Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  Yes, some men want to penetrate vaginas that look like things coming out of vaginas (the startling conclusion is babies) or at least that’s what Internet alarmists say to each other in comment threads amid all the other outrages. That, and adult films are turning all men who watch them into child molesters, I guess because pedophilia is no longer a psychiatric disorder and instead just what happens when you watch a lot of big-budget porn and pretty soon all people will expect women to shave away their pubic hair and wear plastic shoes and all men will speak in lecherous, stilted monotone and get barbwire tattoos. It doesn’t seem like girls are grossed out by male pubic hair, which I guess is because porn tells us it’s fine for men to have a rotten sprout salad down there or because girls never watch porn, ever, and if they did they’d probably be chi-mos, too.

  I learned a lot about sex from the Internet and people on there have some harsh words for pubic hair. Apparently it’s disgusting. I guess a lot of the Internet is composed of fourteen-year-old boys giggling at themselves over witticisms like, “I don’t want hair in my food,” and in their defense, they’ve never been near a naked woman and they’re so high right now. I imagine if anyone supplying a lot of that anti-pube rhetoric were to come in contact with a naked woman he’d probably stroke her body hair lovingly even if it looked like algae. I get it, though, because I find the Internet pretty terrible unless I’m high, too.

  Which brings me to the main point here: no one should care this much about pubic hair. No one. Sure, you can have a preference, if you really need one, but if you’re the sort of person who gets into bed with someone and is upset by his or her pubic hair, you have entered the realm of being a ridiculous asshole.

  Surprisingly, this extends to just about every seemingly polarizing aspect of the female body that is so widely debated on the Internet. A quick perusal of comment threads will reveal that no matter how lean, toned and glowing with health a woman appears, there’s going to be a dozen opposing views on how she looks: “She’s fat,” “She’s a bag of bones,” “Her hips are too wide,” “. . . Too narrow,” “She’s overmuscled,” “Knock-kneed,” “Is that a happy trail?” and such.

  It’s important to remind yourself that these are the opinions of virgins. Anyone who cares that much about the specifics of a person’s body suffers from a kind of putrefaction of the brain, which can sometimes be caused by puberty but also by a litany of other factors: insecurity, want of attention and (of course) hating yourself.

  I started eradicating all body hair around age fifteen, several years before I became sexually active. It happened one day after a friend and I were walking around the mall looking for punk rock shirts and she casually mentioned that she was itchy because she hadn’t shaved in a few days.

  Startled, I asked what she meant.

  “I haven’t shaved down there,” and she used her arm like a windshield wiper across her lower body, standing beneath a display of replica tour shirts from the seventies made in 2001.

  “You shave that?”

  She gasped. “You don’t?”

  “. . . No. Why would I?”

  “Because it makes sex way better.”

  It seemed legit.

  —

  Here’s a nice summary of what I knew about sex at this point in my life: if one engages in anal sex, one risks the possibility of shitting out one’s vagina. Sounds awful, right? When I was fifteen, I heard countless lies and untruths and blatant fabrications about sex that I took for gospel until I actually started having it, the act of which became a years-long project of systematically undoing all those stupid preconceptions, among them one described by a friend in high school named Alison, who gravely intoned that if you have anal sex too many times, you could end up “shitting out your vagina.” Seriously. No high school girl should ever have to try to sleep at night haunted by the idea that if she lets a guy put it in her ass x number of times, the abrasiveness of his penis (a legendarily abrasive instrument) against her anus could actually tear the delicate, lacelike fabric of skin separating the anus from the vaginal cavity and cause her to shit out her vagina and how curious are you to find out the value of x? But wait, how did Alison know? Because she knew of course, like all the girls knew, that disgraced popular girl Lacey Norman had let football captain Mark Schuster put it in her ass a lot and, now, when she’s in the restroom everyone can hear all the centimeters traveled as Lacey Norman heaves a gutful of excrement out her twat.

  The idea that removing one’s pubic hair makes sex better is preposterous. But, peer pressure being what it is, I set about trying to be a little more like my comparatively womanly friends. It continued on as part of my daily routine until my midtwenties, about the time when you (hopefully) realize that if you aren’t doing it for yourself, you shouldn’t be doing it.

  Moreover, I began thinking about all kinds of exciting things I could do with pubic hair and all the intricate ways in which I could ornament it. I could get it those little dinosaurs and palm trees that people use to decorate twenty-five-dollar ice cream cakes and then maybe, just maybe, I’d construct one of those vinegar volcanos you see in middle school science fairs and put that down there, too. Then I’d learn to play the Jurassic Park theme on the piano but I’d play it very slow (in a moving way) so when the volcano erupts, it would represent something and be poignant.

  I also thought a lot about how I’d style it (around the dinosaurs and vinegar flows). I’d probably shave a lot of funny messages in there, like “This Makes You Gay” just to fuck with people. Or I’d stencil a cool drawing of your parents. Or I’d braid a tiny battery-powered lightbulb into it so my vagina would look like one of those menacing deep-sea fish with the light in front of its mouth. Then penises would be like little helpless minnows swimming toward a grisly death. I really liked animals growing up, so it would also be a cool nod to my childhood. Even better, I could get pants and cut the crotches out and then make it look like my pubic hair was wearing little costumes. I see people with their dumb teacup dogs in sweaters all the time, and that strikes me as way less dignified than trying to do something nice for your body and feel pretty. Also, my vagina could fend for itself if left to its own devices way longer than a puggle.

  What’s weird about all this is that sometime ago pubic hair became a political statement. It’s become a challenge to make decisions about your own maintenance without those decisions being influenced by a larger cultural pressure one way or another. If a woman shaves her pubic hair, it’s like she’s a passive bystander injected with the sexist notion that the vagina is a cool sex hole and not part of the female reproductive system. But if she has pubic hair, she loves jam bands (which is worse than no one wanting to fuck you).

  I found no compelling reason to excise pubic hair other than (1) it grosses fourteen-year-old boys out and (2) laser treatment might be what it sounds like. Seeing as how I don’t plan to have sex with teenage boys ever (unless they could love me) and scientists probably don’t let you play laser tag for hours until it all wilts off and never grows back because your follicles are so thrilled they all dislodge in unison, I’m not sold. Beyond that, I don’t know why anyone would opt out of having pubic hair if they weren’t personally bothered by it.

  What all of this boils down to is that if anyone ever expresses such a strong preference for pubic hair or no, for thin or no, for muscular or otherwise, it’s best not to fuck that person. In fact, that person needs to stop fucking people entirely and go read a book, maybe spend a few months in silence and consider why they are such a weird, fetishistic asshole. If you sleep with people based on their fitness as regards to a mental checklist involving disembodied parts and how they should look, you’re probably way too young to be having sex.

  Extreme aesthetic preference gets in the way of actually having sex. In order for sex to be good, one needs to discard reservations about one’s thinness or the size of one’s cock or what angles are the most flattering or h
ow one’s breasts look in whatever position because those distinctions matter only to the wrong people. The human race would also do well to let go of the idea that sex should be sanitary and dramatic and paced like a movie, because movie sex is a lie. Unless, of course, you want ponderous, candlelit missionary forever. In which case, shave everywhere but your head and start dieting and practicing your fake orgasms, because there is no hope for you. It’s quite like anything in life, really: if you’re that concerned with how it looks, it’s going to be shallow. Or worse: boring.

  —

  Sadly, though, the pubic hair political battle will never be waged on the swath of flesh between my legs I like to call Antietam. All the years of shaving have caused, I guess, my pores to atrophy or something. All I can grow down there is a single hair. It’s long and lonely and thin and scraggly. Like a coke nail. Every time I see it, I kind of feel like it’s a wounded soldier left behind on the battlefield, but I guess you have to count your blessings.

  INFIDELITY

  I’m inclined to think that the very worst aspects of human character come out with respect to sexuality. Once, I was talking to a friend in a bar and explaining to him what sorts of perversions I thought were the most abhorrent in humanity; child molestation and rape were pretty high up there. He listened for a while and paused in a very serious way because he’s read a lot of Nietzsche and then he said that human sexuality exists outside the bounds of morality. I thought about that for a few minutes and concluded he was wrong. I guess it was kind of misleading to begin with this anecdote because I’m not going to explore it any further.

  Without morality, people would just be running around pissing on each other and having sex with inanimate objects. Granted, neither of those things have any real repercussions and so long as they’re performed between consenting adults, I see no problems with them really but I have to find a way to end this sentence and save face. So we impose a system of basic morals on human sexuality because human sexuality is occasionally inclined to darkness. If you don’t believe me, Google any word you can imagine after the phrase “jammed full of.”

  If we want autonomy over our sex lives and want to traverse our desires without shame and humiliation, then we should also ask of ourselves some ethics. There are a few basic rules that most of us already abide by—don’t fuck children; don’t rape people; don’t fuck animals—but there are also ones less adhered to that are equally important: don’t have unprotected sex with strangers if you know you have an STD; don’t use sex to manipulate or hurt people. In short, don’t be an asshole.

  —

  We run into this a lot with cheating. Infidelity is the space in which people are often capable of completely repugnant behavior and will find obtuse justification for that behavior. Or no justification at all. Which is more terrifying.

  Before anyone insists “My lover loves that I have lovers!” by “cheating” I don’t mean open relationships, swinging or just a general rejection of monogamy (also, alliteration is annoying). Infidelity cannot exist between consenting adults because the person being cheated on can’t, by design, give consent.

  I had a coworker once who was a well-educated cosmopolitan woman with an impressive bust-to-waist ratio. She was also a mentally unstable wreck who collected empty cigarette packs, even though she didn’t smoke. Not that collecting empty cigarette packs would make sense if you were a smoker. It’s not like there are cigarettes in there. Once, she trapped me in my office to tell me about the middle-aged Russian man she met at a smoothie bar and with whom she had sex later that night, which led to a shouting match, which led to him running from her apartment semi-naked. And she didn’t understand why he hadn’t called the next day. Also, he had bizarre symbols tattooed on the shaft of his penis. So I guess she didn’t understand a couple of things.

  Even though she’d often confide in me about her personal life, she’d go get drunk with other coworkers and tell them she thought I was a cunt and how I had a huge potbelly but also that she thought I had an eating disorder. Which confused me in light of the confiding she’d do, but I’m not some behavioral scientist qualified to talk about complex social constructs (I’m just writing about human sexuality). Further, if you think someone has an eating disorder, you probably want to avoid humiliation hinging on his or her potbelly. Further still, I do not take kindly to people badmouthing Ajax.

  The reason I’m telling you about this person, Maude, is that one time she slipped into work about an hour late and looked like she’d had a long night. She came into my office and shut the door quietly and announced that she’d been making some very bad decisions lately and had decided to stop. Without any solicitation from me, she revealed she’d been fucking one of our male coworkers. They’d run into each other at a bar some weeks ago, got wasted and went back to her place. This had happened a couple times since.

  She was looking a bit worse for the wear that morning because our male coworker had ended things the night before. I guess when she said she’d decided to stop making bad decisions, what she meant was she hadn’t decided anything and in fact the outcome had been decided for her. She really shouldn’t have presented it that way. She then laid into him for being selfish and leading her on.

  As she was talking, my face got kind of scrunched up and incredulous and I said, “Doesn’t he have a serious girlfriend?” which explains why my expression was so incredulous.

  She nodded.

  “Doesn’t he . . . live with her?”

  She nodded some more.

  “Doesn’t that . . . seem relevant?”

  Here she shrugged and said, “That’s between him and his girlfriend.”

  This was one of the most unnerving, inhumane things I have ever witnessed. It is right up there with the first time I learned about the concept of murder, the Ebola virus and also riding in the sky buckets at Disneyland. Thank God they got rid of those. Who were they even for?

  Maude had just admitted to being a willing accomplice in our coworker’s act of infidelity. Moreover, she was remorseless to the point of befuddlement at my questioning. This, in turn, befuddled me because I did not understand why I had not yet pegged her for a sociopath, considering every single one of her behaviors. I think the term “sociopath” gets thrown around when people don’t really understand the implications. Even though it’s actually a serious personality disorder, people will employ the term just to endow their informal observations of human behavior with a certain faux medical expertise. People like me.

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” I asked.

  “Why would it?”

  At this point, I was starting to actually question if I was the crazy one. “Well . . .” I trailed off, “he has a girlfriend.” Figured I should give that another shot.

  “It’s none of my business,” she replied, “I’m not forcing him to cheat on her.”

  “No, but . . .”

  “If he wants to mess around with someone, he’s a grown man and can make that decision himself.”

  “Right, but . . .”

  She shrugged, a big, affected, disingenuous shrug meant to display how much time she hadn’t spent even bothering to consider this. “I don’t think he’d cheat on her if he was happy.”

  “I’m not disagreeing with that. At all. But doesn’t it bother you that you’re the one he’s cheating with?”

  She shrugged again, with an almost breathtaking indifference and said, “All’s fair in love and war.”

  I love a platitude as much as the next guy. If I had a car it would be covered in bumper stickers. Funny ones, mostly, but definitely some about religion and politics. However, this particular platitude is loathsome. For example, there are such things as war crimes. Which we prosecute. People who say “all’s fair in love and war” are not familiar with the Geneva Conventions. Appropriating that prosaic bit of nonsense to callously justify fucking around with someone who’s involved just makes it
sound like your high school history class skipped the Nuremberg trials.

  “Well,” I said, “can you agree that if you were in her position and you found out your live-in boyfriend was sleeping with a coworker, you’d be upset?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not her.”

  I nodded because I, too, recognized the distinction.

  She went on: “I mean, she must not be making him happy . . .” And here she trailed off and wore a flat expression as if to imply that their sex life was unsatisfying to him, thus driving him to cheat with her: Maude, Poseidon of the Boudoir.

  I told her I didn’t think it was possible for her to make that call, from her position, but I was beginning to realize she just didn’t understand the point I was trying to make.

  “Look, I don’t know. Maybe she’s let herself go or something.”

  “Um, okay.” I decided to take a few steps back. “Can you at least agree that cheating is a bad thing? And that’s probably why it’s synonymous with deceit?” After all, that’s why we call it “cheating,” and not “making babies smile” or “feeding artisanal bread to ducks.”

  She nodded a little bit this time.

  “So you can agree that cheating is bad and not, say, for example, good?” Socrates would be proud.