You may have thought that how you styled your pubic hair was your own business, but evidently not. Pube-shaving is apparently an epidemic, with women slavishly denuding their front bottoms in order to pander to the vile desires of their men-folk, whose tiny lizard brains have been scrambled by too much porn and pedophilic fantasies. So that’s nice. There can’t possibly be any more prosaic and not so interestingly perverted explanation, could there? After all, we all know that it looks horrible, feels horrible, and takes away the thrill of getting hair stuck in your teeth when indulging in oral sex, which we all know is also a Bad Thing.

I don’t really understand the frothing at the mouth of the anti-pube brigade, unless it’s really the frothing of the anti-men or anti-porn brigade, desperately looking around for something else to bolster up their sometimes spurious arguments. Personally I don’t have a huge amount of interest in anyone else’s hair anywhere on their bodies, and find it hard to understand why my own tonsorial choices should have motives attributed to them.

I find it hard to believe that I’m in the minority of The Shaven who aren’t in thrall to the desires of their porn-enthralled lords and masters. Given that I shave off all visible body-hair apart from that on my head every day, and live alone, I find it hard to believe I’m doing it primarily for any man. Given also that none of the men I’ve had sex with has ever asked me to do it, I’m even less convinced. I must be influenced by porn all by my perverted little self, then… except that I’d done it when all the porn I’d seen featured women with bountiful bushes (yes, children, that WAS a long time ago) – and I don’t actually look at porn much, so I’m not terrible aware of what the latest trends are.

In my naïveté, I thought I did it because a) I was exposed to far too much art of a child (The Naked Maja notwithstanding (shocking! A painting of a naked woman with pubic hair! Er… barely discernible pubic hair, but a few visible strands none the less. What an excellent choice of illustration for a pro-pube rant), most of which is female-hair free); b) I am absolute rubbish at keeping my bikini line straight, and early pube-removal was actually as a result of trying to even up the sides, failing, and concluding that it was easier to take the whole lot off; c) it looks pretty, it feels nice and it makes the whole area more sensitive, d) far from being “uncomfortable, time-consuming, irritating, expensive, troubling, humiliating” it takes about two minutes in the bath, while I’m presumably also demonstrating my servility and submissiveness by shaving my legs and armpits and e) it has been my luck to mainly have sex with men who are as enamoured of my pussy as I am, and who generally appear to appreciate being able to see it.

I have gone on at length about how sick I am by the British press’s obsession with the craven stupidity of women and the brutish imbecility of men, and this article is just more of the same, with added vitriol. In media world (unlike the real world as experienced by most intelligent rational beings) men are addled by porn and women only want to please them; women are incapable of autonomous thought and shave/wax/pluck their pubic hair for men, who don’t (they don’t? Really? You mean some of the men I’ve fucked were born with shaved balls? Weird). Men also, in an imaginative twist on the old all-men-are-potential-rapists trope, are latent pedophiles according to this article (or rather, pubeless-preferring men are latent pedophiles, because the sole sign of a post-pubertal woman is pubic hair. What, you thought grown women might also be distinguished from children by hips and breasts, not to mention other body-hair?) This must be because men look at porn and think: “Ooh, no hair! She looks like a prebuscent girl. I must get myself some of that”. They don’t look at porn and think: ”Ooh, giant tits!” No, wait… I’m getting confused here. Or maybe it’s not me that’s getting confused. Maybe women (and men) in porn are shaved so that porn-viewers can see the action. Maybe some men think they’d like to see the action too. Maybe all this has nothing to do with underage sex. Maybe in the case of this and similar articles trying to throw porn and everything else a little unrepressed into the BAD basket, giant plastic breasts are the elephant in the room.

This article isn’t really about how women are oppressed by the baser sex, and how everything women do to their bodies is an expression of their servility. The premise of the article is fear of change, of pleasure, and, ironically, of autonomy. Our bodies are a part of us, like our minds, where we have free reign over our individuality. We can choose to adorn or denude our bodies, and choose our cultural influences. We get to decide how we wish to please ourselves or our lovers. Now there’s a much scarier notion than hair.

And it has been. These are the bits you remember, just as much as the passion and all the rest.

Even with the cold water, the bath is far too hot, so I wash fast, and denude myself of all visible body hair, then rub lotion into my skin and wrap myself in a towel and contemplate the stockings again, and the fiendishly difficult catch on the garter belt on the back of my left leg. I get the stockings on without ripping them, and then have to peel them off again and back up to make sure the seams are straight. Then knickers, bra, shoes that make me want to sit down again, fast, or failing that, lie on my back with my feet in the air, and lastly a dress, not my usual black; I’m dressing to be noticed tonight. I put on my face, and I’m ready to go.

I put the keycard in my bag and shut the door behind me. It probably took about twenty minutes max, from the elevator up to the elevator down, but it seems as though it was twenty minutes of flat-out effort. I wonder if it shows, if that’s part of the charm, the effort we put in to allure when presumably we were, in ourselves, just as alluring travel-stained and tired. It doesn’t really matter, I think, as my feet remind me why I rarely wear these shoes, it’s part of the ritual – immaterial in the end if it’s for someone else’s benefit or mine; I turn up tired and end up ready

All this is mind-boggling enough, but it’s the packing that is doing my head in. If I was a bit more normal, I’d just fling everything I need into a suitcase, and I’d be fine. But I can’t stand traveling on public transport with suitcases, so I will just have a large bag which does not conveniently roll along the floor, and which will therefore give me backache. The fact that I am an idiot will not alleviate the backache, particularly as I will be a person with backache tottering along in high heels. A suitcase would, of course, accommodate clothes to go to work in, to travel in, to get fucked in, to have late lunch in, and to party in; a largeish bag can probably deal with one change of clothes and one of unsuitable shoes.

Sometimes I’m grateful that dealing with my own weird neuroses is the most stress I have to deal with.

Sometimes it strikes me that my love/sexlife is a triumph of optimism over realism (and in everything else I pride myself in being a realist). “Live in the now!” my best friend burbles. “It’ll all work out in the end,” I mutter, sometimes through clenched teeth. “It’s been almost ten years,” my old love says, and I don’t say I have fallen off that bandwagon of faith more times than I can count, because almost ten years is a long time, and there are other old loves who have kept faith with me that long (and less long), and who still make my life a better place.

Right now, in this now, I sit at my desk with a cat draped across my lap and look at the remnants of Black Cherry nailpolish on my toe, still clinging on from the end of the summer. The not-now, the future, stretches before me luxuriously with its possible plans and its plane-ticketed definite plans and its maybes. Adversity is better kept in the unknown future to be dealt with in the now when there’s no other choice, but love is better savoured past, present and future.

A while ago I took the survey at LELO.com and when it asked what I’d be interested in them producing in the future, I said a waterproof vibrator. As I already owned a few LELO products, I felt they pretty well had most of my needs covered, but considering the amount of time I spend immersed in water, not having something buzzy and waterproof seemed a bit of a lack. So it was pure serendipity when I got an email from LELO asking if I’d be interested in reviewing their products, and another advertising Insignia, their new waterproof line. Two days later, the vet downstairs kindly signed for a mysterious parcel, and I bore it excitedly upstairs.

The design snob in me salivates at good packaging and sleek, ergonomic shapes. I love that LELO panders to the sort of woman who is halfway to aroused by the fact that her toy has a smart box to keep it in, has a black satin pouch to transport it in, and that everything about the design of the toy has been thought through. All LELO products are amazingly tactile and strokeable, and all curves and smooth lines. The responsible adult in me is also pleased by the fact that they are non-toxic and phthalate-free, as well as rechargeable and come with a country-specific charger (they last for hours).

Every time I try anything LELO I think it’s the best thing ever, but I’m beginning to think that the Soraya might be. I’ve been suspicious of rabbit-style vibrators ever since trying one and finding it sadly ineffective, but I think I’m being won round. Most of the eight different vibrations on the Soraya are concentrated on the external stimulator, although some work with or independently from the internal part (despite extensive research, I find I’m a bit hazy about how the pulses and vibrations work, due to a tendency to get distracted during my research). There are three buttons on the Soraya, which I found made it easier to switch between modes (as opposed to the two or four on my other models), and the upside of easy-access controls is fingers accidentally convulsing on the button and switching spontaneously. One of the design features I also liked is the hole in the handle, which made it easy to hold the toy, and one of the coolest aspects (which somewhat baffled me at first) is that the hole for the charger reseals itself when the charger is removed.

I spent most of the weekend in the company of my new friend, and I can say fairly unequivocally that this toy works. The external bit (the sticky-outty bit) is where most of the action is concentrated, and cursory appearances are deceptive: initially I thought this would work like the ears on a rabbit vibrator (i.e. designed to hit your clit when the toy is inserted), but it clearly doesn’t. It’s great as a warm-up, and then it can be bent to the ideal position, at which point earth-shattering orgasms ensue. I love everything about the Soraya: I love how it looks and feels, I love that it isn’t too big, I love that it’s waterproof and I love the variations in the frequencies of the pulses/vibrations, which more than hit my happy places. Now, of course, I want to try all the others in the Insignia line…

And finally, as an ex-punk, I love that in the manual, “pleasure point” in English is “lustpunk” in German.

I’m more inward than outward looking. I favour sunless rooms and curtained windows; what other people get from views, I get from the changing colours of my walls. I retreat inside my room even when I’m in other buildings. I like the spaces between things, the way stuff is defined by what is around it. When I learnt to paint I was taught always to check my work in a mirror: mirrors show you the bits your eye glides over too easily. There’s a mirror to one side of my bed, and so when I open my eyes in the morning the first thing I see is myself held securely in the room’s embrace. Sometimes other things are reflected in it – crumpled heaps of clothing and moving bodies. Sometimes all I see are dust-bunnies, chasing themselves under the bed.

Bedrooms are revealing, and can be almost oppressively intimate. My daughter objects to her boyfriend refusing anything remotely flowery in their bedroom, and she points out that he was perfectly happy to snuggle up under cabbage roses when he lived here with her. It’s different, I say: this is their room, that was hers. In her room, the girlishness was an invitation, in their room it would lessen his place in it; in her room he was inside the citadel. If a bedroom doesn’t reveal enough it takes away from that sense of invitation, and if it reveals too much it’s a passion-killer (my bedroom disguises my slovenly nature: it is the only room in the house that is invariably tidy, partly because although I can live in chaos, I can’t sleep in it).

I love the secret nature of my bedroom. I love its peacefulness when I wake in the morning, and the passion-fueled memories it holds. But at the moment, the bed seems too big for me alone.

Because this summer was one of the worst in living memory, I didn’t spend it in a whiney low-blood-pressured energyless heap on the floor, but in happy wild bursts of creativity. Back at work, my creativity is focused on work, and all sucked out of me by the time I get home.

I’m not really complaining: it could all be a lot worse, and the work+creativity thing makes me happy, but I could do with lazy mornings waking up next to a hard cock, and hourless days wandering around with a paintbrush again.

Lying in the bath, what I was thinking was that the term adventurer has somehow more negative connotations than I know she meant it to, it has suggestions of opportunism that don’t apply in this case.  She said that she was always looking for  fellow adventurer and never found one, and I thought that what I was looking for/invariable find is cerebral types with an ingrained streak of rebelliousness – and then I thought no, that’s not it.  It’s adventurers that I unerringly head towards, but the difference is that I don’t venture until I’m slammed in the face with it (and then I’ll make the most of it: my rallying cry when faced with seemingly hopeless adversity was always: “It’s an adventure!” but it was less a reveling in the circumstances and more an invincible belief in my ability to survive and come out the other end with a good story to tell: nothing like a good face-slamming to up the narrative value).  Because I tend to stand around looking sideways waiting for life to wander into me, I admire those who run into it headlong, and I value those who grab hold of me and make me run into it too.

I suppose that although I was never a scuba-diving. Parachuting, white-water rafting adventurer like she is, I was once more of an adventurer, even if what I was seeking out was nihilism, and now what I seek is a happier temporary oblivion.  My adventures gave me cracks in my heart and soul, not my bones, and the thrill was less of one and more of a growing dread, in the end.  That’s what I’ve learnt to avoid, or at least to avoid heedlessly: I weigh up the options more carefully now before I expose myself to bruises on my inner skin.  I like myself for my ability to learn from my mistakes, even if I bemoan my tendency to have to learn the hard way, and am sometimes perplexed by the lessons that haven’t  yet sunk in.  Perhaps it’s just that fellow feeling I search out: the adventurers who have learnt some things the hard way, but who haven’t stopped believing that it is still all an adventure.