It's Messy

by Amanda de Cadenet

  Why do so many women choose to go bald, to go through this ordeal regularly? Why do so many men encourage us to? In my humble opinion, it’s simple: Porn culture has woven itself into the very fabric of our bedsheets.

  Boys and girls as young as nine years old are googling the terms porn and for free; in fact, free internet porn is often their first exposure to sex—it’s serving as most kids’ sex ed these days. It’s no longer parents, siblings, friends, schools (or books of Greek mythology) that are teaching kids about sex, but the distorted lens of pornography. Porn culture is influencing our most private life experiences in an unprecedented way.

  Imagine if your first exposure to a vagina was one that was devoid of hair, available and open like a twenty-four-hour fast-food eatery for you to enter whenever you want, capable of an orgasm within seconds, and squirting like a water fountain? You’d probably have some very high expectations when you got your hands on a real one. I know I certainly would.

  If the only dicks I’d ever seen were unusually huge, capable of staying hard for hours, and situated next to shaved nut sacks and hairless buttholes, I’d feel really confused when I got one that wasn’t all those things.

  Thanks, porn culture; you’ve done a great job of amplifying the existing awkwardness of early sexual encounters.

  Personally, I’m a little alarmed by grown men who want their women bald as an eight-year-old. Don’t you wonder where that preference is coming from? I do. My husband tells me it’s just more “practical” and “easier to get to all the hidden bits.” Fewer pubes stuck in the teeth or down the back of the throat. Okay . . . but what about the fact that only little girls have hairless vaginas? I just can’t help but think about that as I wait for my car outside Super Wax.

  It’s sunny outside. It’s always sunny in Los Angeles. I reach for my shades as I get into my car and drive down Ventura Boulevard, which is lined with billboards advertising strip clubs, escorts, places to meet a sexy local—all showing me ladies with barely any clothes on and the promise of a good time and, I’m sure, hairless vaginas.

  I’ve joined the club, I think as I drive home. I’ve got the bald eagle! Except I wish it weren’t so sore. I’m sweating now, and the sensitive just-waxed skin on my vagina is stinging like mad. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. I just want to scratch it. What if someone sees me furiously scratching my vagina in my car? Not a good look.

  I spend the next few weeks trying not to itch myself incessantly at inopportune moments as the regrowth emerges. As my pubes come back to life and my vagina starts to look like that of a grown woman and not a plucked chicken with a bad rash, I tell myself, “Remember this the next time you feel like your vagina needs to meet the social norm. It is YOUR vagina and you should do with it as you please. No matter what anyone else says.”

  If having a bald vagina makes you happy, then I say go for it—but make sure you are doing it for YOU, not because porn culture or anyone else tells you to.

  6.

  The Love of My Life (and There Are a Few)

  I don’t believe in the notion that you have only one love of your life.

  Life is constantly in motion and hopefully we are always changing with it.

  A person you deeply connect with at one point in time is not necessarily the person you want to be with forever. The idea that there is only one person for you, or that you should limit yourself to one ultimate love, is a belief system that keeps us desperately searching for our idea of the perfect partner, sometimes for way too many years.

  How about the concept that there is a love for every stage of life, whether that is the same person or someone new?

  I was a twenty-year-old wife and mother when John and I moved to LA. It was a relief to be free from living in the fishbowl that my life in London had become. Being the object of ongoing press attention, which included endless body shaming that began when I was pregnant with my first child, was no way for anyone to live. The tipping point came one day after some paparazzi made it their mission to capture a picture of my lactating boobs while I was breastfeeding baby Atlanta on a bench near my house in London.

  That was it. I was done.

  Within days I had packed a couple of suitcases and left for California, leaving food in the fridge and laundry in the hamper, and didn’t return for over ten years.

  Moving to LA was such a relief, but it had its own challenges. I lived a much simpler, anonymous life of a new mom caring for her baby and breastfeeding without being harassed, but soon after we moved, my then-husband went on tour with his band, and I found myself alone with a new baby in a new city where I knew only three people.

  One of them was a young man I had interviewed two years earlier for my talk show The Word. He was insanely handsome, charming, and he made me laugh like crazy. I couldn’t pronounce his name for the first few months after we became friends.

  “I’m sorry to ask again, but HOW exactly do I say your name, KEE-AHH-NU?”

  (Dear Keanu: I tried to leave your identity out of this, but given the gigantic impact you’ve had on my life, I had to call you by your name and not some weird pseudonym.)

  Keanu Reeves is my love-at-first-sight story, or at least, my first love-at-first-sight story. We met when I was two months pregnant, nineteen years old, and married to another man. On the day of our interview for The Word, we met at my house in London; he arrived on time, as usual, and I was running late, as usual.

  Within minutes of first laying eyes on him, I remember thinking, I wonder how many pregnant women have affairs? I was surprised by my strong attraction to a man I had just met. As I would soon learn, Keanu is a man with hard-core ethics when it comes to doing the right thing, which is one of the qualities I greatly admire about him. From the day I got divorced, two years after we first met, I tried every goddamn trick in the book to get him to submit to my advances. Even my tried-and-tested seduction tactics, which had otherwise worked with 100 percent success, failed with Mr. Reeves for many years. He was having none of it, and thank God because had we become lovers at that point, I don’t think we would have the powerful and transformative friendship that we have today.

  Somehow, Keanu knew that what I needed more than anything was platonic male love, and that was what he gave me in spades until it became clear that maybe being lovers wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

  As I write this book, Keanu and I are twenty-six years deep. In that time he has been my best friend, my brother, my father, my lover. He is unquestionably a soul mate, whose unconditional love has helped me heal many deep wounds. But most of all, he has been and continues to be my champion in all things and in every way.

  I do believe there is a lover for every stage of life, and Jimmy in the trailer is the perfect example of that. Jimmy lived in a dilapidated trailer in Topanga Canyon. He was a smart and brilliant man, but always shirtless and shoeless, the quintessential starving artist—with the mind of Nietzsche and the body of Tarzan. We had crazy great sex and stayed up all night eating whatever he cooked up on his plug-in stove top.

  I was so into Jimmy in the trailer, but at the same time knew this would never be anything more than a really great vacation for my neglected vagina and battered ego. I met him after having been in an emotionally and physically abusive relationship for almost three years with a dude in London who had been my childhood obsession. Let’s just say that guy turned out to be a wolf in a practicing Buddhist’s robe.

  My time with Jimmy was healing on many fronts, and I’m grateful for it. He taught me that there was most certainly a time and place for a relationship like the one we had. Most days it looked something like this: drop off my daughter at school, drive to Topanga, and spend the day having great sex, napping, and walking to the beach through the Topanga woods. It was exactly what I needed at the time, and in fact, I think every girl needs a Jimmy experience at some point in her life.

  Then I dated a guy who lived in the back of a U-Haul truck and had a vicious drug problem, but his insane cuteness and charm
helped me forgive his living situation. He had no money and no wheels (aside from the U-Haul), and used to walk for two hours to come visit me. He took me on my first official American road trip to San Francisco, where we got tattoos together, little matching stars on our hands. I also got my daughter’s name tattooed on my upper arm, and he got his own name tattooed across his chest. That should’ve been my first sign that he could be a classic narcissist, but as usual I stayed in the relationship until the message was beyond loud and clear. For my birthday he gave me a tiny green poisonous frog and also gave the same kind of poisonous frog to his other girlfriend, whose birthday happened to be the same day as mine. I can’t remember how his other girlfriend and I found out about each other, but we both got rid of him immediately, and she and I are still friends today.

  It was around this time that my shrink said to me, “You know, you’re not Madonna.”

  What did she mean I’m not Madonna?

  “Madonna is rich enough to fuck whomever she wants, but you’re not her. Get a guy with a job.”

  That really stuck with me. Did she mean that if a woman has enough money, she also has independence and her romantic options increase? That she can actually afford to fuck whomever she wants? That she doesn’t have to compromise her lifestyle or the quality of her day-to-day life just because she’s fallen for a guy who lives in a trailer? That’s exactly what she meant. I heard it, and that was the end of U-Haul Man, who, for the record, wound up landing the lead in one of the most successful TV shows on the planet. The U-Haul is long gone, I’m sure, and he’s now super well paid and is making some lady—or knowing him, multiple ladies—very happy.

  As a single woman after my divorce, I learned a valuable lesson about the guys I hooked up with, whether for a few weeks, a few months, or in the case of Keanu, many years. It’s this: Listen to what he’s telling you about himself; he’s letting you know who he is.

  If a guy says, “I don’t want a girlfriend,” he means it. Sure, you can use your charms to seduce him into thinking otherwise, but if you’re trying to turn a sexual attraction into something more, you’re wasting precious energy. I’ve been in this position a few times, and I always ended up feeling that the guy wasn’t there of his own volition—which he wasn’t. I had simply succeeded at manipulating him, with sex most likely, to stay a little while longer. Save yourself the headache and the heartache. When he says “I’m not a relationship guy” or “I’ve never been faithful” or “I drink waaaaay too much,” take him at his word and run in the other direction as fast as you can.

  People do not change because you want them to; they only change when they want to. I can’t count the times I’ve fallen in love with someone’s potential, created a fantasy, and then been endlessly disappointed that he’s not the person I projected on to him.

  Speaking of fantasy men, I met Nick Valensi, the man who would become my second husband, in 2001. He was just twenty-one, and his band the Strokes were releasing their first album, Is This It.

  My friend Jacqui invited me to watch the band during a live appearance on MTV. And as fate would have it, I arrived at the studio and wandered into a room where I hoped to find Jacqui. Instead, there was Nick sitting on a chair, bent over his guitar. All I could see was the top of his head and his mop of wild curls. He looked up at me with his wide blue eyes, and I had one of those profoundly knowing moments. With every ounce of my being, I knew. If you don’t turn around right now and get your ass out of here, you are in for the long haul with this one. But I couldn’t get my feet to move and instead found myself inviting this stranger out for dinner that night and the next night and the one after that.

  There is no bigger nightmare than getting involved with a musician who’s about to hit it big. I did not want to live through this boy’s rite of passage into rock stardom, which I was certain lay imminently ahead. But my heart had other plans for me.

  Being with Nick felt freeing in a way I hadn’t experienced before. I spent time with him at his apartment in New York, staying up late as I had no 7:00 a.m. car pool to get up for. I felt free from responsibility for the first time in so many years, and boy, did it feel good.

  Our early relationship days and nights were so much fun. And as I predicted, what started as somewhat of a rebound from my previous relationship and my grown-up life began to turn into something more serious.

  There were moments I tried to discourage our relationship. “You’re about to get super famous,” I’d tell him. “You should go have sex with as many supermodels as you can, and when you’re not as successful, then get back to me. I am not going to commit to a twenty-one-year-old beginner rock star.” To which he would say, “I will never meet another woman like you, and I just want to be with you.”

  He was of course right and somehow smart enough to know it.

  The beginning of our relationship was not without issue. We were coming from very different worlds and at completely different stages of life, but through tenacity, hard work, and a touch of codependency, we persisted through more than our fair share of hard times.

  I’m not really down with the old-school notion of marriage, where “two people become one.” I’ve never understood the concept of two half people coming together to make a whole person. If you’re in love with a half person, get out fast. Likewise, if you think you’re only half of a person, you should probably figure your shit out before you get married. Don’t expect your union to be the answer.

  Also, the “romantic” idea that you must deconstruct your own boundaries in order to merge with someone else is codependency at its most extreme. When you’ve worked as long as I have to form your own identity, the last thing you want to do is blur the line of where you end and someone else begins.

  Both times I’ve been married I’ve kept my own name. I like it. It’s me, and I see no reason to abandon it. Of course, all-consuming romantic love as a requirement for marriage is a modern phenomenon. The idea of marriage is older than recorded history, but it wasn’t originally just about love. Arranged unions were a way for families to create useful alliances and solidify bonds with other tribes and families. The happiness of the betrothed, particularly the girls, was utterly beside the point. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that in ancient times, and unfortunately in some countries today, the moment parents see that their baby has a vagina, she is viewed primarily as a matrimonial bargaining chip. Which isn’t to say that marriage was a till-death-do-you-part arrangement even then. If it turned out a wife was infertile, the husband could return her to her family, or discard her completely.

  These days, we can define marriage on our own terms, and everyone’s marriage has its own rules. Sometimes one person is the breadwinner; sometimes both partners work, and sometimes they both lie around on the couch getting high and watching porn. But if there’s one rule that defines many marriages, it’s that you’re not supposed to fuck other people.

  I have to wonder, though, if our devotion to monogamy is realistic. Many husbands and many wives cheat. I myself was a serial cheater for the early part of my sex life. It seemed like an acceptable thing to do since pretty much everyone I knew was also doing it. But some part of me cheated because I was afraid to be cheated on.

  In a perfect world, there would be millions of different iterations of a good marriage. I think that if there was more than one socially accepted blueprint for a good marriage, maybe people could talk openly and stop being embarrassed or ashamed if their marriage functions outside the traditional ideology—or if their marriage is not functioning because they’re trying to stick with a template that isn’t working for them.

  Take polygamy, for example. Early marriage was not at all opposed to polygamy. Personally, I’m intrigued by the concept. When I was a guest on Extra promoting my show The Conversation, I met the stars of Sister Wives in the greenroom. I hadn’t seen the show but was fascinated once I discovered who they were.

  “So you three are married to him?” I asked. “How does that work? Do y
ou have children together? How do you explain that to your children? And what happens if he likes to stay in her bed instead of your bed, do you not get your feelings hurt? Do you have threesomes?” (They don’t.) Polygamy is not for me, but I know a few people who swear by it. Same with open marriages, two people who are into having multiple partners. I knew a guy who was in a relationship with a man and a woman, and they all lived together, a straight woman, a bisexual man, and a gay man. Actually, now that I think about it, that sounds completely exhausting; I can just about make time for one husband.

  I should also take a moment to say that even though the prevailing cultural climate perpetuates the message that a woman isn’t complete without a man, the whole idea that you’re not whole or capable of genuine happiness unless you’re married has done a massive disservice to women. Also, it’s simply not reality.

  In her powerful book All the Single Ladies, Rebecca Traister reported that single women are currently the most powerful political and cultural force in America.

  No kidding.

  Many women are waiting longer to get married by choice. Gone are the days when the first thing a woman considers when she meets a guy is whether or not he’ll be able to put a roof over her head. I know many young women who provide a more than good life for themselves and look at potential mates through the lens of “What are you adding to my already pretty awesome life?” And they’re not averse to staying unattached for as long as it takes to meet someone who meets their standard.

  This raises the bar for men.

  Their paycheck is no longer enough to excuse a boring or obnoxious personality. If they’re interested in a woman who has her own life and means of support, who’s looking for a true partner, they’re going to have to bring it and then some.

  Culturally we’re slowly beginning to acknowledge that getting hitched is not the only option for ladies. Of course, this makes many people nervous.