Every Lie I've Ever Told

by Rosie Waterland

  I tried laser hair removal not long ago, because I’d spent years advocating my full-bush position, but so many women kept telling me that they didn’t do it for men, they did it for themselves, because it felt ‘cleaner’, and I wanted to know if that was true. (I’m not sure if I believe that ‘just for me’ thing though, since I’ve heard many of the same women talk about the ‘pubic hair chastity belt’, which is the act of not removing one’s pubic hair before a first date, so any temptation to sleep with said date is nipped in the bud. Because who would ever let a guy know they’ve hit puberty and have natural recurring female hormones AMIRIGHT LADEEZ?)

  The pubic hair chastity belt is a mystery to me. The only thing stopping me from bringing a guy home is the amount of plates I have stacked next to my bed or the amount of empty bottles I may or may not have left in the bathroom (I highly recommend drinking chilled wine in the shower).

  But I hadn’t had a bald vagina since that one time when I was seventeen, so I thought I should try it again to see if maybe I liked it. I also knew that laser had become a thing, which I was told is not nearly as painful as ripping the hair out of your labia with hot wax. (Still painful, though, because ‘no pain, no gain’ AMIRIGHT LADEEZ?)

  The girl at the laser clinic told me I would need to completely shave my entire pubic/bum region before coming in for my appointment. She apparently needed a zero-hair situation. No stubble, nothing. I nodded confidently, knowing full well there was no way I was going to be able to reach most of the places she just described. I hadn’t reached those places in years. The fat upper pussy area maybe, but even then I would have to pull my belly back to make the skin taut enough to shave. (I am in the weird position of having lost a lot of weight, which means my body appears to have given birth to several children, when in fact my only child is my big screen TV called Gilda Radner, and the closest I’ve come to giving birth is pushing out a dump that felt like it was sitting horizontally across the inside of my poop hole.)

  I didn’t quite understand why I needed to shave off the hair that I was paying the clinic to get rid of, but the girl said some very impressive words about follicles and science, and I’m sure she’d been trained in a beauty school of some kind because she had very manicured eyebrows. So I trusted her advice, and went home to shave a bush I’d been growing since I was seventeen.

  If you’ve ever tried bending over in the shower, pulling your bum cheeks apart with one hand while you reach up and in between your legs to shave your crack with the other, you may have some idea of what I spent my afternoon going through. I cannot even tell you the kind of pressure involved in trying to run a razor over some areas while narrowly avoiding others. Putting a razor anywhere near my labia and/or clitoris just doesn’t feel natural to me. Like trying to go to the toilet outside – my body just freezes up and shuts down. I couldn’t seem to build up the nerve required to shave close to any sensitive areas, which meant I ended up with a bald vagina that looked like it had just been through the careless, violent, patchy head-shaving that Anne Hathaway went through in that scene from Les Miserables. This was not a successful or aesthetically pleasing shaving job. And that was just the front – I have no idea what the back situation was like. I just closed my eyes, prayed to Oprah and tried to get as much of my bum as I could. It wasn’t perfect, but damn it, it was the best I could do.

  Apparently my best wasn’t good enough, though. It’s uncomfortable enough to have to get naked from the waist down, lie down on a table and spread your legs as far as they will go. But it’s even worse when you do that and the heavily made-up technician looks directly into your snatch and lets out a big, unimpressed sigh.

  ‘This is going to be difficult,’ she said, wincing now but not looking away from my vag.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Did I miss a spot?’

  ‘You missed most spots,’ she said, putting her gloves on. ‘Look, I can do this for you today, but the laser only works if there’s no hair coming through the skin. So you’re going to be . . . patchy until you come in for your next appointment. And next time, you really need to shave properly.’

  She had said the word ‘patchy’ like she was describing a weeping sore on my vagina.

  ‘It’s just that, there were like, parts that I couldn’t really reach,’ I offered feebly. ‘I thought I had got to most of it though.’

  ‘Let’s get started, shall we?’ she snapped. She really wanted to get me out of that room. I was a hairy outsider who needed to be disposed of quickly, just in case she caught something. Like pubes were contagious.

  The laser itself isn’t really that painful. It just feels like someone is snapping a rubber band against your skin, but cool air is being blown onto the area at the same time, so you barely feel the sting before it’s gone again. What was really off-putting was the smell of burning hair, which I suppose was my fault, for, you know, having some. It was only about halfway through the zapping that I started to consider the ramifications of allowing a laser that close to my clitoris. I’m no scientist, but I don’t think we’ve been lasering our fish tacos long enough to know whether that thing causes lasting damage to the main bean. If a laser can cut through steel, then it sure as hell might be able to zap all the nerve endings out of a clitoris. I was just about to ask her if she knew of any studies that had looked into clitoral laser damage, but then we were done. The whole thing had taken about five minutes, if that.

  ‘I’ll just let you get dressed,’ she said, rushing out of the room.

  There is no doubt in my mind she was immediately going to tell the other technicians about the patchy freak show in Room 2. I know they say that they’ve seen it all and they’re professionals and they would never talk about what goes on during hair removal, but if that was my job I can absolutely guarantee that I would be gossiping about weird-looking vaginas all day long. That would be the best part of the job.

  I looked in the mirror before I put my pants on and was a little taken aback. My vag looked so . . . bald. I didn’t like it. It was shocking and a little wrong – like when you see Ron Swanson without a moustache. It just didn’t look right. Plus, thanks to my fat upper pussy area, I didn’t realise that the only thing stopping me from looking like I had two stomachs was the pubic hair. Now it just seemed like I had a top stomach and a bottom stomach with a little bit of labia sticking out between my thighs. But I was sexy and hairless, which is the main thing. (AMIRIGHT LADEEZ?) Well, I was sexy and hairless except for several small tufts that the razor hadn’t reached, but that was as good as I could hope for.

  The only other thing I noticed almost immediately was that my bum cheeks were slipping all over the place when I walked. I didn’t realise that the pubes in my crack had been acting as a kind of non-slip buffer, stopping my crack sweat from sending my cheeks flying. I may have been hairless and sexy, but I spent the next few weeks with toilet paper wedged in my crack just to soak up moisture and hold everything in place.

  I allowed the pubes to grow back. Getting rid of them didn’t make me feel ‘cleaner’, I just felt . . . unrecognisable. It was like my vag and I didn’t know each other anymore. And I like being familiar with what she’s got going on, you know?

  But when I was in bed with the 21-year-old hotshot, I still had my pubes and they were shocking to him. What should have been shocking was that he’d never seen a woman with pubic hair, but this is the time we live in.

  He didn’t fixate on the pubes for long though; they never do when penetration is on the table. And unfortunately, this penetration was over very quickly. This was how my new young friend did the sex (and I say ‘did the sex’ because I honestly feel like that was probably how he described it):

  He got on top of me, thrust into me like a jackhammer, came, then he was done. Then he rolled off, gasping for air after his intense workout, and asked, ‘So did you come?’

  I wasn’t even sure I’d blinked.

  ‘Um, yes,’ I said, unconvincingly. ‘That was sooo great.’

 
I just didn’t have the time or the inclination to educate the poor boy. He had clearly grown up watching the kind of porn where women are just heads attached to hairless vaginas, who scream in pleasure as soon as a penis even brushes up against them. That he thought I could have orgasmed from what he just did was gobsmacking to me. Porn had broken his brain. He was Pornwashed.

  I sent him off into the night and left him to be some other woman’s problem. I’m too old to be teaching men that having sex with a woman is more complicated than having sex with a Fleshlight that has a human body attached to it.

  Soon after that . . . tryst, I came down with Glandular Fever. So rather than give me an orgasm, he gave me an illness that kept coming back for the better part of a year. I accepted it, though, as my punishment for not sending him back into the world with more skills than when I found him. Glandular Fever was my sexual karma, and I was paying the price. Which is why I couldn’t believe it when a new guy I had met on Tinder spat in my damn face. WASN’T GLANDULAR FEVER PUNISHMENT ENOUGH, OH OPRAH?

  Tinder is a strange place. The very first time I used it, in less than twenty-four hours I ended up in a game of Jenga with my face and a penis. Naturally, I promised myself I would never return, and I didn’t, for about a year. Then I caved. Going back on Tinder after a while is like finally finding something new in the fridge after opening it a million times and seeing nothing but the fresh vegetables that have liquefied because you bought them while feeling motivated but kept eating chicken nuggets instead. After a year, it seemed like the Tinder fridge was full again. But it only took me about a day to realise that the fridge was full of the same rotting, liquefied vegetables that were there all along.

  Online dating seems to have a bizarre effect on some men, causing them to behave in ways that would be considered psychotic, pervy or even criminal in real life. Dating apps, especially, are like the Superman phonebox for a lot of guys – they step in as their normal, seemingly decent selves, and step out asking every woman on the street if she would like to be sprayed with jizz.

  Why do so many men feel like the online world is different to the real world? Why do the rules of general decency go out the window as soon as they log in to a dating app? In order to explain to men how bizarre this behaviour actually is, it’s much easier to look at it as if it were, in fact, happening in the ‘real world’. Because if men behaved in real life like they do on online dating sites, they would find themselves in situations like this:

  See a woman you like in a bar. Introduce yourself by cupping your penis in your hand and proudly presenting it to her. If she does not appreciate your penis, scream at the top of your lungs that she is a ‘fat cunt bitch’.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Say hi. If she responds, immediately assume she is desperate to have sex with you and demand to see her nipples. Sit back and wait for her inevitable orgasm.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Walk up behind her and whisper in her ear that you are masturbating that very second. If she ignores you, do the exact same thing to the next woman you come across.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Don’t say hello. Don’t introduce yourself. Just sit down at her table and tell her how much you’d like to feel her big toe up your bum hole.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Have a lovely twenty-minute conversation with her, at which point you announce that you’ve invested enough time and now deserve a peek at her vagina. Or at least one tit.

  See a woman you like in a bar. See more women you like in that bar. In fact, just like every woman in the bar and keep showing them all your penis. It’s a numbers game, after all.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Say hi. Get no response. Say hi again. Get no response. Call her a fucking ugly slut who deserves to die. If she finally responds and says she didn’t hear you the first time, ask if maybe she’d like to hang out some time.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Shake her hand. Smile and say you just jerked off with those fingers.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Refuse to engage with her until she tells you about her pubic hair situation. Actually, just wear a sign around your neck that says ‘Bald Vag Only’. That should save time.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Approach her and tell her that you’d love to get her off. When she responds that she’d actually love for you to touch her clit, freak the fuck out and quickly google its location.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Ask her if the carpets match the drapes. Bask in the brilliance of your hilarious pick-up line and wait for her to undress.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Get a closer look at her face and tell her you’ll fuck her, but only from behind.

  See a woman you like in a bar. Ask her about her hopes and dreams. Listen intently. When she asks you yours, say, ‘To have you riding my dick by the end of tonight.’

  See a woman you like in a bar. Approach her and introduce yourself. Ask her about her life and listen when she responds. See if she’d maybe like to meet up for a drink sometime. Struggle to understand when she thanks you for not taking your dick out and shoving it in her face.

  It’s no wonder that when a man behaves like a normal human being while online, it suddenly feels very impressive. Like chivalry was dead, and by not immediately asking to see your ‘wet pussy’, he has brought it back to life. For a man to be considered a ‘catch’ online these days, he just has to not be disgusting. That is the new base level of acceptable man.

  That’s how it feels when you’re online dating, anyway. So when I came across a guy who just wanted to chat about TV and laugh about memes, I was . . . cautiously optimistic. Then we realised we were watching the same TV show at the same time, so we started trying to outdo each other with jokes (I won, obviously). Then we realised that we lived right around the corner from each other, and he suggested that he come over, and we watch TV together. He would even pick up gelato on the way! I liked the sound of all of that. It really is my dream for all dates to involve watching TV at home while eating gelato, so I told him to come on over.

  I had not planned on having sex with this person, but there was some wine involved, which meant I was very romanced by the TV and gelato. So when he leaned over to kiss me and we started making out, I thought, ‘Yeah, okay, he brought gelato, I’m into this.’

  It seemed normal at first. Normal making out during a normal make-out session on a normal couch in my normal apartment. Very, very normal.

  Then we went to the bedroom, and the full extent of this guy’s Pornwashing became apparent.

  It was subtle at first. When we started having sex, he was on top of me, and he asked if he could slap my bum. ‘Sure,’ I said. I liked that he asked, and don’t mind a bit of a slap during sex anyway. Then he asked if he could do it a little harder. Okay. Well, he’s asking. ‘Sure, go a little har—’

  ‘YOU LIKE THAT, YOU FUCKING BITCH, DON’T YOU?’

  Wait, whaaaat?

  ‘Um, yes?’ I said, a little thrown by that outburst, but not thrown enough to stop. I was more fascinated, to be honest, so I decided to keep going.

  ‘Hey, is this okay?’ he asked, as he put his hands around my neck and applied a little pressure.

  I didn’t feel threatened at all, just . . . bewildered. But I’m open to new stuff, and he was still asking before he did anything that might make me uncomfortable, so I figured I’d give it a go.

  ‘Can I apply more pressure?’ he asked about a minute later.

  ‘Uh, sure,’ I said, studying his face now like it was a science exhibit. His eyes were tightly closed, he was thrusting in and out of me, and so far all he’d asked me was if he could do a few very specific things that he clearly needed to be turned on – slapping me, choking me and calling me a fucking bitch. It was like he was masturbating, and I was just one of many tools that he was using to get the job done.

  And as I lay there, being bounced around underneath him, I was still just so fascinated. I was witnessing the sad results of Pornwashing in real time! I was like a sexual David Attenb
orough! I was a selfless anthropologist, being penetrated so I could take a detailed look into what men think sex is like after being raised on porn. My date seemed to be struggling now. His face was sweating and the thrusting was getting faster. He had one hand around my neck and was using the other to slap my thigh, but it just didn’t seem like it was getting him there. And just as I was wondering what messed-up thing he might ask me to do in order to help him come, he did it.

  All of a sudden, he looked right into my eyes . . . and SPAT ON MY FACE.

  He spat. On my face. And the sound he made as he was doing it made it obvious that he’d come.

  He rolled off me, breathing heavily.

  I was pissed off.

  ‘Um, did you just fucking spit on me?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, giggling. ‘Sorry. Normally I ask – getting permission is really important to me, but I was just so close, it got away from me a bit.’

  Bullshit. He knew I wouldn’t say yes to having my face spat on, so he just did it. And now he was trying to justify it by indicating that he was a good guy, because he’d asked about the other stuff.

  BULL. SHIT.

  It should also be pointed out here that at no point so far had he asked me about my pleasure. This entire twenty-minute session had been about him satisfying his sexual needs. And his needs were messed up – anybody who needs to slap a girl, choke a girl, call her a fucking bitch and then spit in her face just to be able to orgasm, is broken. That person’s brain is broken. I will say though, that while the very unexpected spitting did make me feel a little violated, I wasn’t scarred by it in any way. I didn’t feel assaulted or abused – if I had felt that way, I would have said so. I made it clear that I thought the spitting was gross and that he shouldn’t have done it. But I was mostly just annoyed that the sexual experience as a whole had been so . . . unsatisfying.