How To Be A Woman

Chapter 2




I Become Furry!




It’s a cold house – a cold house, and a small one. When you get out of the bath, you wrap yourself in the towel – still damp from the last person who used it – and run downstairs, to dry in front of the fire.

It’s Saturday night, so Bergerac is on. The sofa has six people on it, of varying sizes, packed in tight, at sundry angles. Some people are essentially lying on top of other people – only ‘on’ the sofa in the most nugatory sense. Eddie lies across the back of the sofa, like an antimacassar made of seven-year-old boy. It looks a little bit like the Galactic Senate in The Clone Wars – if everyone in the Galactic Senate were eating cream crackers, Branston and cheese.

I come into the room, towel like a cloak, and crouch in front of the fire. I still have the shower cap on, which is one of the best things in our house. It’s one of our more feminine items. I always feel a little bit demure wearing it. Not as much as when I wear a pair of woolly tights on my head – to signify long, princess hair. But still, quite lovely.

As Charlie Hungerford shouts, ‘Jim! It was just a misunderstanding!’, I start to put on my nightie.

‘Oooooooh!’ rings out a voice, suddenly, from the tightly packed sofa. It’s my mother. ‘Is that PUBES I can see? PUBES, Cate?’

The sofa stirs into instant alertness. Everyone stops looking for the diamond thief on Bergerac and starts looking at my pubic hair instead – except my dad, who appears absolutely unaware of what is going on, and continues to eat crackers and cheese whilst staring at the television. There is clearly a part of his brain that has evolved to be like this, in order to survive the horror of his daughters’ puberty.

I feel like I’m not allowed to look for the pubes myself – I have to be nonchalant about it, although it is all, frankly, news to me. The contents of my pants are a bit like my subconscious, or the field by the playground. Since my bad birthday, I’ve tried not to go down to any of them.

‘There!’ my mother says, pointing. The whole sofa cranes to see. ‘It’s DEFINITELY a pube! AND your little legs are getting hairy! You’re growing up! You’re growing into a lady!’

My mother has a way of saying this that makes me feel that this is both the worst possible outcome to being a 13-year-old girl and also, somehow, my fault.

‘Look!’ I say, pulling my nightie down, firmly, and pointing at the television. ‘Look! Liza Goddard!’


The next day, I resolve to sort all this out before things get out of hand. I am simply going to remove all the hair so that the most interesting thing to look at in the front room will be, once again, Bergerac, and everything can get back to normal.

‘I’m going to commit a crime,’ I tell the dog. The dog lies under my bed – nervous, baleful eyes glowing in the dark. Since the incident on my birthday, I have put the whole affair from my mind, but the dog has become even more anxious. Last week, she ate the plasticine model village that Caz had made. In the dog’s faeces the next day, we could clearly make out the tiny face of the woman who ran the Post Office.

‘I’m going to steal one of Dad’s razors, and beautify myself,’ I continue. Even saying it to the dog makes me nervous. Stealing a blade, in order to address the issue of my pubic hair, is definitely the most transgressive and rebellious thing I’ve ever done. It feels little better than stealing a gun, in order to start my periods. It’s a world away from my previous biggest crime: eating more than half a packet of raw strawberry jelly, then claiming that it wouldn’t set because the weather was ‘too warm’.

As my mother believes in neither medicine (‘Just have a poo and a hot bath, and go to bed, and you’ll be fine in the morning’) nor ‘beauty treatments’ (‘Deodorant gives you cancer. And you don’t want that’) there are only four things in the bathroom cabinet: a dark-blue 1920s-style glass eye-bath, a bottle of calamine lotion the colour of Ermintrude in The Magic Roundabout, baby-gin (gripe water) and Dad’s razors. Under the cover of running a bath, I take the razor from the shelf. I am so nervous I can feel my heartbeat in the soles of my feet, on the lino.

As my mother doesn’t believe in locks on the door, either (‘They give you cancer’), I barricade myself into the room with the washing basket, get into the bath, lather myself up, and shave off my pubes. I place them on the side of the bath, by the soap. They never even had a chance to get curly. They were cut down in their infancy.

I then shave my legs, too; not really understanding which direction the razor should go in, slashing my knee and thigh. It feels like it takes around nine hours. I am amazed how much calf I have. Just after I finish one bit, I notice another outcrop, looking like a patch of marram grass on a dune. I wish some manner of ‘leg mower’ had been invented, so it could be done all in one go. I frequently think, 13-year-old girls should not be allowed to use razors. It is dangerous, Wow. I really am bleeding quite a lot!


But, eventually, the shaving is done. I have removed the problem. I am back to normal.

‘Feel all clean and silky,’ I write in my diary that night, sticking a fresh piece of tissue paper to the wounds. ‘Might do under my arms tomorrow!’

I turn out the light. I have to rest, in order to be fresh for stealing again in the morning.


Hair is one of the first, big preoccupations of womanhood. It appears, unbidden, and so decisions must be made about it – decisions which signal to yourself, and the world, who you are. As the teenage years are where you begin the complicated, lifelong business of beginning to work this out, hair is the opening salvo in decades of quietly screaming ‘WHO AM I?’ whilst standing in front of an array of products in Boots, clutching an empty basket.

And it is hair that has the most money, and attention, spent on it. Hair in the ‘wrong’ place: legs, underarms, upper lip, chin, arms, nipples, cheeks, and across the sundry contours of your pelvis. Against this hair, lifelong wars of attrition are waged. It informs the ebb and flow of day-to-day life – the scheduling of events. Sometimes, the entire course of a woman’s life.

A man may think, I have a party next week. I’d better roughly flannel my face before I tootle out the door.

A woman, on the other hand, will call up the calendar in her head – like the mid-air screens in Minority Report – and start a cycle of furious planning, based around hair management.

Here is my friend, Rachel, and me on a Sunday night, discussing a forthcoming party.

‘Party’s on Friday,’ Rachel says, sighing. ‘Friday. This means we will have to get our legs waxed tomorrow, latest, in order to start undercoating self-tan on Tuesday. Can’t undercoat on Monday – all the follicles will still be open, from the ripping.’

We’ve both applied self-tan when the follicles are still open, from ‘the ripping’. The self-tan embeds itself in each tiny, empty hole. Your legs end up looking like that freckled, ginger kid on the cover of Mad magazine.

‘I’ll make us a waxing appointment for tomorrow,’ Rachel says, picking up the phone. ‘But we should book upper lip and eyebrows for Thursday. I want minimal regrowth. I think Andrew’s going to be there.’

‘Are you going to shag him, though?’ I ask. ‘What about your foof?’ I care for Rachel. She looks inside her pants, and assesses.

‘It looks like Desperate Dan’s chin, so only if it’s dark, and we’re drunk,’ she says, finally. ‘I’m not adequately prepped for a brightly lit room. Chances are, if we do shag, it will be drunk and dark. First shags always are. So I don’t need to bother.’

‘But what about the next morning?’ I ask. I really do care about Rachel. ‘If you stay over, you might have a second, sober, well-lit pre-breakfast shag. Are you going to be ready?’

‘Oh God!’ Rachel says, looking back in her pants again. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Bloody hell. But it’s ￡20, and I’m broke. I don’t want to spunk my taxi money on a wax if there isn’t going to be a pre-breakfast shag.’ She stares gloomily at her crotch. ‘I don’t want to be hairless – but on a night-bus, f*ckless.’

‘If you are getting your bikini done, you’ll need to do it by Wednesday – to let the terrible, disfiguring rash die down,’ I say. I really am being as helpful as I can.

We stare at each other. Rachel starts to get annoyed.

‘Bloody hell, why can’t he just call me now and say, “Rachel, are you on for a pre-breakfast shag on Saturday?” I can’t budget correctly with all these “Random F*ck Factors” in my week. No wonder everyone’s a slag these days. Even if you don’t like anyone at the party, you want to get some return on your wax. I hate my hair.’

And all of this isn’t done to look scorchingly hot, or deathlessly beautiful, or ready for a nudey-shoot at the beach. It’s not to look like a model. It’s not to be Pamela Anderson. It’s just to look normal. To have normal-looking legs, and a normal-looking face, and a crotch you’re confident about. To not be anxiously standing in the toilets with a reel of Sellotape, dabbing at your upper lip and wailing, ‘As soon as the bright lights hit, I realised I was looking a bit Hitler! I honestly don’t want to annexe the Rhineland! I just want a Breezer and a feel!’

And of all these hair dilemmas – these decisions that you must make with your follicles, about who you are and what you want to say about yourself – it is pubic hair that is now the most politically charged arena. That palm-sized triangle has come to be top-loaded with more psychosexual inference than marital status and income combined. Over the years, pubic hair has gone from the very least of a woman’s worries – when I was 17, around BritPop, the idea of waxing your bikini line was bizarre, marginal, for porn models only – to a pretty routine part of ‘self-care’. Pubic hair must be confined to a very small area, or, increasingly, removed completely. The industry-standard pop-video crotch shots of girls in bikinis make it very, very clear: there should be nothing there. It must be smooth. Empty. You must clean this area of fur. To see even a single hair, curling out the side, would be to have the whole world going, ‘Is that a PUBE I can see? A PUBE, Lady Gaga?’

Whilst some use the euphemism ‘Brazilian’ to describe this state of affairs, I prefer to call it what it is – ‘a ruinously high-maintenance, itchy, cold-looking child’s fanny’.

In fact, in recent years I have become more and more didactic about pubic hair – to the point where I now believe that there are only four things a grown, modern woman should have: a pair of yellow shoes (they unexpectedly go with everything), a friend who will come and post bail at 4am, a failsafe pie recipe, and a proper muff. A big, hairy minge. A lovely furry moof that looks – when she sits, naked – as if she has a marmoset sitting in her lap. A tame marmoset, that she can send off to pickpocket things, should she so need it – like that trained monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I am aware that my views on waxing run contrary to current thinking. As far as pubic hair is concerned, I am like someone sitting in a pub, tearfully recalling how exciting it was to go into Woolworth’s and buy the new Adam Ant single on seven-inch vinyl. I am ‘vagina retro’.

‘I remember when it was all furry round here,’ I will say, sadly, in the changing rooms of the Virgin Active gym, surrounded by smooth, pink genitals. ‘Hairy toots as far as the eye could see. Wild and untamable. An arbour of nature. Playground of my youth. I used to spend hours there. Now … now it’s all waxed and empty. All the wildlife has gone. The bulldozers have moved in. They’re going to build a new Morrisons there, on the vaginas.’

It is now accepted that women will wax. We never had a debate about it. It just happened – and we never thought to discuss it.

Even though I knew we are living through a time of pube disapproval, I was still, nonetheless, shocked by a recent letter to The Times’ sex columnist, Suzi Godson, from a 38-year-old divorcee, worried about her retro, befurred moof. She said that her 29-year-old boyfriend was ‘shocked’ by ‘my lack of personal grooming’. Somewhat naively, I thought The Times’ sex columnist – a feisty-looking chick, with the peroxide hair of a sassy 1950s telephone operator – would briskly tell her correspondent’s boyfriend to go to hell.


Instead, she took on a sadly chiding tone. ‘Things have rather changed in the genital grooming department,’ she began, explaining that ‘Any woman who dares to be less rigid in her styling, as you have found, risks being labelled as bucolic, unsanitary or possibly French. If your boyfriend has been conditioned to expect a tidy Brazilian, he may genuinely find anything else very off-putting.’

Godson firmly instructed her correspondent to go for a wax, went on to describe just how much that waxing would hurt – ‘think of burning-hot Sellotape … now treble the pain’ – before ending with one of the most annoying pieces of ‘good news’ I’ve ever heard.

‘Fortunately,’ she said, ‘the craze for Brazilians is abating. The hot new haircut is the Sicilian. It is like a Brazilian – but you are left with a neat little Sicily-shaped triangle, which at least means that you still look like a woman. Good luck!’

Sicily? The good news is that I can make my luge look like Sicily? Home of the Mafia? That’s my vagina now? It’s got the Godfather in it? Ha ha! Can you imagine if we asked men to put up with this shit? They’d laugh you out the window before you got halfway through the first sentence.

I can’t believe we’ve got to a point where it’s basically costing us money to have a fanny. They’re making us pay for maintenance and upkeep of our lulus, like they’re a communal garden. It’s a stealth tax. Fanny VAT. This is money we should be spending on THE ELECTRICITY BILL and CHEESE and BERETS. Instead, we’re wasting it on making our Chihuahuas look like a skanky Lidl chicken breast. God DAMN you, mores-of-pornography-that-have-made-it-into-my-pants. GOD DAMN YOU.


And, of course, it is pornography that’s costing us all this money, time and follicular pain. If you ask the question, ‘Why do 21st-century women feel they have to remove their pubic hair?’ the answer is, ‘Because everyone does in porno.’ Hollywood waxing is now total industry standard. Watch any porn made after, say, 1988, and it’s all hairless down there: close-ups are like watching one of the Mitchell brothers, with no eyes, eating a very large, fidgety sausage.

And when you first see it – it being hardcore pornography – there is a slight frisson to it. Completely hairless? Ooooh, that’s nasty. Like Perspex heels, spit-roasting and anal sex, the extreme, effortful, ‘Blimey, this isn’t everyday sex, is it?’ aspect is quite exciting. So long as your cast have been recruited from neither a nursery nor a zoo, anything goes, really.

But the hairlessness isn’t there for the excitingness. It’s not, disappointingly, there to satisfy a kink. If it were, I could argue it until the cows literally came home. Nah – it seems to me that the real reason all porn stars wax is because, if you remove all the fur, you can see more when you’re doing penetrative shots. And that’s it. This gigantic, billion-dollar Western obsession with Brazilians and Hollywoods, that millions of normal women have to time events in their lives around, endure pain and inconvenience for – and, I regret to tell you, ladies, actually makes your thighs look bigger – is all down to the technical considerations of cinematography. It’s just a lighting thing. The day-to-day existence of your foof has been dictated to by the Miyagawa of minge, or the Charles B. Lang of dong.

Given that it is simply an ‘industry thing’, our widespread adoption of it is as bizarre as everyone, in the early days of black and white television, walking around in the thick panstick make-up and black lipstick like the presenters used. It’s like – ladies! This shit doesn’t apply to us! We’re not getting paid for this! We don’t need to bother! Grow your little minge-fro back! Be Hair Now!


But, of course, it does apply to us, as I’ve said: because hardcore pornography is now the primary form of sex education in the Western world. This is where teenage boys and girls are ‘learning’ what to do to each other, and what to expect when they take each other’s clothes off.

As a result, we’re at risk of a situation in which every boy expects to undress a girl and find a thorough wax job, and every girl – terrified by the idea of being rejected, or thought abnormal – waxes for them. My beautician told me she has had girls of 12 and 13 coming in for Brazilians – removing the first signs of adulthood even as they appear, in a combination that – with its overtones of infantilisation, and impetus in hardcore pornography – is pretty creepy, whichever way you look at it.

It’s now got to the point that, if you listen in to conversations on the back row of the bus, you can hear 14-year-old boys being horrified to discover that, on fingering a 13-year-old girl, she has pubic hair. In the 21st century, modern boys watching hardcore pornography are now as panicked by pubic hair as Victorian art critic John Ruskin apparently was, in 1848, when he was so alarmed at the sight of his new wife’s pubic hair that he refused to ever consummate the marriage. Bloody hell. Aside from every conceivable, dolorous psychosexual side effect, it saddens me that 13-year-old girls are spending what little money they have on getting their foofs stripped. They should be spending that money on the really important stuff: hair dye, tights, Jilly Cooper paperbacks, the Guns N’ Roses back catalogue, the poems of Larkin, KitKats, Thunderbird 22, earrings that make your ears go green and septic, and train tickets as far away from your home town as you can possibly afford. TAKE YOUR FURRY MINGE TO DUBLIN, that’s what I say.

Because there is a great deal of pleasure to be had in a proper, furry muff – unlike those Hollywood versions, which look like they want only for a quick squirt of Mr Sheen, and a buff with a lint-free cloth.

Lying in a hammock, gently finger-combing your Wookiee whilst staring up at the sky is one of the great pleasures of adulthood. By the end of a grooming session, your little minge-fro should be even, and bouffy – you can gently bounce the palm of your hand off it, as if it were a tiny hair trampoline.

Walking around a room, undressed, in front of appreciative eyes, the reflection in the mirror shows the right thing: a handful of darkness between your legs, something you refuse to hurt. Half animal, half secret – something to be approached with a measure of reverence, rather than just made to lie there, while cocks are chucked at it like the penultimate game on It’s A Knockout.

And on proper spa days, you can pop a bit of conditioner on it, and enjoy the subsequent cashmere softness, safe in the knowledge that you have not only reclaimed a stretch of feminism that had got lost under the roiling Sea of Bullshit, but will also, over your lifetime, save enough money from not waxing to bugger off to Finland, and watch the Aurora Borealis from a five-star hotel whilst shit-faced on vintage brandy.

So yeah. Keep it trimmed, keep it neat, but keep it what it’s supposed to be: an old-skool, born to rule, hot, right, grown woman’s muff.


‘But what about underarm hair?’ people will say – usually 40-something men, who look uncomfortable when you use phrases such as ‘lovely big Hair Bear Bunch-style minge’, and then downright alarmed when you bring pornography into it.

‘If you don’t believe in Brazilians, do you shave your armpits? Do you shave your legs? And your eyebrows? You look like you pluck to me. What about your lady moustache?’

And then they sit back, a little smug – as if they have just put a sausage roll in the bottom of a trapping pit, and are fairly confident you’re about to go in after it, and be captured.


But the crotch, the upper lip and the armpit are miles apart – well, on average, 43cm apart. What happens to them, and why, is wholly different – primarily because armpits aren’t intimately associated with sexual maturity or, indeed, sexuality at all, unless you’re on some seriously specialist websites.

So what you do with your armpits it just an aesthetic concern – and not really part of The Struggle. Given this, I have, over the years, experimented with different looks for my armpit. Some days, a shaved armpit just looks a bit … boring. If I’m wearing jeans and a vest top, and I’m hanging with my homies, it’s quite nice to go a bit George Michael – a bit ‘Faith’, with a flash of four-day fuzz. There’s something pleasingly musky about it – like you’ve been too busy living the bohemian dream, and souping up your hot-rod, to do something as mimsy as shave. On other occasions, I’ve grown it properly long – a hollow of damp curls, like it’s 1969 all over again, and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash.

One Glastonbury, when the hair on my head was down to my waist, and dyed cherry-red, I decided to dye my armpits and foof to match, and cracked out the Crazy Colours. ‘I shall be red in foof and maw!’, I thought to myself, cheerily, slapping on the crème.

Alas, it all sweated off in the first two hours and soaked through my T-shirt, making it look like I had terrible, suppurating armpit eczema. Mind you, I got away with dye lightly that year at Glastonbury. Caz dyed her ginger eyebrows black and, in the pounding sunshine, they turned the colour of aubergine. When she spotted Thom York from Radiohead in the Green Field, and ran up to him to tell him how much she loved him, his reception was ‘slightly off’.

‘No one wants to hear “I love you” from someone with purple eyebrows!’ she wailed, afterwards.

When it comes to hair – legs, upper lip, eyebrows, chin, nipple, pubic – the desirable outcome would be an expanding of the aesthetic lexicon: like when Eddie Izzard explains his transvestism as ‘equal clothing rights for all’. He doesn’t want to wear a dress every day – he might not wear stilettos for a year. But whenever the mood takes a man to wear a dress, or a woman to go furry, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be part of the range. There are some women out there who are just going to look better with a moustache: that’s statistics. There are a lot of armpits that will look better with a silky curl of fur than they do stripped, or plucked, depending on what outfit is being rocked at the time. A monobrow can be magnificent: my six-year-old – raised on pictures of Frida Kahlo – is militant about hers: ‘I love it, because it never ends.’

On ‘dress like a character from history’ day, at school, she dresses as Kahlo, and applies mascara to the centre, ‘To make it even better.’

She is so much saner than I was at her age.


Having shaved my first, scared, lonely pube off, at the age of 13, I continue to remove all my pubic hair for three further months, and then stop. There are a number of reasons.



1) As they become more numerous, picking them out of dad’s razor – so I can replace it on the shelf, ostensibly untouched – becomes more and more difficult. My fingertips are covered in a criss-cross of tiny razorblade scars, as if I’ve decided to replace my fingerprints with something more angular, or am attempting the least effective self-harming session ever. Cleaning out a razor is dangerous. A 13-year-old shouldn’t be doing it.

2) It’s itchy. Insanely itchy. The regrowth appears to be made of three-parts asbestos, one-part artisan mohair, and drives me to distraction. Three weeks in, and I’m scratching like I’ve caught the pox – which is ironic, because the final reason I abandon shaving is:

3) The realisation no one is going to see what’s going on there for years. YEARS. Since the terrible day of Bergerac, I now dress – shiveringly cold – in the bedroom. There will be no more putting my nightie on in front of my family. In front of anyone at all. As my friend, Bad Paul, will put it, in years to come: ‘What you look like undressed? That’s scarcely something you need worry about, dear.’ The idea of a 13-year-old virgin shaving off her pubic hair is as ridiculous as Neil Armstrong splashing on aftershave before setting foot on the moon: any audience for the effort is entirely imaginary. I let it all grow back, in peace, and leave my father’s razor next to the eye-bath, and the lotion. I move on to the next incident on puberty’s agenda.


The next time anyone sees me naked, I am 17, losing my virginity in a bedsit in Stockwell, South London, to a man with steady eyes, who clearly couldn’t care what I do with my pubic hair, and just wants to take my green dress off, and lie me down.