Bearded Lady (Kindle Single)

by Mara Altman

  Many women suffered gruesome disfigurement, scarring, ulceration, cancer and death all because of the extreme pressure to become hairless. The women who were adversely affected were dubbed the “North American Hiroshima Maidens,” named after the women who suffered radiation poisoning after the nuclear bombs hit Japan in WWII. To some women, hairlessness has literally been worth dying for. As depressing as that was, I kind of admired it.

  Maggie brought her hands to her mouth and her eyes got big. “That’s a monstrosity!” she said. “That’s bat-shit crazy.”

  “Mags,” I said, “I think I would have been one of those chicks. I would have stuck my face right into some radioactivity.”

  Clearly, I still had some issues.

  ***

  I kept calling up many academics for information. Oh, who am I kidding? I was calling them for comfort.

  Bessie Rigakos, a sociology professor at Marian University, has studied why women remove their body hair for the past eight years. Her biggest challenge in finding answers has been that she cannot find a big enough portion of women who don’t remove body hair to use as a control group in her studies.

  Before volunteering for her next study, I began with the basics. Why do we remove our body hair?

  “I research hair removal,” she said, “and I do it myself and I still don’t know why we do it, which is amazing.”

  I felt better already.

  She went on to say there are so many factors involved that she just can’t pinpoint which is exactly the cause. “I wish I had the answer,” she said. “Is society controlling it or are women controlling it?”

  Keep going, Bessie. I’m wondering the same thing myself.

  One thing she definitely believes is that hair removal gives women positive feedback, and is thus a positive force. “Just like how when kids pee in the potty, they are rewarded,” Rigakos said, “when women adhere to beauty standards, then they are rewarded in society.” Somehow that analogy lost me, and I hung up the phone with Rigakos just as uncertain as before, but at least I felt academic validation in my uncertainty. Rigakos had a doctoral degree in hair-removal studies from Oxford, or something like that.

  Next, I called up Breanne Fahs, a professor of gender studies at Arizona State University. Fahs was incredibly passionate on the subject and spoke rapidly. Which was good, because I was getting married in less than three months and needed some quick answers.

  “It’s amazing how people imagine hair removal is a choice and not a cultural requirement,” she said. “If they say it’s a choice, I say try not doing it and then tell me what you think.”

  “What would happen?” I asked.

  She said the practice of growing body hair can be so intense that it can show women how marginalizing it is to live as an “Other.” By “other,” she means growing hair will give you a taste of what it’s like to be queer, fat or have disabilities. “You experience this tidal wave of negative appraisals of your body,” she explained.

  “How do you think it came to be this way?” I asked.

  “At the root of this is misogyny,” she said. “It’s a patriarchal culture that doesn’t want powerful women. We want frail women who are stripped of their power.”

  She explained that in Western culture men are fundamentally threatened by women’s power, and eroticize women who look like little girls. “We don’t like women in this culture,” she said. “Pubic-hair removal is especially egregious. It’s done to transform women into prepubescent girls. We defend it and say it’s not about that, that it’s about comfort. They say they don’t want their partner to go down on them and get a hair stuck between their teeth as if that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to them.”

  When I got off the phone with her, I’ll admit I felt pretty tense. She made hair removal sound like it was the beginning of the end of this civilization. I didn’t need that kind of responsibility.

  ***

  I needed to know if there were any reasons why, evolutionarily speaking, humans might be more attracted to hairlessness. I have to acknowledge that during my reading, I did find evidence that even though hair removal wasn’t popular in early America, it has happened on and off for as long as humans have existed. Archeologists believe that humans have removed facial hair since prehistoric times, pushing the edges of two shells or rocks together to tweeze. The ancient Turks may have been the first to remove hair with a chemical, somewhere between 4000 and 3000 BC. They used a substance called rhumsa, which was made with arsenic trisulphide, quicklime and starch. In The Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, author Victoria Sherrow explains that women in ancient Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire removed most body hair, using pumice stones, razors, tweezers and depilatory creams. Greeks felt pubic hair was “uncivilized” — they sometimes removed it by singeing it off with a burning lamp. Romans were less likely to put their genitals in such peril, and instead used plucking and depilatory creams. When in Rome...

  That means that though I’d like to place all the blame on advertisers, maybe they were just jumping on an inherently human trait, and exploiting it legitimately.

  I called up anthropologist Nina Jablonski, a professor at Penn State, to find out if there would be any reason, evolutionarily speaking, why women might be viewed as more attractive when they are hairless.

  “Things that are considered to be attractive are also most childlike,” she said, “and hairlessness is something we associate with youth, children and naked infants.”

  She obviously hadn’t seen my baby pictures.

  Jablonski went on to explain that women who are considered attractive often have facial attributes that exaggerate youthfulness and are reminiscent of children — thinner jaws, longer foreheads, big eyes relative to the rest of the face, plump lips, small nose and shorter distance between mouths and chin.

  “In MRI studies, a huge part of the brain indicates affection, love and an outpouring of positive emotion when a person lays eyes on a child,” she said, “So these same responses could be elicited in a man when he sees a woman with childlike attributes.”

  Interesting, I thought — but I didn’t particularly like to hear it. I was suddenly starting to feel like I might want to embrace my natural state at last, and didn’t want evolution to get in the way of what was considered beautiful.

  So I asked Jablonski why facial hair on a woman is more taboo than any other hair on the body — taboo to the point that we not only hide it, but hide that we got rid of it. I was hoping that her answer might help me at last divulge my darkest secret to Dave.

  First, she assured me that having some facial hair in women was normal.

  That was a fabulous and very comforting start to her answer.

  She went on to explain that it’s because the follicles on men and women’s upper lip are more sensitive to androgen and especially testosterone. She said that “peach fuzz” is seen on the upper lip of a pubescent male as his testosterone ramps up and before the appearance of the larger-diameter hairs of the mustache and beard. Because women also have androgen, though at lower levels than a male, peach fuzz also develops on their upper lip.

  “That is the normal state in many mature women,” said Jablonski.

  So my mustache that I flipped out about as a high school junior was actually a normal symptom of puberty? Sweet! Though a little late.

  But wait. Jablonski then noted that there remained reasons why women would feel compelled to get rid of it.

  First, she offered the obvious notion that most women don’t want to be mistaken for a pubescent male.

  “It gives mixed sexual signals,” she said.

  Mixed?

  Second, she said that women, as they get older, have more androgens and fewer estrogens.

  “Facial hair becomes more visible and less ‘peachy’ as women age,” she said. “And they get even more obsessed with removing it because they want to look ever more youthful.”

  So basically, I gathered that women with less facial hair appear
younger and since more facial hair is correlated with menopause and therefore a higher age, having less could essentially give signals of continued fertility.

  Got that?

  And isn’t that the driving force of humans and all animals, really? We’re all in this, theoretically, to reproduce, right? So maybe, from a strictly academic perspective, I’d been getting rid of my face hairs all this time so that men would see me as a qualified baby maker before I’d even really consciously thought about if I wanted to make babies myself.

  Now I was hopelessly confused.

  ***

  The next day, I was talking to my friend Erin. I was finding that as I researched hair, I was becoming desensitized to the taboo and could speak more freely about my own hair issues, so I ended up telling her about my latest chin hair.

  Erin, much to my delight, admitted to having some chin hairs, too. “I discovered back in high school while I was in math class,” she said, bringing her hand to her chin. “I was just thumbing my chin like this and then there was this little thing.”

  She had discussed the hair with two of her friends who also had chin hair and they had employed one another to be emergency pluckers if one ever fell into a coma or became otherwise incapacitated.

  “Seriously?” I said.

  I was somewhat astonished, but also pleased to know that I wasn’t alone — in the chin hairs or even more unexpectedly, in the ongoing fear-of-coma scenario.

  Over the next couple weeks, I interviewed close to twenty women about their body hair, of whom more than a few also had a plan in place for their strays if they ever were not able to pluck on their own. For some, the surrogate plucker was their mother. For others, it was a sister or a friend. So far, I haven’t heard of the position being filled by a husband or boyfriend.

  It felt good to know that I wasn’t alone, but it also bothered me to know that so many of us lived in such fear that our biological side would show. It was bad enough that we occasionally had to be seen in natural sunlight.

  ***

  So on November 14th, I began growing out my body hair. I contemplated growing the chin hairs, too, but I figured that I would probably incur some minor to medium psychological damage as a result. I wasn’t substantially practiced in the Zen arts of shrugging off contemptuous remarks. Even a friend, Ali, warned me, “Don’t do it for your own mental health.” Ali and I actually had a lot in common. She was so freaked out about her own hair that her husband didn’t know she uses Nair on her face or bleaches her arms. Her biggest fear is that when she has a baby, her husband will probably see her breastfeeding in daylight. “He’ll see my boobs and they are going to be so sore so I don’t know if I’ll be able to pluck,” she said, “and does it bother your child if there are weird hairs there?”

  Nothing really dramatic occurred as the hair grew in. It was sparser than I’d expected. My legs were not particularly hirsute, popping up with fine dark hair about a quarter to a half-inch long. They looked the way a wood floor at a salon would look after a stylist had trimmed a balding man. The armpits, however, came in fuller. They developed a brown fuzz, which was surprisingly soft. Sometimes when I reached my arms upward, I thought I’d spotted something — like a rodent — out of the periphery, but then when I swung my head back to look, I’d remember that it had actually been my new armpit locks.

  I felt some anxiety about going to yoga and the gym — where my legs and underarms would most be on display — wondering what people were going to think of me. But mostly I felt like a rebel. I wanted someone to say something and I wanted to defend my choice, but no one even seemed to look in my direction. Only once did I see two girls laugh and point at my armpits. I was self-conscious about it, but I also felt a little relieved. All these years of hair angst haven’t been for nothing. People actually can be judgmental schmucks!

  The absolute coolest thing — and it wasn’t actually that cool — was when I stood naked in front of a full-length mirror with my arms raised and noticed that with the hair under my arms, it looked like I had two decoy vaginas. I suspected that, somehow, those were used to much advantage during our cave woman days.

  The empowerment that I’d hope would come, though — it just didn’t. A lot of the time I just felt hairy, and everything was a little worse for it:

  The dishes are dirty... and I’m hairy.

  Something is rotten in the fridge... and I’m hairy.

  I have no money... and I’m hairy.

  I felt like my body was morphing outside of its jurisdiction — crisp lines were suddenly blurring. I was a coloring book and a little kid was coloring outside the markings. My eyebrows broke free from their usual shape and simultaneously were trying to visit my hairline and my nose. How did Frida do it? To feel momentary relief, I’d visit the Hairtostay.com website, which calls itself the “World’s only Magazine for Lovers of Natural Hairy and Hirsute Women.” It’s part female hair fetish porn site and part positive hair treatise. You can do everything from have hairy phone sex to peruse articles such as the one titled “Are Hairy Legs a Deterrent to Crime?” It wasn’t to commiserate with other hairy women that I went there, though. I went to stare at ladies that were hairier than me, so that I’d feel smooth for a change.

  It was finally December — time for my family’s annual vacation together. This year we were going to Southeast Asia, land of genetically hairless women. Right before we left, I bought a box of Sally Johnson pre-wax strips (that addiction had never evaporated) and ripped off my happy trail. I couldn’t take it anymore. And once it was torn off, I actually felt like I could breathe deeper.

  I was soon in Cambodia with my family. When we went to Angkor Wat, a temple complex from the 12th century, I asked my tour guide, Vutta, how Cambodians felt about women and body hair. “They don’t do anything to the hair,” he said. “Well, actually, they don’t really have the hair.”

  “So no waxing or shaving?”

  “Actually, the girls want to have light skin like you.”

  “But if they get light skin, they will have the hair that comes along with it.”

  “To be honest,” Vutta said, “the people here believe that a girl with the hair is lucky. She can get a better life. A better husband.”

  “Really?” I said. That was the most hair-positive belief I’d heard, probably ever.

  “But it’s not true,” he said. “They just believe it. We are so behind in our economy and society because people believe silly superstitions like that.”

  “So it’s not lucky to have hair?”

  “Not any more lucky than not having hair.”

  “Oh.”

  At this point, I began to think I was actually journeying backwards.

  ***

  On the final day, I got one of my legs threaded on the beach in Vietnam. I did it as an experiment. I’d never done threading on anything except my face before. Besides, the woman who did the threading had been chasing me for the past three days, pinching my hairy legs as I passed. I sat down on a little platform that she had propped up in the sand; it was about five feet from the water. I was shielded from the sun by a big umbrella. The hair, by this time, was about a half-inch long. The woman wound the thread around her hand and put one part of the loop in her mouth. She twisted the thread and then bent down and started ripping out my hair. It felt like a pack of mice were sinking their jaws into my skin over and over again. I grabbed at the sheet covering the platform below me. I felt the sweat slide down my arm as I yelled “Ouch!” again and again and again. She leaned over me and after each time I said ‘ouch’ she said, “No ouch later, later beautiful.”

  I was amazed that the same hairless aesthetic prevailed on the other side of the world.

  I quit after half of one leg. I couldn’t handle the pain. A razor seemed so much more humane. I was also having trouble letting go of the hair. I hadn’t come to an understanding with my body hair, yet. That is, I still didn’t really like it. I felt guilty for favoring my leg without the hair, being so thrilled w
ith how smooth it looked, that is until I sat down and spoke to my mother. I’d been putting it off, but it was time since it was our last day of the trip. She would be going back to California and I would be heading back to New York.

  My Mom and Dad were sitting on wooden chaise lounges on the beach. My Mom was in sunglasses, a hat and bathing suit, comfortably showing off her legs and pits. They weren’t as intense as I remembered them. I don’t think an astronaut would be able to see them from space, which is how I used to feel when she’d pick me up after school, waving for me to come with her tank tops on. I sat down beside her, crossing my hairless leg under the hairy other one. “So, were you guys bummed when I started shaving?”

  “I wasn’t that happy about it,” said my Dad. “Natural is better, but it’s your business. I just thought it might be a problem for you later, get you on the wrong track.”

  “Which track?” I asked.

  “Well, you cut your hair and they branch and then you cut it again and they branch.”

  “Are you thinking about pruning trees?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s how I see it.”

  I’d always assumed that my Mom didn’t shave because of her radical self-acceptance — and I yearned to be like that, to accept myself in my All Natural state — but we never really had a conversation about it before, so she elaborated. “I got into the politics,” she said. “I also read a lot of Zen and Buddhist texts and it really felt like accepting who I was more important to me than looking a certain way for society.”

  As she said that, something clicked for me that hadn’t before. I realized that if she was so into accepting who she was and all the hair she had, then why did she bleach her mustache hair? They seemed to contradict each other.

  “Well, if you’re so Zen and comfortable with yourself,” I said, “then why do you wax your upper lip?”