Since shaving is conventionally a female activity, it carries an added charge when men are shaved. It can be at once humiliating and enormously arousing. Many men enjoy shaving themselves in order to play with cross-dressing (dressing as a woman); hence I mention these two topics together. Shaving first.

How to shave? Use a sharp razor and a bowl of hot water; splash water over your leg (or wherever) and lather with shaving cream. Then shave with the direction of the hair (i.e. shave down the leg towards the ankle, or shave from the navel towards the crotch); going against the direction of the hair can lead to ingrown hairs when it starts to grow back. Shave with short strokes, dipping the razor frequently in the bowl to remove the hair. If you shave only seldom, you may go through a couple of razor blades doing your legs alone.

Some people who shave infrequently use an electric razor first to remove most of the hair, then a hand razor for the remainder and on the sensitive areas. (Electric razors tend to pull hair, and they are most annoying on genitals.) Some people swear by waxing (using sticky wax to pull hair out) or by other non-shaving methods of hair removal; to each their own. Shaving can be part of a scene; I've seen many gay-male SM movies with big male tops forcibly shaving their prisoners, and I've also seen dominatrixes washing then shaving their bottom's asses. (It's hard to reach back there yourself, and being bound while a razor gently strokes your most sensitive region is...well... very intense!) Then once they're shaven, you can go on to all sorts of other fun.

About crossdressing: many men enjoy dressing in female clothes, either because the clothes feel good, look good, or are humiliating to wear. Whatever the reason, there's no doubt that lots of people enjoy this sort of thing. Makeup is often part of this sort of play, as well. Many women also enjoy dressing up as men; switching gender roles can open up a vast range of possibilities. Some people call this "gender- fuck" -- i.e. fucking with one's perceptions of gender, or fucking someone who's assuming a different gender, or both.

There is a spectrum of attitudes among those who play like this. Some just enjoy wearing opposite-sex clothes because they feel nice. Some fantasize about actually being a person of the opposite sex, and use those fantasies in their scenes. Some people want to take it to the point of going out in public dressed as, and acting like, the other gender so accurately that they pass--i.e. are mistaken for the gender that they're assuming. They may find doing this enjoyable because of the fun in faking people out, and/or the thrill of successfully transforming oneself into one's fantasy image.

Some people actually feel that their biological sex is fundamentally at odds with the gender they feel themselves to be. They may feel like a man who happened to be born with a woman's body, or vice versa. These people are known as transsexuals, and may have operations to change their bodies and genitals to more closely correspond to the gender they most identify with.

Transsexuals are still very widely stigmatized; it is not easy to live in this very gender-based and sex-role-oriented society if you don't conform to the standard pattern, and transsexuals definitely do not. And while many of the kinds of genderfuck I mentioned are "play," transsexuals are not playing; their gender identity is a vitally serious issue to them. (Though when they want to play, there are few people who know more about it).

It's important to realize that these groups of people are distinct; just because a man enjoys wearing panties underneath his business suit does not mean he has any desire to get a sex change operation. As with all aspects of human sexuality, gender and gender play encompasses a wide array of levels, and honest communication is the only way to know what a particular person is into.

Gender play can be combined with all the other things in this list to create some extraordinarily powerful sex magic. As always, listen to your desires, decide how much you actually want to make real (and how quickly), communicate, and play!

*****
Copyright Rob Jellinghaus. Reprinted with permission. For more information on bondage topics, visit the Bondage FAQ at http://tpe.com/asbfaq_i.html.