I let my muff grow wild to see how the patriarchy would react My vagina was giving off the attitude of a vagina that spent summers in Italy, taking many handsome lovers, and not a vagina that spent the majority of its time walking to work in the rain.

I recently decided to see what my darling vagina would look like if I “grew her out.”

After having spent the last 10 or so years removing any vestige of hair, I thought enough was enough. I remember back when I was at college and the Brazilian was the HOT NEW THING in pubic topiary and we all went wild for it, and got our Gillette Venus razors and whipped ourselves into a landing–strip frenzy and compared results while doing the obligatory “two in the toilet” trips at parties.

Having any scrap of hair down below was a dumpable offence — or at least we thought it was. The number of times I’d go home with someone, and then run to the bathroom, completely bollocksed, and quickly tidy up my bikini line! I genuinely thought that if I were to get out my bits and there was even the slightest suggestion of a pubic hair, then my date would run for the hills. EUGH, PUBES!

I have shaved, epilated (possibly the most pain I’ve ever put myself through voluntarily), tweezed (too time-consuming), and waxed myself (whereby I slapped all the strips on haphazardly not realizing the hell that was to come, and after ripping the first strip off and swearing a LOT I spent the good part of an hour trying to gently tease the other strips off without having to rip them off. I failed, of course, and my poor ladygarden was covered in bruises for about a week.)

I considered lasering until someone told me that “your twat feels like it’s getting stung by a million bees.” Not for me, thanks! Too chicken.

This year I will have been with my boyfriend for five years. I’m sure that for the first two or maybe three, I kept that up, along with always ensuring my eyebrows were tweezed, and that there was beer in the fridge for when he came over.

Now that we live together, and have done for over two years, the mystery is pretty much gone. I wee with the door open in the middle of the night, he hocks up phlegm in the morning and spits it in the loo. He sees me at my very worst, mid-stomach bug, I chip off the bogies he’s sneezed over the shower tiles. It’s a beautiful thing!

Once, with a hangover, I stumbled into the living room to see him crouched over the table in his underpants, eating the leftover kebab from the night before. He turned to look at me and farted. His fart made me throw up. This is our real life.

So, I thought, a little extra pubeage wasn’t going to make much difference. Not a lot happened at first, other than I noticed that I had a lot more time on my hands when in the shower to lather myself up and chip the aforementioned bogies from the shower tiles. In fact, I didn’t really notice at all until last week when I took delivery of some lovely new undercrackers.

When trying them on and prancing about in front of the mirror like a somehow less sexy Buffalo Bill, I noticed a shadow through the peach lace. The SHADOW OF MY PUBES! I was actually quite excited! How sexy! How French! I felt like I was straight out of “Emmanuelle”!

I’m not the hairiest of women anyway, so it’s not as if I looked like I was smuggling 10,000 baby spiders in my inner thighs. I just thought it looked terribly cosmopolitan. My vagina was giving off the attitude of a vagina that spent summers in Italy, taking many handsome lovers, and not a vagina that spent the majority of its time walking to work in the rain. My vagina was sunshine and pasta.

My newfound growler and I were getting on brilliantly. I loved the extra time she afforded me in the morning. I loved the comfort of whacking my hand into my knickers and giving her a little stroke, like having a very quiet and well-behaved dog.

I loved how if she had a voice, she’d definitely have the dulcet, knowing tones of Marianne Faithfull, but with the accent of Bardot. In fact, we were getting on so well that I didn’t even notice how much Chris hated her.

“Got a bit of a muff going on there!” he said, last week. I noticed that he didn’t look at her through the same eyes as me. He didn’t see me as being a sexy woman of the world who laughs in the face of convention and razors. He saw dodgy 80s pornos.

And with regret, I took my razor from its holder, and I said goodbye. I said goodbye to my cosmopolitan vagina. I said hello once again to having a cold labia.

I am in mourning. But one day, hopefully in the not too distant future, I’ll hang up that razor again. Maybe I’ll dye it pink, like the ends of my hair!