Two months ago, I decided to stop shaving all my body hair, to put down the razor and go au naturelle. My armpits have been left to their own devices, as have my legs, pubes, and eyebrows. So far, I have found it very liberating.

To explain how I reached this decision, it seems prudent to go right back to the beginning of my hair-removal career. I was 11 years old when the first wispy hairs began to curl from the nooks of my pre-pubescent armpits. No sooner had they tentatively sprouted than I was eager to obliterate them. I pleaded with my mother to let me use her Veet. I was so desperate to rid myself of something I thought had no rightful place upon my body, failing to see it as a perfectly natural phenomenon.

All I could think about was avoiding the impending embarrassment – boys and girls would all change for PE together in the classroom. Seeing me on the verge of tears, my mother agreed (despite her concerns that I was far too young) and the hair was promptly eradicated.

My pubic hair was to escape unscathed for a few more years. At 16, preparing myself for intimacy with my first boyfriend, I remember gazing down at my hitherto untouched curls of pubic hair whilst thinking of the images of  sexualised women I had encountered.

Invariably, they were hairless ‘down there’. With this in mind, I reached for the razor and shaved the whole lot off. When it was done I marvelled at the  smoothness, feeling quite proud of myself, despite the 10 minutes I then had to spend extracting the hairs lodged in the metal bit over the plughole. After that inaugural sexual encounter, the boyfriend mentioned that he would’ve been disgusted by the presence of pubic hair.

There was nothing more off-putting, apparently, than a “hairy minge”. My naive 16 year old self sighed with relief; thank god I had taken the initiative and met his expectations! This boy claimed that, “Hairy vaginas look…angry.” I think, in his mind, a hairy vagina stood for an angry, hairy, raging feminist. At the time I mutely nodded, still pleased with myself. The smug glow was not to last.

The following day, I had a long-haul flight to New York. I woke up itching not with excitement, but with an urgent burning sensation around my pubic area. Puzzled, I pulled off my underwear and discovered to my dismay that the previous day’s smoothness had been replaced by dozens of angry red bumps, the skin red and inflamed. I looked diseased. I slathered on Sudocreme, and prepared for a singularly uncomfortable eight hour flight.

I wish I could say that this put me off shaving for good; but alas my urge to satisfy my boyfriend’s expectations outweighed the discomfort. It was only relatively recently that I decided to give up shaving my body altogether. It’s expensive, painful and pointless.Whilst I understand that this does not apply to everyone, for me it is an arbitrary societal expectation. The person I’m with now doesn’t care either way. But what’s really important is that it is my choice whether I shave or not.

Hidden in a less than ideal location vaguely near the dining hall, the newly-opened Undercroft (also apparently known as the “Undie” or “Chundercroft” depending on which type of Christ Church student you are stuck in a  conversation with) is normally not accessible to non-college members, but the door was fortuitously propped open in semi-realistic hopes of attracting formalguests and rugby lads. As anticipated, the biggest deterrent was not Christ Church’s normally excessive security, but a combination of the bar’s quickly-garnered dismal reputation and the really quite dangerous cobblestones one must overcome to reach it.

I would have been concerned for the safety of its high-heeled patrons, had the bar ended up with more than six women in it at any given time during my visit. After finally entering, one finds the interior quite incongruous with the beautiful, traditional, elegant architecture of Tom Quad. The combination of arched stone ceilings, light wood furniture, and painted white walls was perhaps supposed to have a bright, Mediterranean feel, or at least a converted-church vibe similar to that of The Vaults & Garden Café on Radcliffe Square, but this looked tacky and mismatched without the presence of actual sunlight, an inevitable consequence of pub business hours and the cheaply frosted glass on the few, sparse windows. It took at least half an hour for me to remember that I wasn’t in a basement (or the Gladstone Link), an illusion only encouraged by the sickly green ultraviolet lights. Instead of adding a sense of history and grandeur, the ceilings thus only ruined the acoustics, echoing the sound of the badly placed speakers and flatscreens. Bizarrely, the few tables were largely placed directly beneath these TVs, so instead of being able to watch the very loud rugby, their occupants were forced to have their conversations interrupted by thenoise instead.

The unfriendly, humourless barman was unaware whether Christ Church had a college drink, but served me a gin and tonic. The toilet door was marked by three circles with different symbolic markers, from left to right, 80s bow-wearing Madonna lookalikes, people in wheelchairs, and then the one per cent in bow tie. Once inside, it seemed there were only disabled facilities for women (however, it must be said that the combination of stairs and cobblestones makes the bar not particularly wheelchair-accessible in itself).

As this bar lacks any redeeming quality, it may be worth instead going to Christ Church’s unofficial college bar, House, when trying to bag yourself a lover of the landed gentry classes.

My boxer friend had spent months weighing food, forgoing alcohol, and complaining  a lot. So this week, I found myself at the Varsity Boxing Competition. On learning he would be fighting near the end, we decided to head off to the Union Bar. Drinks clinked, and we sank rapidly into consuming a quantity of alcohol large enough to rival the Pacific Ocean. A housemate cried, “Does anyone want any Balti mix?”, swiping the pack from the bar and thrusting it around the hubbub.

Fortunately, just as the bar manager’s face swelled and turned bright red, my friend got called up for the fight. No drinks allowed inside. Drunken Bex waddled in with dismay. The fight began. Fists collided. I burrowed into jackets. And then it was over.

And then, time blurred and accelerated. Somehow, I was in purgatory. Minutes, maybe seconds, maybe hours, but at least not days, later, I, in the midst of intoxication, managed to recognise the true location of Hell – in Park End.

Are-We-Mates-Mate sat on a chair, staring into his hands as he moped, whilst the other guy, Mate-Who-Isn’t-Really-My-Mate-Either, glared at us in a similar fashion. People were screaming and shouting all around us and in a flash, I remembered the last time I went to Park End.

I had decided to wear shoes which I knew from the outset were broken and then claimed to have sat cross-legged on the floor, causing the heel to snap. Each time a friend attempted to help me up, I would look down at my shoe, and then sit once more, as if ashamed of my obvious lie.

But as I continued to fall into the abyss of resignation that is Park End, I suddenly decided that enough was enough. I left the two third-year-pseudo-mates, and fled. As I gasped for breath, restored to reality once more, I saw the Boxer and his girlfriend. The Boxer’s face, even with bruises and cuts from the evening’s sport, has never looked more angelic.

They soared towards me and I exhaled. Soon we were snugly walking, hand in hand. We pit-stopped at Hassan’s. Each holding polystyrene, we dozily began the final trail home. We popped our clams open. But mine didn’t contain the chicken nuggets I asked for. We turned to look at Hassan’s. The queue is huge. “There’s no point even trying,” said the Boxer. I look back down at my ten angry onion rings.

I guess awkward moments are something I specialise in by now. Running into ex-lovers in unsuitable places, whilst looking like I haven’t showered in weeks? Check. Running into girlfriends of ex-lovers and having nowhere to hide? Double check. But among all of the little mishaps that colour my adventurous sex life, nothing could ever be more awkward than having a hot make-out session interrupted by the horrified, gawping face of my tutor.

It all started perfectly normally. I was having an utterly average evening at the King’s Arms, which involved consuming obscene amounts of ale. It also involved a date, but the ale was more exciting. However, as the Cinderella hour slowly approached, I decided to give the chap a chance before the pub closed and kicked us out. That turned out to be a very good decision, as his tongue was definitely more skilled when mute. We went outside for a cigarette and just as he decided to demonstrate further to me his kissing prowess, I  caught the eye of my tutor standing in the doorway. His look was full of recognition and terror. It was obvious that spotting one of his lovely students being a leather-skirted sex vixen was not what he wanted out of his evening. Tutorials will never be the same again. The poor man said nothing and walkedback inside, and I promptly suggested moving the date to my room, away from the scene of the crime. The sex temporarily took my mind off the matter, but now it’s PANIC TIME.

I suppose it’s not immediately obvious why this bothers me so much. Yeah, my tutor saw me feel someone up, whatever. We’re all adults and it’s not a big deal. Rules of professionalism dictate that neither of us mentions this incident, and our lives will happily go on. Right? Yet just as you wouldn’t want your boss to see you in the throes of passion, you don’t necessarily want to be confronted with your tutor in a non-academic context. I want my private life to be somewhat private (and that’s why I write about it in a student paper, obviously), separated from any professional relationships. Unless a really hot academic wanted to fuck me. Then I’m game. But all in all, an elderly, extremely respected man who may be expected to write me a reference one day is not someone I want around when I’m committed to the serious business of seduction.

Of course, if he were really attractive, it’d be a different matter. One hears many tales of illicit tutor-student incidents. A female student may have been spotted getting hot and heavy with a tutor on the Cowley roundabout. I was once advised by a postgrad to ‘just go for it’ if I so fancied; a suggestion I didn’t take, mostly because I didn’t know how. Perhaps wearing a little leather skirt would have been a good start.