The subreddit r/TIFU is hard to describe because a lot of things could fall under the heading “today I f—ked up,” which is what the acronym stands for. Sometimes people share stories about getting into fights, messing with the law, accidentally killing their lawn or embarrassing themselves in front of a crush. There are a lot of ways to f—k up in this life.
Folks usually just share stories as a warning to others, occasionally for advice. Redditor u/BabyHooey just seemed to want to protect people from the mistakes he made in an overzealous moment of personal grooming.
He writes that he is a guy, who usually takes a “trim the grass but don’t scorch the earth” approach to shaving his body.
Whimsically, he decided one day to try and shave his whole ass. His story is about what a huge mistake that turned out to be:
I failed to take into consideration what a massive undertaking this would turn out to be. Even if you’re normal-sized, your butt is bigger than you think. It’s not like shaving your face, where there’s a relatively small amount of surface that needs actual shaving. A butt represents a decent-sized parcel of real estate. And even if you’re not super hairy, the hair is probably widespread, which means you probably have to shave the whole thing. With my face, I get maybe two or three swipes of the razor before I have to rinse off the blade.
With my butt, as it turns out, I get about half a swipe before the razor is full. And I mean full in a “rinse it off, oops that didn’t work, I guess I’m going to have to swipe backward against a washcloth or towel and then rinse it off some more” kind of a way. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to throw out this washcloth because even after washing it, it still has the appearance of my grandparents’ shag carpet.
He explains that he also had a difficult time thinking about which direction to swipe, since you can’t really look at your butt in the mirror the way you look at your face. And then he had to make a big decision:
Am I only shaving the outside? Or do I go, uh, between the pages? In my ongoing brilliance, I decided that shaving just the outer cheeks would only serve to make the inside appear that much hairier, so I parted the fold and continued inward. This, it turns out, is a different undertaking altogether. Skin that never sees the light of day is, understandably, much more sensitive.
Altogether, it took the OP about 45 minutes to do the deed. He had a brief moment of satisfaction, before ruining the next hour or so of his life:
Aftershave was a terrible, horrible idea. I only had a minute or two of enjoying my nice, smooth butt before I decided something along the lines of, “Now let’s make this smooth skin feel like someone set it on fire.” It took a solid half-hour for the burning sensation to subside. And by then, there was no real enjoyment over my achievement, just a relief that my ass no longer felt ablaze.
But all the problems with a shaved butt hadn’t yet revealed themselves. The OP has now discovered that his hairy crack was acting as a natural muffler. Now his flatulence is exposed:
You know how each of us sort of learns the best way to position yourself so you can stifle a fart? Shaving your butt changes all of that drastically. You will never fart quietly with a shaved butt, and I do mean never. About an hour or so after I had finished, I dropped a normal-sized fart without really thinking about it. The sound visibly startled me. It was like someone fired a machine gun in an echo chamber. Anyone within earshot will clearly hear the unmistakable sound of your butt cheeks slapping against each other.
And without hair to provide an easy exit, you will feel the little gas bubbles as they slowly work their way up your butt crack, like the carbonation bubbles on a Sprite that you’ve poured into a glass. Every fart since then has been a very similar experience, and I now suspect this will continue until the hair grows back.
As someone who waxes, I already knew this. What the OP hasn’t mentioned in this post, maybe because he hasn’t discovered it yet, is that he is in for a hellish, itchy, pokey experience as all that hair grows back in the next few days. Just wait! You f—ked up for sure!
A lot of comments are from people telling him to expect the butt itch and also offer advice for how to have a smooth butt and quiet farts:
The OP seems to be enjoying the Reddit notoriety, though he did write to people to stop PMing him for photo requests. His story is as much as he’ll share. He just wanted to help.
Thank you, good sir. Thank you.