Eccentric Flower:199901/occams depilatory
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twenty-four january occam's depilatory I put my hair up. D'you like it? No, I don't have something special planned this evening; why do you ask? I just did it because I knew you liked it.
Lest any newcomers think that I'm always on the trail of some Big Idea, though, today I need to delve into the "too much information" section of my life ... which usually involves my gender issues. In this case it involves body hair as well. It's my journal and I'll say what's on my mind, but I feel it's only fair to warn you first. - - - I have been reading a lot of transgender fiction lately. I read a fair amount of it anyway, most weeks, but for some reason the last few nights I have been rereading old tales compulsively, twenty or so a night (they're short), which leaves me with a vaguely dissatisfied feeling and very interesting dreams. One day I'd like to show a mostly heterosexual genetic female around these websites and feed her about five hundred TG stories - I've probably read about twice that - and get her honest reaction. Like most fetish fiction, it's nowhere close to reality, it's often trite and sexist, it frequently (and obviously) reflects the sexual agenda of whatever fool wrote it, and it's hardly politically correct. Nonetheless, it's often good. If you like that kind of thing. With TG stories the basic idea is that a male is made to look female or behave in a female manner - or actually changed into a female, in whole or in part, surgically or magically. TG stories and "forced feminization" stories are not the same, but they overlap each other about ninety percent. There are very few men in TG stories who become butch women; femme (in fact, outright sissy) is the name of the game. (If you're wondering where the female-to-male TG stories are ... they reflect the same ratio as in the population, where there are many, many fewer FtMs than MtFs. "Why" is something that could keep a lot of writers occupied for a very long time.) Anyway, this isn't a mouth organ column. The point is, I've been reading TG stories when I haven't been doing anything else, and it's affected some real aspects of my life lately (as you'll see.) Along the way, I've come to three conclusions. All of them involve hair. - - - 1. I feel more self-confident when I've shaved my face. I carry myself better in public and I feel attractive. When I haven't shaved, I feel ugly. I suppose I knew this at the back of my head ... but just like with the sunglasses, the extent to which it made a difference came as a shock. Why should a little thing matter so much? Part of it, obviously, is that I can't be femme with stubble, but honey, my femme portion has always been mostly behavioral anyway. It shouldn't count that much. 2. And even if you can explain that, why should something that no one but me sees make a difference? Partially as a result of these stories, I have once again embarked on a campaign to remove my body hair. I would give a major organ to wake up one morning and find that the Depilation Fairy had waved her wand and I would no longer grow hair any further down on my body than my eyelashes. If I could be dunked up to the nostrils in Permanent Follicle Stop, I'd take it. But I have been the shaving route and I just have too much real estate. In a fit of desperation, though, I gave Nair another try - and got it to work. How? Well, um, you know how it gives you a range of times to apply it, and then says UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES LEAVE ON LONGER THAN 15 MINUTES? I chose to interpret that in the "whatever is not forbidden is permitted" sense and left it on for fifteen minutes. I used a stopwatch. It worked wonderfully. I just about pranced down the street the next day. Now, it's cold out, and none of my skin was exposed to the public below the neckline. Furthermore I had one area I shouldn't have put the Nair - where I forgot my skin was abraded - and it was behaving like a bad sunburn. Furthermore some of the short broken-off hairs (Nair doesn't remove hair so much as make it extremely brittle and easy to rub off) were already beginning to itch in the places that a shaved body always itches. (If you're male, ask a female what that means.) In short, this was not the slippery smooth lovefest that your average TG fantasy makes a shaved skin out to be. (In your average TG fantasy, depilatories are also shockingly and instantaneously effective.) Nor did I expect bliss from my denuding - I've been doing this for years and know what's what. So why was I still on cloud nine? Why would I even bother to maintain a hairless body, when most of my female readers are probably glad to shave as little of their anatomy as they can possibly get away with? Don't assume I have answers to those questions. 3. One of the interesting things about TG fetish fiction is that it some of the sexiest scenes don't have sex in them. Many TGs, for example, have a thing about having their hair styled or handled. I do; I admit it. I have a sequence from a story I saved which consists of nothing but a woman brushing an unsuspecting young man's long hair out, lovingly. I am feeling the tingle on the back of my neck just typing these sentences, thinking about it. Mind you, you don't have to be a TG to have a hair fetish. Regular readers of Circlet books (and you know who you are) are invited to peruse the story "Braided Bonds" - which was written by a woman - in the book SexMagick. You can find it easily if you're borrowing my copy; the book falls open to it. Anyway, the personal effect of this is that I have renewed my vow to grow my hair out and then get it cut in a fairly femme fashion. Damn the torpedoes. It's getting to that do-or-die stage where it looks horrid (cut it off, or wait it out?) and I was having a crisis of confidence. Now I am once again resolute. - - - I suppose the connection between these three items is that I don't understand my own brain. It is a constant mystery to me that I should want these things in these ways. I decided to go with the flow long ago, figuring it to be basically harmless - and so far my decision has proved sound. But I'd like to be able to make sense of it, and that hasn't really happened yet, after close to ten years. Maybe it never will?
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