Why I Love Grey Pubes on a Woman

Cosmopolitan

3 days ago

Nine years ago, the summer of the Pulse nightclub shooting, I discovered my love of the silver bush on a built butch. We were one thousand miles north of the queer Orlando club, in a Manhattan apartment I was house sitting to supplement my intern's 'salary.' It's been nearly a decade since my initial introduction to greying pubes that summer night, but the mere suggestion of a silver streak still remains one of the fastest ways to turn me on. And in more recent years, as I've entered my 30s, what I first fell in love with on a former lover's body has become a secret weapon for falling in love with my own.
My knight in shining silver and I met up for the first time in Washington Square Park where, just 24 hours earlier, the Dyke March had spilled out of Fifth Avenue, transforming the park into our make-shift dance floor. It was 2016 and far from my first pride parade—I came out as lesbian in high school. But with 'One Dance' blasting, the fountain splashing, and glitter glitzing just weeks after the Pulse Massacre, it remains the most impassioned one I've ever been part of.
Equal parts hungry and horny, I looped the spitting mouth masterpiece, hunting for the muscled frame I'd only ever seen, unclothed, on my phone screen. Later, when we were covered in sweat and cum and city, she'd tell me she'd used those moments before I spotted her as an excuse to watch how the animal of my body moved in real time.
Finally, I felt her—heard her. A 'hi' in my ear, a thick hand on my lower back, a smile more smirk than sugar. Finally, her.
With the same urgency that marked that entire summer, I took her back to the brownstone I was babysitting and we fucked on the first date. Although, with the 'mine' and 'yours' braided in between our every 'on,' 'under,' and 'now,' I've always thought it might be more accurate to say we made love in the Manhattan moonlight.
On account of my recent arrival to the city and her upcoming departure (she was days away from a West Coast relocation), we intended our romance to be a one-night stand. For her, a last hoorah, a happy ending. For me, a chance to be with someone older, established—to have the kind of May-December relationship I didn't need to see in Babygirl or The Idea of You to know I'd enjoy. But chemistry quickly consumed self-control and our one-night fling became a full-blown age-gap relationship.
In fragments as horny as Anne Carson and as incessant as Sam Delaney, I confessed my love for the visual markers of our 13-year age difference: 'I want to lick your crows feet, feel my tongue caress the creases. I'm going to braid my hands through your hair, spot the silvers while you swallow my cum.'
'If you like the silvers that speckle my scalp,' she responded, 'you'll love the ones I can grow between my legs.'
The next time I saw her, my older lover sported a silver-streaked bush where she'd previously been bare, just for me. I wanted to feel each buttery bristle against every pink part of me—and I did. Again and again. For the remainder of our love affair, each time we met up, she came to me like that: grey, glistening, and gloriously mine.
Eventually our fling ended, as the most fiery ones always do. But even today, our sex life continues to have a lasting impact on my desires. So while my silver-bush kink might have bloomed in a specific moment in my personal and queer history, my love of grey pubes remains.
This affinity for grey pubes has not only encouraged me to date people across multiple decades (fun!), but as I gradually begin to transition from hot bisexual babe to queer elder, I suspect this formative experience of eroticizing my lover's greying pubes has helped me embrace my own signs of aging.
Over the past few years, with my 30th birthday in the rearview mirror, I've started to notice a few such signs. Smile lines that linger when I've stopped giggling. A neck creak that creeps in while giving cunnilingus if my lover's hips aren't sufficiently lifted. Fingers that fatigue before I'm finished, well, finishing.
Certainly, there are moments when I miss the smooth skin and endurance that marked my sex life of a decade ago. But just as often, the passing dawn of my youth makes me think of her—and I feel hot.
But more than just hot, I feel as hungry and horny for my own body as I once was for that salt-and-peppered summer fling. My early experience of loving someone older for all her wisdom and wiry greys, as it turns out, has become a kind of blueprint for admiring my own gradually aging body.
'The only exposure most of us have to sex in middle and later age is Viagra commercials and jokes about 'undesirable' older bodies,' says sex therapist Stefani Goerlich, a kink expert and author of With Sprinkles On Top: Everything Vanilla People and Their Kinky Partners Need to Know to Communicate, Explore, and Connect. '[This] can leave us to internalize the false message that our erotic lives are over the minute we get our first grey hair or pube.' But when we can find specific signs of aging in our past or present partners that turn us on, Goerlich says, we're better able to see ourselves as sexy and desirable when similar changes occur in our own bodies.
Joan Price, the 81-year-old author of several senior sex books including Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex, agrees. 'Accepting—and even celebrating—your partners' bodies for the delights they give you can help you celebrate your own, which is ultimately key to a spicy sex life throughout a lifetime.'
Will my love of grey pubes alone dismantle the ageist rhetoric about good sex—especially in queer spaces? Probably not. But that won't stop those silver tufts from starring in my fantasies, or from reminding me of those unforgettable summer nights with my silver-bushed butch.