Nothing compares to the paradise of smooth skin touching smooth skin, especially when the skin is sloshy wet with arousal, sweat, cum, g-spot ejaculate, spit, piss, lube or what have you. That hot, warm, slippery, sliding, dissolves boundaries and makes you both feel like you are fucking with your whole body, and you are. So, to shave or not to shave? One strong vote for shave: pubic patch, around labia lips, cock, balls, and around the asshole. Then fuck hard and wet, add lube, go deep, drip, squirt, spurt, gush, spray, soak, mark, fill, overfill, and gulp your partner's wetness to your heart's delight.
But wait, sometimes "hairy" opens whole worlds of pleasures. Hair holds and intensifies scent, and if you are scent-driven like me, each different smell of the person you adore is a bit of paradise unto itself. Whitman's "smell of these armpits / aroma finer than prayer" makes deep and lovely sense, and even better sense the hairier she or he is. Even now I can close my eyes and remember Julie's different scents. And it helped a lot that she was also the hairiest girl I have ever known, or ever am likely to know.
Julie was sitting in a bookstore café, pouring over an oversized book on the artist Edward Hopper. Though it was a blazing hot day that had most of us wearing the absolute minimum, she was wearing long pants, closed-toe shoes, and a long-sleeved buttoned-down shirt fastened high on her neck and tight around her wrists. She wore oversized dark glasses too, which seemed a bit odd in a café, and even odder considering she was reading an art book.
Julie was so covered up by clothing and glasses I couldn't get much fix on her appearance. Except that is, for beautifully full lips and a quite lovely, if distinctively pronounced aquiline nose. She was on the tall side and trim. But aside from that and her apparent great taste in art she was pretty much a blank.
I was newly single and actively looking for a partner. Since Hopper was one of my favorite painters, and she had caught and held my interest, I was tempted to talk with her. But looking closer at her she radiated a bit of a "do not approach me vibe" which squelched that idea. I settled, quite content, into my own reading, a new biography of the poet Anne Sexton.
Sexton had been complex and troubled but she was fiercely honest in her writing and the biography was drawing me in pretty deeply. I was startled to hear "Sexton's my favorite poet" spoken by the woman I had been looking at earlier. She now stood just inches from my table looking down at me. I looked up at her. She removed her glasses revealing expressive and striking pale blue eyes and an angular face. I was excited that she liked Sexton and without her dark glasses felt instantly drawn to her. My glance played over the thin layer of peach fuzz covering much of her face and the thicker hair near her lips. There was a bit of irritation wherever the hair was thicker as if she were constantly trying to pluck it away. Curious.
I asked her if she would like to sit down and to my excitement and joy she said yes. We talked for quite a while about Sexton and then we talked about Hopper and I found myself utterly smitten by her enthusiasm and insight about the painter. Conversation flowed easily back and forth between us and I found myself drifting a bit into the sea-blue intensity of her lovely eyes. It turned out we had a lot in common and when after an hour she looked at her watch and said she had to go it felt perfectly natural to exchange numbers.
That night I called her around nine and it was dawn when we finally hung up after agreeing to meet at the bookstore again after we had both slept a bit. She was already there when I arrived and it felt like a kind of homecoming to sit facing her. This time, both our hands when out across the table to grasp one another. Touching hands that way felt amazing.
She was again dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and long pants. Looking at her this time the hair around her mouth was gone but in its place the skin was chaffed and red and even a bit inflamed. I hadn't meant to stare but she caught me anyway and looked back at me with slightly sad and perhaps worried eyes. I didn't understand.
I watched her bow her head just a little and then swallow hard. Then she raised her head and looked directly into my eyes. In a clear, determined, even resolute voice she slowly said:
"I have a condition. Its technical name is "hypertrichosis" which is basically an extreme form of hirsutism. In other word's I have a LOT of body hair. It grows fast and thick and over pretty much all of me."
She paused looking for a reaction and I guess she felt reassured because she soon continued.
"I'm mostly ok with it, well sort of. But it is hell on my face. My skin is too sensitive for chemical depilatories and if I don't constantly pluck, well, you can imagine."
"I am so relieved," I replied, my face breaking into a warm smile.
"When you said you had a condition I flashed on a flurry of ailments that could impact your health. You are ok. That's what matters."
"Well, I'm almost ok" she began again slowly.
"it is a pain because I don't look anything like other women. It's pretty extreme. Most people with my condition constantly fight it with all sorts of hair removal. When I try that route my skin, which is quite sensitive, goes to hell. And body scent tends to cling to hair so I have to go a bit crazy with deodorants.
I looked at Julie. The pale blue of her eyes felt oceanic and inviting. I glanced at the chaffed skin where she had clearly plucked hairs before coming to meet me. I looked at the buttons on her cuffs and thought how she hid her arms every day. I looked at the how high she buttoned her shirt and glanced at her close-toed shoes.
Looking again at her eyes I said slowly and softly "Julie, I think you are quite beautiful"
"Thank you." She replied as she met my gaze.
"I'm going to tell you something I really have no right to say. But I want you to hear it." I Knew I was pretty far out on a limb here, but I felt it deeply and I wanted her to hear it.
"Julie, I've never in my life talked with anyone till dawn before. I think you are amazing. If I am, ever, lucky enough to see you completely naked your condition won't make a bit of difference to me. It wouldn't make you less beautiful if you were the hairiest woman on earth."
She sat still, her face a blank, and then slowly it broke into a smile which in turn broke into laughter. In a moment I was laughing too and we didn't stop for quite a while.
When our laughter trailed off she began describing how self-conscious her condition had made her. How to her shame she had been nicknamed "gorilla girl" in grade-school. How she always wore cover-up clothes, even on the hottest days. How she was obsessive about deodorant. And how, in the few intimate relationships she had experienced, she always made sure she was freshly showered and that the room was completely dark before she undressed.
I felt a deep sympathy for every hardship Julie described. But to be honest, sitting there, looking at her while she spoke I found myself getting incredibly aroused by the specific details of almost everything she said.
Her talk about scent made me imagine the thick bush of her armpits on the hottest of days. I wouldn't want her to use deodorant I thought as I looked into her eyes. Rather, I would sink my face and mouth deep into that fragrant forest, inhaling and sucking in every bit of her scent and wetness.
"Gorilla girl," now that was cruel of them and must have stung horribly. But at the same time the image Julie as gorilla girl made me hot. She was beautiful inside and out. I was so tired of sex being tidy, tame, polite, vanilla and domestic. As she spoke that name I felt acutely the sting of her early ridicule. But at the same time the raw, feral, rutting, beastly side of "gorilla girl" made my insides quake with hunger.
Our talk drifted to other things and when the subject of photography came up I couldn't believe the common ground of our tastes. We talked about the partnership of Lee Miller and Man Ray in 1930 when they were lovers and colleagues, and of the astonishing results of that short entwining. On a hunch I asked her about the D/s photos they had produced together and Julie's eyes lit up with the pleasure of recognition, not of the photos, but of the beautiful impulses behind them. I stared back at her in response and knew, she knew, I knew what that recognition meant. This time it was both of us who were squirming a bit.
Then, for a moment, Julie sat very still in silence pondering something. Just as she had an hour before, she dropped her head down a bit and then, looking up with slow deliberation, asked me a question that sent a wave of warmth throughout my body.
"If you were to photograph me, how would you do it, given that I am very shy about my body hair?"
I knew at once the answer but it took a moment to find the words.
"You could get dolled up and shoot a traditional glamour shot with soft-lighting and soft-focus and be beautiful just like millions of others in that conventional playboy, or boudoir-photography way. But that's not how I would photograph you at all. Julie, I could be happy staring at your face all day. The expressiveness of your oceanic eyes, your strong aquiline nose and gorgeous lips would make a head-shot that would make men and women stare in longing.
She looked at me puzzled. Maybe even a with a flash of hurt, but I continued.
"Julie, I would put you in a room with such a bright wall of lighting there would not be a single shadow to hide behind. I would photograph you with a long enough lens that every inch of you came equally into the frame. I would shoot you in such high-resolution and razor-sharp focus you could see every contour and curve and variation of your skin tone. And you could see every single hair too, right down to the root. I would find your beauty and capture it."