Mara Altman - Gross Anatomy

In any case, I’m not saying that I’ve got it together more than any other woman; it is precisely my own volatile and apprehensive relationship with my own body parts, such as my bowels, bunions, belly button, and copious sweat glands, that has compelled me to go forth in search of answers from everyone from the goddess worshippers of Bainbridge Island to the top lice experts in Denmark.

This book won’t cure a bad hair day or a yeast infection, or anything else for that matter, but it is my hope that by holding up a magnifying glass to our beliefs, practices, and nipples, this book might serve as a small step toward replacing self-flagellation with awe, shame with pride, and vag odor with, well, vag odor is kind of inevitable. But get this, PMS might actually be a superpower!

It was the turn of the century. I was nineteen years old and a student at UCLA, a school bathed in milky young complexions and spicy Mexican food. I joined friends for dinner at a taco joint on Sepulveda Boulevard, where a dark and deeply handsome young waiter named Gustavo took considerable notice of my face. I will never forget that name, Gustavo. We flirted over the horchata and made googly eyes over the guacamole. My friends evaporated into the atmosphere until it seemed like there were only two of us left in the room. Every time he passed our table, he glanced furtively in my direction, and I returned his interest with the dividend of a smile and the promise of much, much more. It even seemed possible that, at some point in the evening’s marathon mating dance, we would speak about more than the Thursday-night specials.

Finally, the check—and our moment—arrived. Gustavo placed the bill in front of my friends and leaned down to my expectant ear. I tingled with excitement about what he might whisper. A phone number … an address … a marriage proposal …

And then they came tumbling from his luscious lips, like poop from a piñata—five simple words that have seared themselves forever into my memory.

“I like your blond mustache,” he said.

It is now eleven years later, and I’m on the cusp of marriage to a wonderful man who is covered in hair. He not only makes me feel happy; he also makes me feel smooth. I am writing this story for him, because I have something to tell him.

Dave, I have something to tell you.

I am a bearded lady.

No, not like those women you see at the circus. More like those women you see on the street, in magazines, at the corner coffee shop. Yes, Dave, they’re bearded, too. You don’t realize it, though, because we are all (except for quite a few Southeast Asians; I’ll get to that later) engaged in an endless process of removing the additional and unwanted hair we inexplicably, annoyingly came with.

You see, evolution played a cruel trick on the supposedly fairer sex. It involves chin hair, nipple hair, mustache hair, thigh hair, and—yes—even toe hair. Dave, by God, it’s true—we have fucking toe hair! Just like you! But the difference is that we spend millions, no, make that billions, of dollars to have it waxed, lasered, shaved, and otherwise removed from our bodies so that when you see us naked, you won’t run screaming into the night.

I’m telling you this now, before we get married, because I am, unfortunately, plagued with two parallel conditions: an inordinate amount of body hair and a genetic predisposition toward brutal honesty. These would seem to be contradictory forces, particularly since I’ve spent thousands of my own precious dollars in a futile attempt to look as though I’m not a hairy beast. I strapped myself to a wall in Spain and endured the pain of hot wax; I went for monthly laser treatments from a doctor in Bangkok who almost turned my face into a failed lab experiment; I own enough pink disposable razors to affect the quarterly income of Gillette. I’ve scraped, shaved, yanked, tweezed, and plucked nearly every visible surface of my body, not to mention certain sections I discuss only with my therapist.

I guess I’m telling you this also because I’m trying to figure out why I care. I know you love me no matter what. I realize no one—even you—will ever see the silky brunette strands that occasionally emerge from my nipple. I acknowledge that I’m not the victim of some cruel hormonal joke; I know that plenty of women have it worse than I do.

That raven-haired beauty in front of me at Vinyasa Yoga on Nineteenth Street, Thursdays at four p.m., sports actual muttonchops. But why, when I look in the mirror, do I see Roddy McDowall in Planet of the Apes ? How can I rid myself of an obsession borne by women since the dawn of time? What weapon do I have to combat the societal standard that all women must be smooth, supple, hairless creatures? When will I be permitted to let my hair down? Not my head hair, but my armpit hair, my facial hair, my leg hair, that little “happy trail.” And is that even what I want?

You love me for who I am, right? So why do I want to be somebody else?

I was in my eighth-grade physical education class in suburban San Diego when I learned that there was a really bad kind of body hair to have. And that I had it.

It began with a group of girls, sitting cross-legged on the grass. Our uniforms—maroon drawstring shorts and a gray T-shirt, not that I recall every single solitary detail of that day—revealed our different stages of development. My shirt had ALTMAN written out in black permanent marker just under the peeling, screen-printed figure of our mascot—a crusader. Again, you just kind of remember these things.

While the PE teacher went off to grab soccer balls, we just sat there doing nothing, the sun beating down on us. To pass the time, I was contentedly grabbing one fistful of grass after another and then ripping it out. Grass. Out. Grass. Out. Repeat ad what felt like infinitum.

Finally one of the girls, April, got up and put her hands on her hips. She looked me up and down, but mostly down. She then took a jump back and flung her arms in the air. “Ewww, you don’t shave?” April shrieked. “That’s SO gross!”

I let go of the grip of grass I had in my hand. The blades of grass fell to the ground, like so many hairs. The girls looked at my legs. I felt like Sissy Spacek at the end of Carrie . The hairs sparkled in the sun like beads of blood. Under that withering Southern California sun, they wouldn’t stop making a spectacle of themselves.

Other girl legs were splayed around me. It was the dawning of a new era as my eyes scanned them, pair after pair: Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. And then, finally, back to my furry gams, announcing themselves so brightly that they were probably inadvertently transmitting SOS signals to airplanes.

I’d known that women shaved, obviously. At least it had been absorbed by my subconscious. But it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I was supposed to join the tradition. I was one of them—a girl—and I had to act accordingly, or be shunned like a leper. My hair apparently represented a possible contagion.

As my fur was inspected by the nearby contingent, a warm rouge attacked the back of my neck and then snuck hotly around to my cheeks. I could pull my legs into my chest and then stretch my shirt over them. I could run away. I could pretend that I didn’t hear April and hope that she disappeared. I grabbed another handful of grass and pulled it out, wishing that at that moment each and every one of my leg hairs could be reallocated with such ease.

I was already a little behind. Wait, make that really behind. I was roughly a foot shorter than the average eighth grader and had not yet developed a sense of fashion, unless “fashion” could be described as five different colors of sweatpants.