“Cool, so shall we get back to CEO words?”
I shook my head at her. “SEO words. Let’s just keep it simple. I’m thinking we set it up and pick a standard template for the layout. Then we can just do a post whenever and add more stuff as we go along. Sound good?”
“Sounds perfect,” she said, and grinned.
The Virgin Entry
Welcome to our vlog.
If you’ve clicked on our About Us, you will know that a vlog is a blog for people with vaginas, or anyone who wants to read about them. But before we start delving into the depths of our vaginas, we should introduce ourselves. We are—anonymously, because we’re discussing our sex lives (or lack thereof)—EK and EM.
EK is a twenty-one-year-old virgin who isn’t sure why she hasn’t lost her V-plates yet and desperately wants to. She is not religious, she’s not waiting till she is married, she’s not waiting for The One, she’s not expecting her deflowerer to propose immediately and she’s not frigid. She is just unlucky.
EM is twenty-four years old and the opposite of a virgin. She proudly calls herself a slut and is on a campaign to rid the S-word of its negative connotations and make it unisex: i.e., “Oh my God, they’re such sluts. Cool.”
There you have it. One of us is a virgin and one of us is a slut. The two are not mutually exclusive and regardless of our experiences, we both have very similar views on the world of sex, virginity and vaginas. Ultimately, we’re both just twenty-first-century girls who grew up with Cosmo, Vogue, TV, Facebook and romcoms. We are part of the generation that has been seriously fucked up by media, but also the generation of women who have more opportunities than our mums and g’mas ever did.
So. This vlog is here for anyone who has ever felt temporarily panicked about anything related to a vagina. It is a website, a forum, a social network where you can see what we have to say about taboo topics that no magazine would dare to publish. We are not afraid to say what needs to be said. In the most graphic way we can think of.
So if ever you have felt confused/alone/upset/stressed/angry/worried because of something remotely sexual, we’re your girls. Whatever you’ve felt? We’ve felt worse.
Lying on my bed and staring up at the Peter Andre poster I had stuck on my ceiling at age eleven, I thought about my date with Jack. He had texted me with a firm plan for tomorrow. We were going to have dinner at a cheap sushi restaurant and go for drinks after. According to Emma, this meant that he was hoping to get lucky, so I should avoid the wasabi sauce because it was the Japanese equivalent of garlic. If having S-E-X was a possibility for tomorrow night, then I needed to be ready and sort out my VJ.
I groaned in misery at the thought of waxing (which seemed too painful to contemplate), braving the cream again (although this time I would have to leave it on for double the time) or accepting my doomed fate and going back to shaving.
Then I remembered the interlinked traumas of my cut vagina, itchy stubble and James Martell crying with laughter at my unshaven haven. I had to get a wax. I couldn’t blow it with Jack just because I didn’t like the thought of spending my student loan on an hour of excruciating pain.
Emma had recommended her thirty-pound-a-go salon but I was sure I could find one that did waxes a bit cheaper. I grabbed my laptop and started searching. Eventually I found a place in Bloomsbury that did a Brazilian for eighteen quid. That was pretty much half the price of Emma’s and it was near the British Museum so it wasn’t going to be a dodgy backstreet alley.
Feeling very proud of my thrifty self, I called up before I could lose my nerve and booked myself in for an afternoon appointment. That way I could go just before our date and have a perfectly smooth vag for Jack. Now all I needed to do was trim the damn thing.
The next day, I walked into the salon cautiously, pushing open the pink door and trying to ignore the tacky leaflets stuck all over it. It was a hairdresser’s salon on the ground floor and there was nobody at the reception desk, just a woman with a peroxide-blond head cutting a man’s hair on the other side of the room.
“Hiya, love. Give us a second,” she called out to me. “What is it you’re in for?”
“Um, a wax,” I replied, hoping I’d come to the right place.
“A Hollywood, is it?” she bellowed.
I blushed furiously and shook my head silently, praying she would stop speaking about waxes at the top of her voice. She seemed to take my hint because she put down her scissors and crossed the room to me. The man in the chair had turned around—showing himself to be Eastern European–looking and middle-aged—and was now watching the whole scene with an amused smile on his face. Fantastic.