Okay Fine Whatever

by Courtenay Hameister

  Now my stomach looks bad. I’ll go back to position one and just deal with the shitty thighs.

  I could straddle him, maybe? But then I’ll have eight chins when I look down, and my belly will look doughy and I’ll have to hold my boobs up.

  I could maybe give him a blow job and avoid the whole…oh, okay…he’s on my boobs now. The boobs have never done that much for me sexually, but it’s nice, I guess. Okay, he’s spending some serious time on the boobs. Should I say something? I won’t say anything. That’d break the mood. But what if this works out between us? It’s not like ten years down the road I can say, “Oh, by the way, my boobs have never really been a big erogenous zone for me. I don’t know if it’s a surface-area problem or what; I mean, it’s pleasant, but it’s not, like, earth-shattering.” And then he’d say, “I spent a lot of time on your boobs. Now I can never get that boob time back!” And I’d say, “Oh yeah, well, give me all that ball time back! At least boobs are pleasant to be around, but balls? Disgusting!” And he’d say, “Oh, now you’re attacking my balls! I knew this would get personal!” And I’d say, “I’m not attacking your balls, I’m attacking balls in general, which I think we can agree are not attractive!” And he’d say, “But I shaved them for you!” And I’d say, “Yeah, doesn’t really help. Ever see one of those hairless dogs? Those things are not cute.” And he’d say, “You’re comparing my balls to a hairless dog?” And I’d say, “Look, I don’t want to have this argument with you…in my head…while we’re having sex…ten years ago.” Wait…why am I imagining a fight we’re going to have in ten years? Oh, because he’s been on my boobs for the past five minutes. Right. Okay. I have to distract him.

  Blow job!

  And it goes on from there.

  So you can imagine that if there was anything I could do to increase my odds of not getting distracted by self-conscious brain chatter during sex, I would do it.

  Which is why a Brazilian seemed like the perfect addition to the Okay Fine Whatever Project. Maybe it’d give me a bit more self-confidence. A little…vaginal flair, so to speak.

  I’d never had one before, largely because of the aforementioned years of singlehood. Well, that and the fact that I have a low threshold for pain and don’t enjoy strangers having unfettered access to my hoo-ha. (I’m not ashamed of my vagina; it’s perfectly average, I think, based on a reasonably small sample size. It’s just that it’s one of a couple of private areas on my body where private things happen privately.)

  But this was the Year of Doing Uncomfortable Shit™ and maybe if I had the most perfectly coiffed vagina in the world, it would help boost my confidence and quiet my brain a little. So I made an appointment with a place called Wax On Spa, partly because it was specifically recommended for its Brazilians and partly because I dug the Karate Kid reference and thought that a sense of humor might be a great thing for your bikini waxer to have.

  In case you’re unfamiliar with it, a Brazilian is where you have all the hair waxed off your pubic area, including your perineum and everything behind it, leaving only a tiny “landing strip” of hair right in the middle of your pudenda.

  Yep. That’s what I signed up for.

  I walked into the bright, industrial space at Wax On and was simultaneously put at ease and terrified by the snifter of tequila on the table in front of me. It managed to signal both Hey, we’re fun and casual about this! and This is going hurt like a motherfucker.

  Then I met Laurie, an affable young redhead who has been doing Brazilians for over a decade. Laurie had spent much of her career in Vegas, which I would imagine is the Brazilian capital of the world.

  Laurie led me to my own private waxing area, and on the way I passed a room with one of those Obama Hope posters on the wall. I was glad I wasn’t in that room, since the experience would’ve been even more surreal with the president looking aspirationally between my legs.4

  The poster seemed a little out of place, but when you think about it, getting a Brazilian is a hopeful act for many, like keeping your house clean just in case friends drop by unexpectedly.

  Laurie had me undress completely below the belt and gave me the tiniest towel ever made to cover up with, which was kinda funny considering what her vantage point was about to be, but I’m sure she did a lot of things just to help people manage the humiliation. If it makes a person feel better to have her vagina covered by a washcloth prior to someone sticking her face five inches from it, so be it.

  She explained to me that she was going to use a wooden tongue-depressor-like tool to spread wax on me, then she would press small strips of fabric onto the wax and rip out all my hair from the roots.

  Which I agreed to.

  Which begs the question, Why do I hate my vagina so much?

  I kid. I don’t hate my vagina. But I sure do have a weird way of showing it how much I love it.

  Laurie was really honest about the pain—she said that of course she couldn’t tell me that it wouldn’t hurt, but she said the pain was manageable, which it was, largely. Until the very end.

  I’m not sure how other Brazilian artists do it, but Laurie worked from the outside in, which I’m sure she did to ease people into the experience, but for me that meant going from the least amount of pain to the most.

  I won’t get too graphic, but the clitoral hood sort of has its own hood, and there’s actually hair on the inside of that. I would have her skip that next time. I’d have her skip the whole middle area, really, because the pain got so much worse the closer she got to…central booking. It was like the difference between getting your eyebrows plucked and being impaled on an iron fence.

  But that’s just me. I’m a person who doesn’t want my beauty regime to cause me more pain than a standard dental cleaning.

  Laurie said it always hurts the most the first time. (There’s another experience involving the vagina that this is true of as well…what is it again?) After that, the hairs become finer and therefore less stubborn. Plus I’d imagine that after the first time, a woman knows what she’s in for, so she takes twelve whiskey shots or two hydrocodone or sits on a giant ice block to prepare. Now that I think about it, I have seen a resurgence in old-timey icehouses. I thought it was just another Portland hipster thing, but now I get it.

  The experience is made even stranger when you have the same casual chitchat you’d have with your hairstylist or manicurist with someone who’s staring at a part of your body even you feel uncomfortable looking at.

  It’s like when your gynecologist asks you what you did last weekend while she performs a pap smear. It’s just not a position that’s conducive to opening up. Ironically.

  As far as the result, as much as I hate to admit it, it felt pretty great. The skin on your labia is incredibly soft, and with the right pair of silky underwear rubbing up against your business, you can feel borderline Paltrowian.5

  So I almost understand why women do it. Almost.

  I aspire to brain-chatter-free sex, I really do. But in practice, the amount of sexual confidence I gained from my new vaginal haircut couldn’t nearly make up for thirty-plus years of constantly comparing myself to an unrealistic feminine ideal and saying horrible things to myself for not meeting it. Not that I thought it would.

  If someone invented a pill that would keep women from thinking about what their bodies looked like during sex, they would make more money for the sexual-industrial complex than Hugh Hefner did in his entire career. In a day.6

  Ultimately, I know it’s not really about needing a pill. It’s about recognizing that the person you’re with is obviously attracted to you in some way or he or she wouldn’t be on top of you. Or beside you. Or behind you, or wherever you enjoy having your business worked on.7 So let go and let Gordon or Jim or Jenny or whoever it is do what he or she does. And you do what you do, without worrying about what your belly looks like while you’re doing it. Because no one else is. I can almost guarantee it.

  This is all to say, I suppose, that I’m not getting another Brazilian.


  Mostly because of all the reasons I’ve outlined here, but also because, after all of this, it struck me that my choices about the amount of hair I subtract from or add to my pubic area actually affects the person I’m dating more than it affects me. I mean, my face will never be down there unless I get much better at yoga. So if I end up dating a person who’s just wildly turned on by vaginas with little sideways Hitler mustaches, then I’ll consider it. Otherwise, probably not.

  So I learned where I stand on bikini-area grooming, and it led me to pen the following, which I hope will change the world of pubic-hair care for the better. Please pass it along to your sisters.

  An Open Letter to Women

  Getting Brazilians

  And Ruining It for the Rest of Us

  Hey, ladies.

  Listen, I get it.

  There’s a lot of pressure out there to appear attractive, so I understand the desire to pluck things and shellac things and even use a wand to apply coats of paraffin, methyl cellulose, and pigmentation to the hair around your eyeballs to make it appear thicker and longer.

  No, it’s not your fault that our culture has decided that women’s eyeballs don’t have enough hair around them and other parts have too much hair, but even so, I think you’ve gone too far on this one.

  I understand that it’s complicated down there, and that, in an ideal world, we should make it as simple as possible for others to navigate what can be a dark and confusing place.

  But in the same way we currently regret previous generations’ razing the rain forests, the women of the future will regret today’s women’s personal rain-forest razing—seeing it as an era when we could’ve saved ourselves a lot of pain but chose not to.

  Maybe you feel like we’re already galloping down the waxing road and it’s too late to turn back. Not true. Our culture’s hair decisions are clearly arbitrary and reversible. We’ve moved on from Burt Reynolds’s mustache and the dark days of 1980s claw bangs, but we’ve also gone back and reembraced the muttonchop and the pixie cut. That means we can go back to a simpler, more accepting time when Afros were all the rage. Everywhere.

  This is about creating a new cultural contract, one that says: We all want to be attractive, but we also agree that our personal-hygiene rituals should never trigger a fight-or-flight response.

  Women can do this if we band together. All we have to do is decide, as a gender, that pain hurts and we will no longer pay seventy dollars to have another woman tell us about her boyfriend’s weird mole while ripping hair out of a spot we don’t even allow ourselves to look at because, frankly, it resembles the alien from Alien, and nature has provided natural cover for it, which we should use. And men can make the same contract with other men about hair on their backs and chests and balls (which we’ve already established are also alien-y), and we can become a culture of happy, furry people, indistinguishable from our prehistoric ancestors aside from the cell phones and rampant narcissism.

  We will go back to our roots, which we will also stop dyeing!

  Eventually.

  When I’m ready.

  And we’ll be content. Until we find something else to feel terrible about. Which will be really, really soon.

  Thank you.

  1 If by detritus, they mean “men who require their girlfriends to get their vaginas waxed before they have sex with them,” they may be right. Well done, pubic hair!

  2 A merkin is a pubic wig, worn a few centuries ago by people who had to shave their pubic areas to combat lice or by prostitutes to hide the evidence of an STD. Now they’re worn by actors in films so they appear nude when in actuality their nethers are covered. This is largely because full-frontal nudity sends their pay through the roof, and also because actors live for exposure, just not that much.

  3 Before the entire internet comes at me: I realize fat women are normal. But I’ve been fat my entire adult life, and regardless of how many self-help books I read or how many feminist affirmations I memorize, I will never feel normal, because “normal” is portrayed in the media as a size I will never come close to. And I could stop consuming media in protest, but then what would I do to avoid writing?

  4 This was prior to the 2016 election, which I don’t really want to go into here except to say “Gross.”

  5 Is there a celebrity who feels as amazing as Gwyneth does about her vagina? I don’t think so.

  6 Booze does this to a degree but it’s not effective enough, and too much of it leads to a very sticky nonconsent issue that we won’t get into here because it’s not well suited to the fun romp of a reading experience my publisher hopes you are having.

  7 Yes, sometimes people sleep with you when they’re not really attracted to you, but if that’s happening on a regular basis, you have bigger problems than body issues and should seek help. For realsies.

  Adventures in Dating II

  Summer, the Season of Underboob and Back-of-Knee Sweat

  I reactivated my OkCupid profile in May and had a few decent encounters that helped usher me back into the dating world.

  There was an insanely smart truck driver who bought me a really delicious cheese plate and somehow made traveling around the country alone sound appealing. There was a guy who worked for public radio that I was excited to meet because we obviously had some shared interests, but I learned as he talked (and talked and talked) that common interests do not equal compatibility. And then there was the sex addict who I didn’t end up sleeping with because engaging in codependent behavior on first meeting someone seems ill-advised.

  What follows are just a few other highlights of summer.

  First Date #11, Early May: Outdoorsy Guy

  While you’re thinking what a jerk I am for putting men into a spreadsheet, it may comfort you to know that once I hit May, the guy with the highest score so far ended up giving me the comeuppance I deserved, largely because I’d left off possibly the most important category of all: Totally and Completely Not into Me.

  I only went on a single date with him, but I found him incredibly intriguing. He was laidback, attractive in a burly “Chris Pratt circa early Parks and Rec” kind of way, and disarmingly easy to talk to.

  His job was to climb the tallest trees in Oregon and measure them. I couldn’t believe that was even a job, which is why he became my first 10 in the Interesting Job category.

  He was available only during the day on a Saturday, which in retrospect was a clear indication that he wasn’t that interested. People who date a lot usually reserve their prime dating times (evenings, especially weekend evenings) for top-tier prospects. But I failed to spot the red flag.

  We met at an ice cream parlor, which is a little problematic on a date due to the whole licking-while-talking issue, but we dealt with it.

  We talked about how sexy we both found Tina Fey and about how he got into his line of work, and he told me that tree lovers are hiding the world’s tallest trees from the public.

  “What do you mean, hiding them?” I asked.

  “Well, they’ve found them, but they’re not going to tell anyone where they are.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because people are dicks?” he said.

  “That’s accurate,” I said. “But seriously.”

  “No, seriously,” he said. “The tallest tree in the world is somewhere in Redwood National Park—it’s three hundred and seventy-nine feet tall and nicknamed Hyperion, but because people can’t resist turning trees into tourist traps and then possibly killing them, they’ll never reveal where it is. There are more trees like this than you might imagine.”

  My favorite dates were where I both enjoyed myself and learned a fun fact to use at cocktail parties, so I considered our date a raging success.

  He texted me after the date to thank me for being “funny and cool.” I told him it was no problem.

  We bantered over texts for a week or so—with me initiating most of the time—but he never mentioned wanting to see me again, and then he was just gone.

>   When I look back on it, I can’t believe I thought we were compatible. Yes, talking to him was a pleasure, but almost every one of his profile pictures was of him somewhere high up, near a tree or in a tree or—my personal favorite—dangling on a hammock attached with carabiners to the side of a cliff.

  This guy engaged in my worst nightmare for fun, but because I’d had a lovely time chatting with him, I somehow concluded we should date. It was the same situation as the verbal Instagram filter I’d used with Text Guy; it’s just that in the case of Outdoorsy Guy, I was blinded to the wild incompatibility of our daily lives by our conviviality and his ability to offer me NPR-quality cocktail-party fodder.

  It was just one date, but I was definitely disappointed when he ghosted me.1 Turns out, I didn’t need more than one date for it to sting when I found out that I rated lower on someone’s figurative spreadsheet than he did on my literal one.

  Lessons Learned: REI has a co-op membership program; tree people have to hide trees to keep the public from turning them into garbage-laden World’s Largest Ball of Yarn–style roadside attractions; and I should not date people whose favorite thing to do makes me dizzy when I think about it.

  First Date #14, Early July: White-Linen-Suit Guy

  I met White-Linen-Suit Guy at a sweet little hole-in-the-wall taqueria in the Alberta Arts District.

  He was an artist and a stockbroker, which I thought was an unusual combination, but that’s only because I use the fact that I’m a right-brain type to excuse my own financial ineptitude.

  All I knew about him before we met was the stockbroker part, which made the white-linen suit a little jarring. (I guess I was expecting pinstripes, not something out of a Tennessee Williams play.) He was about five foot ten, quite tan for someone living in Portland, and had the authentic smile and easygoing affect of a real live hippie. He was also wearing a fedora.