Sex & the Islamic City

The diary of a love affair in Iran.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Sex & The Islamic City: part 2

Imagine my surprise… everyone here goes naked. I mean, not with their clothes as obviously this is the Islamic Republic of Iran but underneath all those layers and veils, underneath knickers and tights, vests and chadors, Iranian women – and men – have no pubic hair. And so, although Iranian women sport the most splendid eyebrows in the world, the luxuriousness that is trained into perfect black arches above is not welcome down below. Down below is meant, apparently, to be naked. Clean, as I was told.

I always thought that compared to my Islamic brethren, hailing as I do from the individualistic, tolerant shores of Great Britain, I was the liberated one. The one who had long ago shed inhibitions and had lost the ability to be shocked. But now, in bed finally with the man I have spent the last few years chastely and platonically in love with, I am shocked. He has no pubic hair. And what’s more, he asks me, with total ease, why I have hair when he touches me for the first time. ‘Er…’ I stumble. Well whisper actually, because this is the Islamic Republic and we are in a hotel room in a small town somewhere in the mountains in the west of Iran and the fact that the hotelier agreed to give me a room at all – a single woman travelling alone with a man not my husband, father, brother – is quite a coup. And against the law.

By law, I should have arrived with signed and stamped permission from the local morality police, but I have done no such thing. And the hotelier, because it is late and because he is from the same town as my (then still platonic) lover and because he is also quite obviously, illegally drunk, agrees to waive the legalities and give me a room. So the fact that I even have a room is already defying the law of the land, but add to that the fact that I am in this room in the middle of the night, unchaperoned with a man not my husband, father, brother, and we are naked, would give the morality police enough to keep them busy for weeks. What would happen were we caught? We would be jailed, we would probably be flogged and we may be forced to wed on the spot.

But in truth I didn’t think of any of this. After eight years of longing looks from under eyelashes and increasingly confident ‘accidental’ brushes against each other, finally my lover and I were alone together in a room. The morality police was the last thing on our minds. First our conversation was perfectly conventional, one that takes place in bedrooms the world over.

Me: ‘Do you have a condom?’

Him: ‘No, I don’t.’

Me: ‘Oh that’s a shame. I guess we won’t have sex then.’

Him: ‘Oh look I have found some.’

Me: ‘Really? Huh.’

Then, some delirious moments later, we have the other conversation.

Him: ‘So why do you have hair here?’

Me: ‘Er… because it’s natural?’

Him: ‘So why don’t you have hair under your arms? Or on your legs?’

Me: ‘Er…’

I can’t really fault his logic, but we don’t argue the point. There are other things on our minds. Until of course I see him naked.

Me: ‘Oh, wow, do you shave your hair?’

Him: ‘Yes. Everyone does. Men and women. Do you mind?’

Me: ‘Er, no. It’s just unusual.’

We move on. Hours later, as dawn is breaking and he is preparing to duck back to his own room, we broach the subject again.

Me: ‘So does everyone really have no hair there?’

Him: ‘Yes, really. It’s, you know, better. For sensation. And cleaner.’

Me: ‘Cleaner!! What tosh, there is nothing unclean about my lovely bush…’

Him: ‘It’s just what they say…’

Me: ‘So did you not like it?’

Him: ‘No no, I didn’t not like it. It’s just unusual.’

Me: ‘But look, I am a woman and I don’t want to look like a pre-pubescent girl…’

He kisses me gently, deeply.

Him: ‘You ARE a woman, English, an amazing beautiful woman and I love you with or without hair. It matters not to me.’

Still, as we went about our travels, staying with his family and pretending to be friends – back to sidelong looks and ‘accidental’ brushes – I pondered the merits of having hair opposed to being, well, bald. I looked at the women we passed on the streets and wondered if they too, under their hejab, were clean-shaven. As we went on family picnics and visited historic sights, I made a decision; prior to the next night we would spend together I would go native: I planned to shave my pubic hair.

A little ideological tussle preceded this decision. After all, I had poured scorn on friends in London who had opted for Brazilians, saying I would never want to be with a man who preferred his woman to look like a young girl. Now though, this ‘feminist’ (as I had thought of it) angle no longer held sway as instead I became fascinated with the idea of heightened sensation and the realisation that my lover would be more enthusiastic in pleasuring me should he have a clear path. So one day as we took a drive alone under the pretext of buying some groceries, I consulted him.

Me: ‘Listen, I was thinking of shaving, you know…’

Him: ‘No no, don’t do that! You mustn’t.’

Me: ‘Why not? Wouldn’t you prefer it?’

Him: ‘I love you as you are, English. And I don’t want you to do something you don’t believe in for me. I know your views.’

Oh dear, I was in danger of being held to my convictions – a sorry fate for a girl who, after all, just wants to have fun.

Me: ‘No it’s not just for you. It’s for us. I mean me. I am intrigued, I want to know how it feels.’

Him: ‘But it will be really hard to shave and then it will itch and you will get spots and in-growing hairs… we could buy you some of that cream, but you say it gives you a reaction. Why don’t you just wait till you go back to London and get a Brazilian wax?’

I continue to be amazed by what an expert he is in different forms of depilation. This is a man who lives in a small town in the remote mountains of Iran, not a Primrose Hill metrosexual.

Me: ‘My darling, what’s the point of a Brazilian if you aren’t there? Look I will just shave and be very careful.’

Him: ‘Well, if you are determined then I will give you a fresh blade, make sure you use plenty of shaving cream, don’t shave against the hair and only go over each area once, ok?’

Me: ‘Wow, ok.’

Him: ‘In fact, I better give you the hair trimmer first cos you won’t be able to shave it at that length…’

Me, still amazed: ‘OK. So, think it will be interesting?’

Him: ‘I think I will be able to do things I couldn’t before with all the hair getting in the way. You know, it makes it hard to breathe…’

Me: ‘Yes I noticed…’

So the next day I was shown how to trim and shave and while he was at work I spent a full hour in the shower at his house carefully removing all the hair I could see. Afterwards, bald and, I must say, beautiful, I wandered around his house alone wearing nothing but a t-shirt, feeling the breeze on parts of me that had never felt the air before. It was quite a new sensation, a fluttering awareness of myself that even made wearing knickers a pleasure. I had discovered a whole range of new nerve endings and I waited eagerly for my lover’s return.

Reader, it would be obscene to go on. But suffice to say I am a convert to the joys of the naked bush and no amount of itching can now dissuade me from keeping myself trim and defuzzed. It is, quite literally, sensational.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Welcome to the 'healthy tradition' dear English (or rather British) lady!

It is not necessarily Islamic, nor even a Persian tradition. (Albeit one might be able to put it this way: it is more an Eastern way rather than Western.)

Watch porn movies these days (yes they are obscene but there they are!) and you'll see most porn stars, men and women, do shave. And majority of these movies are made in the West of course. Since rather old times, it is believed by some Eastern scholars that after shaving private body parts, in fact all body areas with hair on them, natural metabolism of the body is 'sped up' thus giving a rise to more sexual appetite and power. Sounds logical even by today's scientific standards.

One thing might be a fact, a truth: most genital diseases such as herpes do because many people do not shave their underparts. (It is even recommended that hair around the anus area be shaved due to clear reasons.)

Besides, keeping genitals covered by clothing all the time and not letting them get fresh air nor see the sunlight (nature's most powerful germ-killer and preventer of many diseases) is perhaps yet another cause of many skin diseases related to private parts of one's body. (Maybe that is why some people go to a nude beach once in a while?!)

8:25 am  

Post a Comment

<< Home