Gross Anatomy

by Mara Altman

  It couldn’t have been very healthy, but I wasn’t thinking about that then. I had one goal in mind: complete eradication. I’d ride home on the back of a motorcycle taxi and stay home for the night, until the swelling had receded.

  I should have realized that there was a problem. I’ve always been kind of cheap. For example, I won’t pay ten bucks for a sandwich that would give me nutrition and probably pleasure—six is my top price—but I could somehow rationalize spending a thousand dollars for someone to fry my face.

  On my last visit, they elevated the laser a bit too high and it burned my upper lip. I still have the scar. It’s about the size of a raindrop. When I’m cold, it turns white.

  When people ask where I got the scar, I tell them, “One time I was making soup—some sort of bean stew—and it was boiling so wildly that it splattered me. . . . Yeah, just like that, third-degree burn. Crazy, right?”

  Yeah, right.

  It was embarrassing to admit that I made myself look worse by trying to look better. It still is.

  Even right now.

  Yep, still embarrassing.

  But not only was I embarrassed; I also felt ashamed. I was back to being that kid poised with the lint remover over my leg—feeling equal shame for having hair as for getting rid of it. Why couldn’t I just be okay with who I was? Why was I spending so much money and time hiding myself?

  But if you thought I’d stop it with the laser after realizing all that, then you haven’t been reading this very closely.

  * * *

  Two years later, in the middle of my second laser treatment back in New York, I began to consider the possibility of a medical problem. I felt like I was fighting a rare battle—but I wasn’t sure because, theoretically, if other women were like me, it would be a battle fought alone and behind closed doors. If other women were waging it, I wouldn’t know. But then again, could any of them have so many wanton whiskers? This couldn’t be what was supposed to be happening to a woman’s body.

  So I went to my gyno for a follicular assessment and possible intervention.

  Unfortunately, she had some bad news for me: I was normal. She explained that there are three common reasons for unusual quantities of hair on women. They either have polycystic ovaries or hormone imbalances, or they were simply born with hairy genes. “Many Eastern Europeans have a lot of dark, thick hair,” Dr. Chrisomalis said. I could have sworn that she was examining my chin as she spoke.

  A waxer once told me that she knows what she’s about to deal with before people even take off their pants because the eyebrows reveal everything. Why couldn’t my doc just check out my eyes, then?

  “But it’s got to be something else,” I pleaded. I’d recently contemplated the possibility that I’d hit early menopause—there had been some hot flashes, I’m pretty sure—and I’d never given up that early idea that I might be part man. I speculated now that my nuts just hadn’t descended yet. “I’ve got hair even on my . . .”

  But I couldn’t tell a medical professional about the nipple hair. And what would be the point, anyway? I’d plucked that morning especially for her.

  “I don’t think you have PCOS,” she said. “Other symptoms are weight gain and acne, but if it’d make you feel better, we can do some tests and maybe some blood work on your hormone levels.”

  She extracted some of my blood and scheduled me for an ultrasound. That actually got me a tiny bit excited. It would be awesome if something was medically wrong. I’d be officially diagnosed and on my way to a cure. I could stop going crazy.

  But the ultrasound revealed nothing wrong with my ovaries. No cysts. There weren’t even any hidden male gonads. When my gyno got back to me about the blood tests, she said that all my hormone levels were normal.

  “Normal? Are you sure?”

  “Totally normal.”

  So my doctor was telling me it’s normal to be a hairy beast. I was relieved, terrified, and lost.

  * * *

  I couldn’t quit the laser. I continued treatments at a place called American Laser, on Broadway near Twenty-second Street in Manhattan. In the waiting room, they had magazines like People and OK! in a pile. I think they put them there for a reason; they wanted me to look at Kim Kardashian’s poreless and follicle-free face and get turned on about having my body blasted with a machine I didn’t understand in the slightest.

  I dislike those magazines and think of them as vapid and a waste of time, but that’s only because I can get sucked into them for hours and I always end up feeling guilty about my desire to know how many hours a day Angelina leaves her kids with the nanny, instead of using my time to start understanding the crumbling economy.

  So I’d get into the laser-treatment room, conjure the hair-free cover girl, and tell the laser lady to put the damn thing on the highest they could without causing my face permanent damage.

  “It’s going to hurt,” she’d say.

  “I don’t care,” I’d say.

  “Tell me if it’s too high.”

  “It’s not high enough!”

  Hair brought out a little bit of psycho in me. I never acted like that anywhere else, except for maybe when I’m baking. (I get really bossy when I’m baking.)

  The American Laser office was in the same building as a casting agency. Sometimes on the elevator ride up, I’d pretend to mouth some scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire and reapply ChapStick in the mirror so that no one would suspect that I was actually lasering.

  No, silly, I’m not hairy. I’m an actress.

  I also kept it from the guy, Dave, whom I’d started dating in 2008. I would throw away the laser appointment cards so that he couldn’t find them and instead use code—“lunch with Leslie” or just an exclamation point—when I wrote down the appointment in my calendar.

  When I moved in with him in 2010, a whole new challenge emerged. Close quarters put my secret in jeopardy. I carried out my depilatory duties like they were a covert Navy SEAL operation. I had extra razors and tweezers in my gym bag and purse and hidden in bathroom corners. Mixed martial arts fights were my saving grace. Dave would be attached to the couch for hours at a time, watching hairless men grapple each other, while my stainless-steel Tweezerman and I got it on in the bathroom. If Dave asked what I was doing in there for so long, I’d tell him I was picking at pimples or that the milk in my coffee was working its way through my intestines. That usually shut him up.

  The point is, I’d rather have Dave think I was shitting than plucking. His knowing that I was so hairy would have rendered me faulty, almost broken—like he’d driven off with a lemon from the used-car showroom. But I also yearned for him to know and accept me as I was. I realize it doesn’t help our relationship that the only thing I can think about when we cuddle is how to position myself to keep him from seeing any stray hair that might break free. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t even be writing this if we weren’t already engaged. Publicly divulging my hairiness during my dating years would have ruined my ratings on Jdate and Match.com.

  You can’t sell a car by pointing out the jagged, deep dent on the driver’s side.

  I hate that I feel that way, but there it is.

  And as long as I’m talking about things I hate—this is a little off the point, but you know what always kills me? It kills me when girls compliment my eyebrows, because in the aughts, eyebrows with girth came back into fashion. “Wow, they’re so nice and thick. I wish I had those,” friends would say. The compliments are always by women who are fair-skinned and light-haired. I’ve never had a thick-browed lady say one thing about my eyebrows. You know why? Because they know the behind-the-scenes story. If any of those light-haired ladies knew what those two caterpillar-shaped suckers actually meant, they’d back away from the situation with their hands up.

  Anyway, I kept up the laser treatments for three years.

  After my last appointment, I asked to speak to the office manager.

  “It didn’t work,” I said.

  I wanted my chin as h
airless as a piece of polished granite or my money back. Even though I knew the truth—that 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 three 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.

  I knew 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, contemplating 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 an 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 a 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 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 the image of downy blond 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. It’s because of people like Muir that I’ve put myself through so much hair-removal pain over the past fifteen 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 blond. I could feel it. Or maybe Cambodian.

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

  I knew what Muir was talking about. I’d just recently experienced my first Brazilian 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.

  Ultimately, it felt strange not having hair there. At one time I had been so proud of the hair 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, back to Cindy Barshop, who 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 City. That means she is tall and skinny, with a lot of cheekbone and full 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 toward some practical information I could use.

  She looked up from her phone; she had been texting as I spoke. “What do you think?”

  I thought I wanted to shove Barshop’s phone down her throat. Instead I 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 wearing a matching velour hoodie-and-pants set from Juicy Couture.

  She then told me about a new hair-removal line that she’s coming out with for girls—eleven- to thirteen-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 blank
et of bare skin. At the same time, I found myself loathing everything she seemed to stand for; I couldn’t help coveting her hairlessness. I couldn’t see even one strand of fuzz anywhere on her. Did she douche 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 twenty pounds was the look, but I don’t think we’re going to regress back to that. We’ve evolved.”

  Barshop, throughout our interview, had continued to look down at her phone and text; she was doing it again. Right now.

  “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.