On bathing and shaving

Sunday night is bath night.

And what a yummy bath I had.... Tonight's soap was a french-milled mandarin and olive-oil, and the oil in the bathwater was lemon-grass, as was the incense. A few candles, a glass of very cold pinot blanc, and a playlist consisting mostly of moroccan music completed this very languid, sensual, and ritual experience.

Sundays and Wednesdays are bath nights, and on bath nights I soak and shave. I may or may not shave my legs, but I always shave my mound bare. And tonight, as I was shaving, I remembered a conversation I had with one of my sisters last week. We both shave. In fact, all three of us do. I knew one of them did, but I did not know that both of them did, not until she asked me for a massage last weekend, and when I said yes, she whipped off her nightie and lay down on the bed, all splendidly golden-skinned and blatantly bare.

And us being sisters and utterly lacking in body-modesty (having grown up as we did in a communal environment in which nudity was the norm) I smiled and commented to her that I did not know that she shaved, too.

As soon as I started growing hair, I began shaving it off. I did not like it. It was unaesthetic to me, both visually, and tactilely. I preferred being bare, and smooth. I realize now, as an adult, that part of it had to do with not wanting to grow up, to enter womanhood, because I knew, even at the tender age of 14, that the two tests for a female being 'old enough' was being 'big enough', and having pubic hair.

When I took my first adult male lover, I was still under-age, and he was more than a decade older. He asked me to let my hair grow in, because seeing me bare made him feel pedophilic. And so I tried. But the hair I grew was so sparse as to make the adjective 'mossy' seem effusive. Disgusted with my sorry excuse of a muff, I shaved it off again. I thought perhaps my shaving had ruined the possibility of me growing a bush, until I talked to my sister.

She, too, grows hair very sparsely.

She, too, likes being smooth and bare, and likes the cleanliness factor as well. We are much less worried about muss and mess during Aunt Flow's monthly visit when we are shaved.

And then there is the sheer sensuality of it. It can be quite arousing, lathering up, running the razor over skin, following it with the sensitive tips of fingers questing, questing, seeking out any roughness that marrs that symphony of smoothness. It is an act of self-love, done to please the self, and no one else, though certainly our partners love the bareness, too.... I makes oral sex so much more pleasant for them--and us :)

Some people react very viscerally to shaving. There are those who think it is pedophilic. There are those who find it erotic, being able to see so clearly that aspect of a woman that has always been shrouded in mystery.

And then there are those who consider shaving their mounds akin to shaving their heads: that removal of their pubic hair is disempowering, as evinced by a conversation I had a few weeks ago... One day after a particularly contemplative bathtime, I logged into the BDSM Social Room on Literotica Chat. Someone asked me how I was, and I said I had been thinking about shaving, and immediately a female asked me "Why, are you owned?" This surprised me. It had not occurred to me that shaving had a part to play in the psychology of Dominance and submission. But after thinking about it, it makes sense. A woman, shaved bare, is utterly exposed, and completely visually accessible--she cannot hide from her Master. Without her shroud of hair, she is stripped of another layer she could hide behind, a layer of resistance to his claim upon her. And so I can see where a Domme would ask me if I was a slave.

But I'm not in the lifestyle. I'm not into Daddy Doms, or playing pre-pubescent games. I have very adult genitalia--there is no doubt that I am a grown woman. I like being shaved because it pleases me to be smooth and bare and clean. And I like my partners to be shaved, or very closely trimmed, too. And after all this thinking about the subject, I've come to the realization that it doesn't matter why I like it. I just do.