Without salt

My recent remarks on body hair (Shaven, lasered, plucked, waxed) brushed over the important and interesting distinction between body hair and facial hair. Nearly all women in modern, mainstream, Western culture remove or disguise all facial hair besides their eyebrows (which are typically minimized) and eyelashes. But the cultural norm is more complicated than this, for women who remove their facial hair must also remove all the evidence of removal - hence waxing and plucking, electrolysis and lasers, rather than shaving. Many men also remove all facial hair besides their eyebrows and eyelashes, and in certain subcultures being clean-shaven is effectively the norm for men, but it is never important for men to remove the evidence of removal: a five o-clock shadow at five o-clock, or a little stubble, is fine. Among men, no opprobrium attaches to having to shave, even when opprobrium would attach to going unshaven. This shows that the norms governing facial hair on women are quite different from the norms governing facial hair on men.

What norms do govern facial hair on men? Because so many men are clean-shaven, no simple correlation between hair and masculinity holds. There are very few norms in place in modern, mainstream, Western male culture. Men who are not clean-shaven typically manage their facial hair - a moustache but no beard, a beard but no moustache, goatees of Fu Manchus, sideburns with neither beard nor moustache, or with just a beard, and so on. But there is not much more to this than a general norm in favor of tidiness, and even this is relatively relaxed, depending on subculture. On the street, you are within the norms if you look like the man on the left, outside them only if you look like the man on the right:


This is how it should be for women - few norms about hair, whether on the head, or the face, or the body. The fewer the norms, the greater the freedom. But the chance of this happening any time soon is, I think, extremely small. Attitudes about women's facial hair do not seem to be significantly different even in cultures where a woman's face is routinely veiled in public. This gives the lie to suggestions that veiling frees women from the tyranny of the male gaze: all veiling does is restrict the number of men who tyrannize a woman with their gaze, while depriving the rest of the men of the pleasure of looking.

Meanwhile, clean-shaven myself, I enjoy the contrast between my mouth, with its smooth surround of cheek and chin, and the tangled undergrowth around D's cunt. This delight in the contrast between hairy cunt and shaven face presumably rests on the underlying resemblance between mouths and cunts. A cunt is like nothing more than it is like a mouth; I shave around my mouth; yet I prefer hairy cunts to shaved ones. Perhaps men with beard and moustache enjoy going down on a shaven cunt for reasons of contrast as well.

In my experience, kissing clean-shaven men on the mouth is rather different from kissing women on the mouth, and rather more like kissing clean-shaven women on the cunt. K, who took a very long time to come, was clean-shaven, and that meant stubble around her cunt, just as around the mouth of a clean-shaven man. I spent a very long time kissing her cunt, and at the edges of my sensibility, even when I was engrossed in playing with her clit with my lips and tongue, was a reminder of shaving, and hence of men.

Since my teenage years, I have never gone more than a couple of days without shaving. Whatever longings I have to kiss men - I have some - are directed towards men who shave about as often as I do. I would not eat an egg without salt, but I prefer, if I am to kiss a man at all, to kiss a man with no moustache.