated her hairy legs for almost forty years, and I admit that it is delightful to lick and suck and kiss my way up her legs, moving slowly towards the line at the top of her thighs where her thick, tufted cunt-hair begins. Smooth is much better than stubble, even if unshaven, unlasered, unwaxed is best of all.

[The picture is of Madonna, or so the caption says. Few things made me angrier last year than numerous cruel and shallow remarks about facial hair on her daughter, Lourdes, who is clearly going to be as sexy as her mother.]