One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
Page 14
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For me, hair has always meant shame, so imagine my surprise when girls and young women around the world started growing out their armpit hair—easily the worst hair to let go, except, maybe, facial hair—as some feminist aesthetic stance against the patriarchy. Lena Dunham was doing it, Miley Cyrus was doing it (and dyeing it), and it was the movement that launched a thousand online thinkpieces. It was heartening, somewhat, to watch young women take control over their bodies, to give a hearty fuck-you to Big Razor and let their forms be the way men have been permitted to be for centuries.
I considered it, briefly, the same way I consider getting an om tattoo once a year when I happen to drink a thick green juice. It’s the kind of feminist statement just subtle enough that you can pretend you’re following the status quo, until you wear a tank top and expose your true self: “You thought I was traditionally beautiful, but look at this feminist freak show I turned out to be! I’M GONNA EAT ALL MY BRAAAAS!” But I didn’t, the same way I don’t cut the hair on my head with much frequency and the same way I maniacally prune the hair on the rest of my body. Hair is a statement, but mine, mine is louder, darker, always less willing to go away. It says too much about me to be affected by mere trends.
How nice it must be to feel so free, so unburdened by the politics of your hair, that you can do whatever you want to it: shave it, cut it, dye it, or just let it exist, worry-free.
It’s easier to rebel against hair norms if you’re a woman generally unburdened by them in the first place. My hair—brown hair—is politicized in every direction. It’s either an unearthly glory, hair so perfect that people want to buy it in bags, or it’s an unholy and crude display of the most aggressive kind of femininity: the kind that doesn’t actually care about what you consider feminine. When Lena Dunham grows her armpit hair, it’s a stance, but not one with much weight. For it to really matter, for your rebellion to extend outside yourself, you have to have been born with hair-baggage—that nagging reminder that what comes out of your body naturally makes you repulsive, or tells people that you’re deserving of a slur, or that your sexuality can exist only in a specific vacuum of kink or generous acceptance. Black and brown women know this, in two different ways, but few others do. When Lena grows her body hair out, it’s a rebellion. When a brown woman does it, it’s a mutiny.
Because, see, I have a great head of hair. I’m prepared to be insecure about almost every part of my body—don’t get me started on my weird veins—but my hair is perfect. It’s long and thick and a perfect mix of rich chocolate brown and magic red lowlights. If I wash it, it’s soft and silky. It holds shape. It blow-dries perfectly straight, with a soft flip at the front. I have, in a word, pure-blooded Indian hair, the kind that other women turn into extensions, bleach into oblivion, and glue onto their scalps. My hair is perfect, and I know it’s perfect because women—usually white women—ask me how I make it perfect. Do you use a particular oil? they ask. What about dry shampoo, is that the secret? Who’s your hairdresser? I bet you drink a lot of coconut water. I once fell asleep on the bus only to wake up to a small child petting my head. She told me it was soft, “like a Barbie’s hair,” which might have been an insult but her hands were clean so I let her keep doing it.
But of course, the secret to Indian hair is merely to be Indian, to have decades of systemic racism, and fear of the other, and beauty anxiety, and fetishization, and repulsion woven into your roots. I mean, I use Amla oil too, but even that is a ploy from Indian cosmetic companies creating products that suggest you, too, could possess the sheen and strength and length that we got from our mothers, who got it from their mothers, and so on and so on. Mostly, it helps to be brown.
Nevertheless, my hair is perfect by a rigid and admittedly colonial standard only. The status quo leads us to believe thick hair is good, but only on your head, and if it’s light in colour, all the better. We like straight hair—frizzy or naturally curly hair scares us, namely on a non-white female body. Scariest of all, maybe, is the hair of black people, hair so unspeakably different that we think we are entitled to touch it in public. We scold black women for letting their natural hair grow out, or we tell them their braids or twists are “unprofessional” at work. Then we scold them for relaxing their locks or getting weaves, because you can’t win unless you were born with the “right” kind of hair. I believe my hair is perfect only because white girls and stupid boys have told me it is perfect. This is my physical worth. I am judged attractive only by what grows out of my head, and only when that is compared to hair we’ve decided is bad. The price, then, is “unwanted” hair everywhere else on my person.
I cut my hair infrequently. Maybe once every six or eight months. Recently, I cut six inches off and my hair was still long enough to graze my nipples. Regardless, when I saw the hair on the floor of my salon, I felt like Samson, like I had lost the only thing that made me powerful: my one traditionally acceptable beauty marker, gone. It’s as if the longer I go, the thicker the hair on my head is, the less white people will notice that the hair on the rest of my body is in a different universe. My “perfect” mane—by someone else’s standards, always—means I have an imperfect body, covered in dark fuzz. White girls like to admire how my hair is so silky that it braids without a comb, but rarely do they admire the way my hairline bleeds into my eyebrows, my tiny forehead wolverine-like and swarthy. Other women want my secrets to no split ends (the only answer that’s ever pleased them has been, “I don’t know, avocado?”), but if I let slip that I shave my entire face multiple times a week, I stop getting invited to parties.
In my grade eight biology class, our teacher gave us a checklist of dominant versus recessive alleles to teach us how babies come out looking the way they do. (The subtext from this particularly nationalistic teacher, clear to me only years later, was that we all end up looking darker and more “vague” than we did in the past. She wasn’t exactly unhappy about this, but did express some concern regarding the eventual loss of the blue eye and natural blond.) We were paired up with someone of the opposite sex so we could compare genes to determine what our potential child would look like. Let me really drive this home: a public school teacher in suburban Calgary told her teenage students to pretend they were going to have sex with each other and bear biologically likely babies. I was one of the only ethnic kids in the class. My genes were already steamrolling everyone else’s.
My partner, Eric, a white boy who was a Hollister T-shirt personified, went down the genetic checklist with me. When we arrived at “hair on fingers or knuckles,” I looked down at my hands for what seemed like the first time. Standing up from the meat of my fingers were soft, black strands of hair. I was horrified. How had I never noticed such a grotesque feature? I always knew my legs were hairy, my arms covered, my upper lip bristled enough to catch flies, but I had overlooked this new barbarity. “Well, I don’t have any,” Eric said, looking up at me while I hid my hands under the desk. I nodded and said, “Me neither,” and we moved on to eye colour—his, a brilliant green, would be trampled by my molasses saucers, another thing I could not hide. When I got home that afternoon, I shaved my fingers for the first time, cutting every single knuckle in the process.
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I am comfortable with, if not bored by, my hair routines as an adult. My armpits continue to wage war against themselves, requiring a shave once a day—more often if I really want to feel smooth and unblemished. Sometimes Hamhock will notice little sprouts of hair when I raise my arms, and will (lovingly, I assume) ask, “Did you shave today?” A normal person would just answer, but since I have typically shaved earlier that day and am already angry at the inevitability of my body, I’ll rage against him and call him weak and make fun of his beard and then rush to the bathroom to shave, again. Meanwhile, he will continue cooking, or cleaning, or reading, or doing whatever he was doing before he innocently asked a question that unpacked my worst instincts about my body. “I was just asking,” he’ll say when I return in tears. “I th
ink you’re pretty. I don’t know why you don’t.”
But at least it keeps me busy. I shave my sideburns, my jawline, and my upper lip so they don’t become more than fuzz. My legs need attention every two days, my knees a particular hotbed for pin-straight black pricks. I check my body for stray hairs that don’t belong, the way other women check for moles or lumps or hickeys. And Brazilian waxes were, for a very long time, a regimented appointment every five weeks. Here, I’d say, to a nice blond lady holding a tongue depressor covered in blue wax. Here is some money for you to put your face close to my vagina, so that I feel more comfortable with someone else doing the same thing for very different reasons.
I didn’t start getting Brazilians until my early twenties. How do you know where to stop with a Brazilian when the rest of your body is covered in hair anyway? Do I just get it waxed like a strawberry blond might, and hope that it doesn’t look like I walked into a controlled fire, labia first? Or do I just go for it, really invest, and pour wax over my entire body with the aim of making me as slick and supple as a condom with excellent eyebrows? (That’s the other great thing about my hair—it’s all over my face and body, but once I separate them, my brows deserve their own illuminated display case.)
My first waxer was May, a talkative flirt who owned a small salon near my apartment, next to a burrito joint. I liked her because she rambled on so much during our waxes that she’d wholly ignore every grunt and squeak and fart that would be squeezed out of my body every time she tore off another strip. “I’m going to Palm Springs!” she’d echo into my vagina, spreading wax on my lips. “It’s just me and my girls.” Then she’d rip off enough hair to build a plush hamster. I’d make a sound that resembled the air slowly being let out of a balloon, and she’d tell me about the hotel they booked. “It’s on the beach and I’m gonna have a mar-ga-riiii-taaaaa!” At least one of us was having fun.
Some women will tell you that waxing is either not as bad as they say, or some kind of necessity if you want to be a sexual creature. Frankly, it’s neither. It’s a painful procedure that can be mercifully quick with the right person, or dreadfully drawn out. And it’s not essential either: the internet and television and movies and the worst influences in your life will tell you that your viability as a sexual object relies solely on your willingness to interact with this exercise in “true” femininity. But those places can also demonstrate how varied womanhood or “femininity” actually is, how little being a woman has to do with what your body does naturally. And while I’m not a straight man, I have known enough of them to know that most of them are happy if your vagina doesn’t have any teeth.
Many of us women engage in traditional beauty practices for ourselves and ourselves only—my nails are filed sharp and painted bright for no one other than myself, and I wear painful shoes because I like stomping around like a powerful, wobbly giraffe—but plenty of other routines are lines we draw so that other people will consider us beautiful. Which is why it was so heartening to watch women grow out their pit hair, however briefly it lasted. At least they were pushing back against something they just didn’t want to do. At least they were having fun, and asking themselves, “Is there one good reason for me to do this? Do I do it for anyone other than the world outside of my body?” I liked it, even if I couldn’t do it.
The day after James pointed out my bushy arms in junior high, I considered adding arm-shaving to my already lengthy list of hair upkeep. Most of my cousins did it, and they were all a decade older and objectively beautiful and lithe and touchable. (I once asked them where they stopped shaving, the arbitrary line that stops you from shearing your entire body. “Well it’s not like I have back hair,” my cousin said as I thought about all of my back hair.) Later that week, I ran a razor across a patch of my arm, leaving it frictionless and tanned and soft. That’s what was under there? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Look at how feminine and delicate I looked! There was hope for me to be beautiful and interesting and worthwhile.
I didn’t shave more of it off. I didn’t want James to know he had gotten to me, so I figured I’d wait until the summer, the way I did for my moustache and brows, so that everyone would just forget I ever had hair in the first place. In class, though, James noticed the bald patch on my forearm. He laughed. “Did you try shaving your arm because I told you that you were hairy?”
James works in finance now. He lives in Boston. We are all eventually punished for our sins.
I still shave my knuckles, a decade after first noticing the hair. I’ve mastered the art of tugging a razor across the meaty part of my finger, never going over it twice to avoid razor burn. I don’t cut myself as often as I used to. Maintaining this insecurity gets easier with every passing year. The hair never stops coming back, it never slows down, it never listens to me. It’s a quintessential encapsulation of running after an unattainable goal: we turned this basic fact about our bodies into something ugly.
I often wonder while I’m in the shower, running my razor across my fingers even if I don’t actually see any hair, what it is I’m trying to prove and to whom. That I’m a woman, a real, live woman with a Frequent Waxer card at Aroma Spa? That if I leave the house with knees that prickle, I’ll run into James, his still-hairless face grinning at me about how stupid I am for trying to pretend to be someone that I so clearly am not? He’ll tell me that I’m ugly, that I’m not worthy of being out in the sun, that I don’t deserve love or to be in the presence of a white boy like him, one who might like me even if I let my sideburns grow down my face.
Then I’ll cut myself, right on the joint, and the water swirling into the tub’s drain will run red.
—
At our last appointment, May welcomed me the way she always did, by mispronouncing my name (“Sketchy!”) and motioning me into a free room. I disrobed, briefly fretting about whatever scents or emulsions were coming from my body, before resigning myself to the fact that it was too late. She told me to lie down and leaned into me to examine her workspace, an overgrown garden she needed to hack at to make a delicate triangle or a heart or a sexy Hitler moustache.
“I’m going to Vegas with some of my girls in a few weeks!” she said, starting with the first strip. She ripped off sheet after sheet, and I only got a brief glimpse at what came off: my black hairs caught in golden wax, like bugs frozen in blocks of amber.
She was halfway through making me an acceptable woman, telling me about the suite she and her girlfriends would be renting, when she stopped midsentence. Her eyes glazed over and her breathing grew shallow. For a second, I thought she had ripped my clitoris clean off my body and I was too numbed to this process to even notice. “Are you okay?” I asked, propping myself up to look at her. I was bare from the waist down, a flap of wax paper still stuck to my body. With her right hand, she clutched her chest, and with the other, she levelled herself—by putting her hand down on my vagina. “I can’t breathe,” she said. “Just give me a second.” Of course, I thought. How could I leave you in a moment like this? You’re having chest pains and I’m not wearing any pants.
May politely excused herself (as politely as one can when having a medical emergency while a second party is naked on a table). Another woman came in to finish the job, and I left the salon $50 poorer and pretty sure that my hair had finally, unbelievably, killed someone.
When I hold Raisin—she is still small enough to hold, for now—she brushes my hair with her fingers. When she was even younger, she’d sit in my lap and pull my long hair over my face and yell, “I see you!” Younger than that still, I’d wave locks of my hair over her face while she was lying on a baby blanket, and she’d laugh and coo and try to pull it to her mouth. Now, she tells me things like, “Boo, your hair is too long, it’s getting all over me.” Hers is wild and curly and unmanageable, remarkably different from that of anyone on our side of the family. Her eyebrows are bold and will become thick like mine. I’m noticing soft light-brown hairs on her back that are darker each time I see her. I don’t know if sh
e’s noticed. Raisin is at that perfect age when she isn’t occupied with her own beauty because no one has yet told her to be. She hates it when you brush her hair; she likes it in a low ponytail, maybe tucked under a Blue Jays cap. I wonder if she’ll get our knuckle hair, our pubescent moustaches, our hairy toes and necks. I wonder if she’ll wish she had hair like mine, thick and long and black and ideal, while also thankful she didn’t get my arm hair, forehead hair, chin hair. Or maybe she will, and she’ll be thankful all the same.
After possibly murdering my waxer—it was, apparently, your garden variety panic attack and nothing more—I didn’t go back for a wax, any wax, for a few months. I gave my body a break; I let my hair grow wild and curl around me and build a protective cocoon of genetics. My pubic hair looked like a wise man’s beard, V-shaped and thick and all-knowing. I liked it, for once, because I was choosing it. It wasn’t an inexorable fact about my body, or an embarrassing oversight, or a quiet humiliation thanks to ethnicity or race or family history. It was just hair, hair that I let go, that I could feel indifferent about. I stuffed it in my underwear and carried it around to work and to dinner and to bars and to movies. Nothing bad happened, and months later, when I sheared it off, nothing bad happened then either.
But you know, no matter your self-love, it’s hard not to take someone’s shortness of breath, blurred vision, and chest tightness—all while hovering over your unkempt genitals—even the slightest bit personally.
Papa
You’re coming home tomorrow. Well, we have to find the good in everything, I suppose.