Gross Anatomy

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 blanket 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.

When I got back to the street, I mumbled angry somethings as I looked down at my arm hair. I was so insecure that one little comment about arm hair could make me question the past thirty 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 muttonchops—on the face of the lady 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 them? 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 being 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 finding 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 of days to read some books and studies on hair removal. I wanted to know when and why this idea of hairlessness as an ideal first entered 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 one hundred 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 Harper’s Bazaar, which, along with touting Crisco and Kleenex, began promoting clean-shaven pits.

At the same time, women’s fashions were also changing. Sleeveless gowns became the rage, and the hemline moved from the ankle up to the 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.

The year 1915 began a period that historian Christine Hope labeled “The Great Underarm Campaign.” This is when advertisers got nasty.

About a dozen companies, including that of King C. Gillette—who less than two decades earlier had come out with the first disposable razor—waged nothing less than full-on character assassination against women with underarm hair. Magazine ads used words to change the connotation, referring to the hair as “objectionable,” “unsightly,” “unwelcome,” “dirty,” and “embarrassing.” On the other hand, hairless women were described as “attractive,” “womanly,” “sanitary,” “clean,” “exquisite,” “modest,” and “feminine.”

Kirsten Hansen, in her 2007 Barnard College senior thesis, “Hair or Bare?”—which would have been salve to my teenage angst had I found it in ninth grade; think The Catcher in the Rye for disgruntled hairy girls—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 the 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 World War II, 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 a lack or a desire—because they stuck so profoundly.

The idea that leg hair is gross is so ingrained that, as one study I read revealed, 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 College and the author of Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture, she told me that women shouldn’t be seen completely as victims of the advertisers. “Women had a role in this, too,” Scanlon said.

That figured.

She explained 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 said 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 I perceived to be the worst. “Dude, ladies irradiated themselves to remove hair!”

“What?!” she said.

I’d found out about this 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 1920s, there were already reports that exposure to radiation could be dangerous. Yet clinics continued to stay open and offer the hair-removal service. Women were lured in by the idea of a “pain-free” procedure and kept there by brochures espousing everything from social acceptance to the socioeconomic advancement that would come from obtaining “smooth, white, velvety skin.” They specifically targeted immigrant women who might feel marginalized because of their foreign (and hairier) origins, which I, a hairy Jew, related to.

Maggie, a hairy Italian, also understood.

By 1940, the procedure was outlawed, so these radiation salons began operating in back alleys, like illegal abortion clinics. 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 World War II.

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 batshit 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 continued to call on more academics for information.

Oh, who am I kidding? I was calling them for comfort.

For the past eight years, Bessie Rigakos, a sociology professor at Marian University, has studied why women remove their body hair. Her biggest challenge in finding answers has been that she cannot find enough women who don’t remove their 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 exactly is 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 Rigakos 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,” she said, “when women adhere to beauty standards, then they are rewarded in society.”

Somehow that analogy lost me, and I hung up from my call 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 Breanne Fahs, a professor of women’s and 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.” Growing hair, she means, will give you a taste of what it’s like to be queer, be 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 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 been done on and off for as long as humans have existed.

Archaeologists 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 rhusma, which was made with arsenic trisulfide, quicklime, and starch.

In Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, 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 singed 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 …

This 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 Nina Jablonski, an anthropology professor at Penn State, to find out why, from her human evolution–informed perspective, 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 jaw, longer forehead, big eyes relative to the rest of the face, plump lips, small nose, and shorter distance between mouth 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’s and women’s upper lips 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 males, peach fuzz develops on their upper lip. “That is the normal state in many mature women,” said Jablonski.