Bearded Lady (Kindle Single)

by Mara Altman

  Anyway, I kept up the laser treatments until about six months ago. After my last appointment, I asked to speak to the office manager.

  “It didn’t work,” I said.

  I wanted my chin as hairless as a piece of polished granite or my money back. Even though I knew the truth — that while laser can be very good for dark hair — pubic, armpit, man beard, — as it targets the melanin in the follicle, it has a much harder time getting rid of fine and lighter hair like the gang of strays I had on my face.

  “Well, the face is a very stubborn place,” the office manager said. “We always tell all our clients that. If you want, we can sign you up for another treatment.”

  “Why should I sign up for another treatment when it didn’t work after two and a half years?”

  “The face is a very stubborn place,” she reiterated.

  “If it’s stubborn, why should I do more laser?”

  “It takes time,” she said. “The face is stubborn.”

  I stared at her. Then she giggled.

  “Why are you laughing?” I asked.

  She straightened her posture and relaxed her mouth.

  “This is not funny,” I said, raising my voice. “I’m. Still. Hairy!”

  I got up and walked out without finishing the conversation. I left that place knowing that I couldn’t go back, but kind of wishing I could lock myself in one of their treatment rooms and shoot the laser at my face until the SWAT team came and ejected me.

  Sick. I know that I was sick, but I didn’t know of any other way to become comfortable with myself besides burning my skin off with a weapon.

  ***

  So over the months since the doctor’s appointment and my last laser session, I was in a hair purgatory, not knowing my next move. Instead of just going moment to moment, working to eradicate each hair as it surfaced — though I did that, too — I began thinking more about this odd irony: To be a complete woman, I felt as though I had to get rid of a part of myself. But why? Why does there have to be all this shame and angst about something that’s a natural part of being woman? The pressure to be hairless has driven me to feel like I have to hide something from my fiancé, to spend thousands of dollars, to even feel less worthy than my female peers. For years I’ve been pretending that I don’t have something that I quite clearly have. That takes a lot of energy.

  I like getting answers to questions, so I pretended to be an objective reporter and called up Allure Magazine. I asked to speak with the beauty editor, Heather Muir. To be honest, I disliked Heather before I even spoke to her. I disliked her because of what she represented, and also because her name conjured up the image of downy soft blonde hair on her thighs, the sort one doesn’t even have to shave. Also, even if I might follow some beauty customs set forth by magazines like Muir’s, I’m generally opposed to people imposing their subjective view on millions of women. I’m not usually into the Nazi analogies, but if the boot fits... It’s because of people like Muir that I’ve put myself through so much pain removing my hair over the past 15 years that if I experienced it all at once, it would likely be lethal.

  “Overall you want to be presenting yourself as really groomed and well-kept and unwanted hair falls in that category,” Muir explained. “Maintain and take care of it to look your best and be polished.”

  Listening to her kind of made me want to strangle myself.

  “Why do you think we get rid of our hair?” I asked, trying desperately not to slam the phone down.

  “We do it to feel better about ourselves,” she said. “And so we’re more socially accepted.”

  This chick was definitely blonde. I could feel it. Or maybe Cambodian.

  Muir used the actress comedian Mo’Nique, who showed up with hairy legs at the Golden Globes in 2010, as a warning. “It was so taboo and people were embarrassed and laughing,” Muir explained. “She’s an example of ‘Oh my gosh, I never want to be that girl.’”

  Muir began talking about trends for the bikini and she quoted Cindy Barshop, who founded and runs the Completely Bare salons, which Barshop named after her own initials. The salons specialize in laser hair removal. Barshop was most recently in the news for PETA’s condemnation of her new fox fur merkins (also known as pubic wigs). Yes, in a paradoxical move, she wants you to rip off your own fur and then glue colorful feathers and animal fur to your genitals.

  I knew what she was talking about. I’d just recently experienced my first full-on bikini wax. It was for Dave’s birthday in October. I waxed everything off for him, except for a small triangular shape (the formal term, I suppose, would be Landing Strip).

  He liked it. A lot.

  I got upset that he liked it.

  “What, you don’t like it when I’m natural? When I’m me ... all me?”

  “I like that, too,” he said. “I like you every way you come.”

  “It seems like you like this more.”

  “Weren’t you doing it for my birthday because you knew that I’d like it?”

  “Yeah, but …”

  That’s when I realized — wait, actually, I realized nothing. I’d endured yet another painful ritual, but for reasons I couldn’t explain to my boyfriend or to myself. I just felt strange not having hair there. I’d always been so proud of it and then it was gone and its disappearance appreciated. I didn’t feel like I had a vagina anymore; now it was a baby bird — pink and freshly broken out of its shell — that I’d stuffed down my pants and was suffocating between my legs. Besides, I never realized until I was bare how useful the hair had been over the years when I’d find myself in the shower without a loofah. If the muff could do one thing — and it can do more than one thing — it could make a really nice lather.

  I thought I was enterprising with my lather trick until I read in The Naked Woman by Desmond Morris, about a tribe living on the Bismarck Archipelago in the South Pacific who used their pubic hair to wipe off their hands whenever they were dirty or damp. In the same way “as we are accustomed to using towels.”

  The most horrific thing, though, about the wax was when the pubic hair grew back. It looked like mange, and felt like chicken pox.

  ***

  So, Cindy Barshop is basically the Queen of Clean. If Allure and other beauty magazines were using her as a source — as much as it made me fear for the future of America and the mental health of all the hairy women who populate it — for fairness’ sake I needed to go see this woman at her Fifth Avenue location, to hear her side of the story.

  Barshop was on Season 4 of The Real Housewives of New York. That meant she was tall, skinny, with a lot of cheekbone and inflated lips. I had issues with her on principle.

  “It’s fashion,” Barshop said, sitting in the back office of her salon, a corner sectioned off with French doors from the baroque-inspired waiting room. “I mean, we all know it. A woman should have no hair on her face. It should be groomed and nowhere else do you want to see hair. I mean, no one says, ‘Oh okay, let’s have hairy arms. That looks great.’”

  But I would! I would totally say that!

  “Do you ever think it’s okay to have a unibrow?” I asked. I did have arm hair, and wanted to steer this supposedly objective interview towards some practical information I could use.

  She looked up from the phone; she had been texting as I spoke.

  “What do you think?”

  I thought I wanted to shove Barshop’s phone down her throat.

  I then skipped to my next question.

  “And the bikini?”

  “Completely bare,” she said, “That’s really where it’s gone.”

  “So what does that mean as far as landing strips are concerned?”

  “That’s so old,” she said, laughing.

  “How old is that?”

  “Must be five to seven years old.”

  “Oh, I just got one.”

  Silence.

  And in that soundless gap, Barshop had managed to tell me that my vagina was so out of style that it was basically wearin
g a matching velour hoodie and pant set from Juicy Couture.

  She then told me about a new hair-removal line that she’s coming out with for young girls — 11- to 13-year-olds — to safely remove their hair at camp. At this point in the conversation, I began to fixate on her upper lip. I couldn’t stop. It was this perfectly smooth blanket of bare skin. At the same time I found myself loathing everything she seemed to stand for; I couldn’t help but covet her hairlessness. I couldn’t see even one strand of fuzz anywhere on her. I wondered if she even douched with laser.

  I finally asked the malevolent woman if she feels good about what she does. I left out the part of my question that went "...destroying the minds and values of millions of women everywhere.”

  “I don’t really think of that very often,” she said. Finally, an answer that I could believe! “But yes, because having hair on your face or somewhere else not great is a very emotional thing. If you’re uncomfortable, you withdraw. So yeah, I feel good about what we do.”

  The truth is that I understood what she was talking about. I’ve felt the same way. But I wondered if she thought our society could ever become hair-friendly enough to eliminate the discomfort.

  “I just can’t imagine it,” she said, stroking her hairless chin. “It’s like saying being heavy is better... it’s the same thing. Like it used to be okay, having an extra 20 pounds was the look, but I don’t think we’re going to regress back to that. We’ve evolved.”

  Barshop looked just about ready to puke at my ridiculous questions.

  “I can tell you want to go,” I said, summoning politeness from some deep recess of my rage.

  “Oh you’re so sweet,” she said.

  No I’m not, Cindy. I actually hate you a little bit.

  Cindy was, truly, the nemesis of a woman’s ability to choose. She’s the type of person who narrows beauty into such a small space that hardly anyone can fit in; she makes us hate ourselves. Now, when I look in the mirror and feel misery about the ugly strays straddling my chin, I realize it’s her eyes that I’m looking through.

  ***

  When I got back to the street, I mumbled angry somethings as I looked down at my arm hair. I was so insecure that that one little comment about arm hair could make me question the past 30 years of keeping it. I didn’t want to pretend that I didn’t give a shit anymore; I wanted to be like my Mom and really not give a shit. As I mulled that over, I went to run some errands. I ended up at Aveda to grab some shampoo. While there, I noticed some dark hairs — like wiry mutton chops — on the lady’s face who was helping me and I was thinking: See, Cindy Barshop, she can live with it. Right on, you go lady with cheek hairs! Empowered hairy ladies rule! Then I went all retroactive on myself and started thinking, but does she know about that? Should I tell her about her cheek hairs? She must want to know about those cheek hairs. I mean, she couldn’t have actually wanted them there, right?

  “You want some tea?” she asked. Aveda gives you free tea.

  “No no,” I said, backing away. “I don’t want tea.”

  I managed to keep my mouth shut.

  Even though I have weird hairs, I couldn’t help but be judgmental about other women’s weird hairs.

  I realized that it happens all the time. When I see a lady in the street with a mustache — the same mustache I could easily grow (except for that scarred part that doesn’t grow hair anymore) — the thoughts in my head are so shitty. It goes from, Right on, you nonconformist powerful woman to I’ll totally let you borrow ten bucks so that you can take care of that.

  I don’t like that my brain does that. I really don’t.

  I wondered if I was any better than Muir and Barshop.

  ***

  When I got back home, I realized how incapable I was of realigning my thoughts. I’d have to be hypnotized or brainwashed to think hairy was okay. The revulsion felt so deep-rooted that I couldn’t help but find the strands more or less... well, yucky.

  While people like Muir and Barshop upheld the ideals of hairlessness and maybe even expanded on them (and I would continue to dislike them for that), they didn’t invent them. I took the next couple days to read some books and published studies on hair removal. I wanted to know when and why this idea of hairlessness as an ideal first got into our heads.

  I got really into it, blitzing those books with my highlighter. I found out that women’s hair removal isn’t even that old of a practice. The Europeans were hairy when they came over to America. Hairy colonies. Very hairy colonies. Even up to 100 years ago, women were letting it all hang naturally.

  The hair landscape started changing in the early 1900s when advertising became national via countrywide-distributed magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Harpers Bazaar, which along with touting Crisco and Kleenex, also began promoting clean-shaven pits.

  At the same time, women’s fashions were also changing. Sleeveless gowns became the rage and the hemline moved up from the ankle to mid-calf in 1915, eventually reaching just below the knee in 1927. Women were showing more skin than ever before, which meant they were also showing more hair.

  In 1915 began a period that historian Christine Hope labeled “The Great Underarm Campaign.” This is when advertisers got nasty. About a dozen companies, including King C. Gillette — who less than two decades earlier had come out with the first disposable razor — waged nothing less than a full-on character assassination on female underarm hair. In magazine ads, they used words to change the connotation, referring to the hair as “objectionable,” “unsightly,” “unwelcome,” “dirty” and “embarrassing.” On the other hand, hairless women were referred to as “attractive,” “womanly,” “sanitary,” “clean,” exquisite,” “modest” and “feminine.”

  Kirsten Hansen, in her 2007 Barnard doctoral thesis, Hair or Bare? — which I probably should have attempted to write myself as a school report in the ninth grade — explained that advertisers tried to relate outward cleanliness with inner character. “Advertisers invoked moral values like modesty and cleanliness that had been central to Victorian America,” she wrote, “and linked them to the modern value of exterior beauty.”

  I found the ads insanely horrible, yet quite psychologically compelling and to the point. One, in 1922, raised this pertinent question — “Can any woman afford to look masculine?” — and followed with this answer: “Positively not! And moreover there is no excuse for your having a single hair where it should not be.”

  The battle against leg hair came next, in a stage that Hope coined as “Coming to Terms with Leg Hair.” Leg-hair removal didn’t catch on quite so quickly, mostly because women could cover up their legs with stockings.

  The upper class adopted the trends first, as hairlessness had been marketed as a status symbol, but by the 1930s, the practice had trickled down to the middle class. The hairless leg deal was sealed during WWII, when stockings became scarce.

  These ads made me angry, but for some reason, these ads caught on; they must have spoken to something — an insecurity or lack or desire — because they stuck so profoundly.

  The idea that leg hair is gross is so ingrained that I’d even read a study that during puberty, twice as many girls as boys develop a fear of spiders. When asked to describe the spiders, girls more often than not depicted them as “nasty, hairy things.” This happens around the same time they start getting rid of their own body hair. Spiders! Sheesh.

  ***

  Why did we embrace hairlessness? When I spoke with Jennifer Scanlon, a women’s studies professor at Bowdoin and author of Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture, she told me said that woman shouldn’t be seen completely as victims of the advertisers.

  “Women had a role in this, too,” Scanlon said. That figured. She told me that women were searching for something at that time; they wanted self-esteem, sensuality and independence.

  “The culture wasn’t offering them these things,” Scanlon explained, “but advertisers did. They sa
id if you remove your armpit hair, you’re going to feel like a sensual being.”

  “So,” I said, “you’re saying that instead of hair removal, the advertisers could have just as easily been like, ‘Chicken livers are the answer. Rub these livers all over your body and you will feel sensual.’”

  “Yes,” Scanlon said, “it was about filling a need.”

  But the ads for leg hair and pit removal weren’t the worst thing I learned. When I met up with my friend Maggie one morning for coffee and a discussion of my reporting to date, I told her what was.

  “Dude, ladies irradiated themselves to remove hair!”

  “What?!” she said.

  I’d found out about it in an article written by Rebecca Herzig, a professor of gender studies at Bates College. When radiation, and more specifically the X-ray, was discovered in 1896, scientists found that besides killing carcinomas, it also eradicated hair. X-ray epilation clinics opened up all over the United States. By the early 1920’s, there were already reports that exposure to radiation could be dangerous. Yet clinics continued to stay open and offer the hair-removal service. By 1940, it was outlawed, so these radiation salons began operating via back alleys like illegal abortion clinics. The women were lured in by the “pain-free” procedure and kept there with the brochures that espoused everything from social acceptance to the socio-economic advancement that would come from obtaining “smooth, white, velvety skin.” They specifically targeted immigrant women who might feel marginalized due to their foreign (and hairier) origins, which I related to being a hairy Jew. Maggie understood; she’s a hairy Italian.