I nodded vigorously. “I know. I blame porn for giving us this crisis. Why can’t it just be like the seventies when it was normal to have a bush? It’s going to be so expensive to get waxes all the time.”
“Yes, and men will never know the pain we go through,” she said darkly. “It definitely has a lot to do with porn and I guess the whole Hollywood industry thing too. Like, all the glam people in films have pubeless vaginas.”
“Exactly,” I cried out. “And, even worse, lingerie ads. They always have pictures of women in lacy underwear with nothing but skin showing underneath. I mean, when I was, like, thirteen, I assumed that’s how all women naturally were and that I was a complete freak for having this growing mass of hair.”
She laughed. “No way! I had that exact thought when I watched my first porno. Although, to be fair, as much as I blame porn for doing this to us, it definitely came in useful in Year Eight.”
“For what?” I asked curiously.
“Well, to know what a penis looked like,” she said matter-of-factly. “Did you not do that? I thought everyone did. I mean, how are you going to know how to give a blow job if you don’t research it?”
I had a flashback of my Bite Job and nodded. “I totally feel your pain. I wish I’d thought to look at porn—I really fucked up when I first tried.”
“Trust me, you weren’t the only one,” she consoled.
“You bit him too?” I blurted out.
She burst out laughing. “That’s amazing. It’s definitely going in the vlog. I didn’t bite my guy but I’d heard you were meant to cup the balls with your hands while you did it, and I definitely cupped way harder than you’re meant to. In fact, I squeezed them so hard he almost fainted and lost his boner immediately.”
I laughed but made a mental note to be careful about cupping balls.
“I know . . . thirteen-year-old me was very embarrassing,” she said. “In fact, I remember when I was even younger and people used to talk about blow jobs. I had no idea what they were. I actually thought that a blow job meant you had to blow into a guy’s penis to make it bigger . . .”
Emma was thirteen when she gave her first blow job? A full four years younger than I was, and she’d clearly managed to do it more than once. I really had been a late bloomer.
“Well, as always, I can beat you on the embarrassing scales,” I replied. “When I first heard about a blow job I thought it meant blow-drying a guy’s pubes.”
Emma howled with laughter and rolled back onto the cushions next to me. “Ellie, that’s . . . that’s so . . . Just, why would you even think that?!”
“No one ever told me what it was,” I said. “I just used my very literal intuition. In the same way I did with most sexual stuff. It’s just not the sort of knowledge you can get from romcoms or wherever.”
“Fuck romcoms,” she said with such forceful assurance that I gulped on the green tea I was sipping. “They’re all lies, and I’m so bored of the whole scenario where the pretty girl gets burned by a guy, then gets a personality, a makeover and some confidence and then he comes crawling back. That’s not realistic.”
I nodded enthusiastically. “Yes! Where’s the rejection and the humiliation? That’s the stuff I can relate to, not amazing book deals that come out of nowhere and random trips to Hollywood. Chick lit these days is just as bad.”
“I know, right?” she replied passionately. “Okay, I like to read Bridget Jones as much as the next person, and I used to love the Shopaholic books, but what is with the sickening happy endings? And these perfect men—where the fuck did they come from?”
“Yeah, and did you ever read those teenage novels? The ones about snogging and first boyfriends . . . I mean, seriously. These girls just know exactly what to do with a guy—their only dilemma is whether to lose their virginity or not—and they seem to never have a shortage of whom to pick. I mean, my friends and I were discussing in major detail how to give hand jobs while these fictional girls magically knew exactly what to do.”
Emma laughed. “You’re so right. This is all going to be such great material for the vlog. It doesn’t even feel like work—although it will look so productive on our CVs. Except maybe we should do it anonymously. What do you think?”
“There is no way I can put that on my CV,” I said firmly. “Anon is definitely the way forward.”
“What if we just use our initials? So you can be EK and I’ll be EM.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “That’s doable.”