Mara Altman - Gross Anatomy

At the time, I wasn’t able to see the apparent hypocrisy. If my mom was so liberal and wanted to stay “all natural,” then why would she lighten her upper-lip hair?

That was a question I would be able to ask only later.

For now, I took that turquoise box from her cabinet. I decided that news of my mustache would be known only to my closest friends, Shannon and Natasha—one a blond Caucasian and the other Cambodian, both of whom grew very fine and small amounts of hair (and the latter of whom is so hairless that waxers, over the years, have often felt guilty charging her full price for any one service; looking back, I should have had a hairy Italian girlfriend or two).

Shannon and Natasha bleached with me. With the white goop swabbed thickly on our upper lips, we looked like we were starring in a road production of “Got Milk?” We turned it into a ritual. While the bleach did its work—tingling and then slowly building up to a stinging sensation—we turned off all the lights so that my bug-shaped glow-in-the-dark stickers would burn green, and sat in a circle, singing aloud to the Cranberries.

In your head, in your head

Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie …

After I washed off the mixture, I felt relieved.

That hair, as far as I was concerned, became invisible. I just had to keep up the ritual every two to three weeks.

I was all set.

Until I met Gustavo.

How many people had noticed my “blond mustache” and didn’t tell me? I tried to recall different boyfriends and situations. I’d kissed plenty of boys by then. Had they gotten mustache burn from my face? Is that why Sam didn’t ask me on that second date? Or Jonathan? Or Bill? Is that why that cashier at Vons, the grocery store, was looking at me strangely when I bought razors for my legs? How did I not realize that with my olive skin tone, bleaching my hairs until they were practically white might create a situation on my face?

Gustavo was the first man to ever mention my body hair, but I had collected enough data to make me pretty sure that men were, as a gender, opposed to it.

A few years before, I was listening to Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew talking to this complete jerk on the radio show Loveline . The caller was complaining about his girlfriend’s nipple hair. He said he found it nasty and couldn’t get turned on when he saw the little strands. He was thinking of breaking up with her. I was shocked to learn that women got nipple hair—and thrilled to check and discover that I’d been mercifully spared that fate—but now, three years later, as I stood in horror after spotting my very own first nipple hair, I knew I faced certain rejection from any man who encountered this new deformity.

I was beginning to understand that there was a very small window of what was “acceptable” and I had ventured beyond it. It wasn’t long after the Gustavo Fiasco that I noticed, while staring down at my bikini area, that my pubic hair had been marching, steadily and without heed, down my legs as if it could practice homesteader rights on the rest of my body.

I was now nineteen years old, and it was time for my first visit to a bikini waxer, whom I came to think of as an aggressive border control agent, getting rid of undocumented pubic immigrants. When she entered with the wax strips, I smiled awkwardly and asked the question that I’d be asking for the rest of my life in any and every hair-removal situation.

“Am I normal?”

She said that I was, but I didn’t believe her.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“We’ve all got hair,” she said.

I knew that we all had hair, but that wasn’t the question. I wanted to know where exactly I stood on the hairy scale, because that was becoming the problem. Ladies were ripping out their hair before I got a good look at it; therefore I was feeling like a beast among a hairless breed.

She proceeded to rip out the hair that jumped the border—about half an inch—but then she spotted the hair on my stomach. For quite a while, I’d had a light “happy trail” from my belly button downward. It was the inspiration for a nickname—Happy—that I’d acquired at fifteen. For a while, I’d considered the name cute.

“You want me to get that, right?” she said, spreading the wax on it before I answered.

“Why, is that not good?”

Rip.

“Well, you probably want to get rid of it,” she said, throwing my happy trail in the trash.

And that’s how I learned that apparently happy trails aren’t as happy as they sound.

By the age of twenty, I was finally coming to terms with the fact that no hair was considered good hair except for the hair on your head, eyelashes, and eyebrows, and those only if they were in the right shape. Arm hair, it seemed, got a pass as well, even though it didn’t look any different from leg hair, which is weird. But even toe hair had to go. I didn’t even know that I had toe hair, but then it turned out that I did, which was bad. I’d always remember that I forgot to get rid of it when I’d fold my torso over my legs in yoga, and then I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from staring at it.

For the crotch, news of the Brazilian style—going completely bare—that would soon sweep the USA had not yet reached my ears. I still thought it was normal to keep all the pubic hair except for the bits that peeked out from my bathing suit. And though I trimmed a little off the sides every now and again, I was proud to have a bush. And I continued with the normal stuff—shaving, plucking, and waxing. I also fell into a dependent relationship with Sally Hansen home wax strips—prewaxed plastic in a rectangular shape. I just had to rub it between my palms to heat up the wax and then I could rip out my hair myself. The problem was that I had issues with getting all the excess wax off, so by the end of the day, I’d end up with an accumulation of colorful fuzz and lint that made wherever I waxed look like my skin was growing patches of sweatshirt.

When I went to Spain for my year abroad as a college junior, I got my legs waxed while being strapped vertically to a wall with a leather belt. I felt a bit vulnerable, but I didn’t question it as long as the wax did its job.

I went to India in 2003, the year I finished undergrad, to work at a newspaper, and got my entire face threaded. I said I wanted only the upper lip and eyebrows done, but Smita just kept going. She touched my cheeks and said, “Face?” I shrugged. She took that as a signal to wind up her thread and tear out all the fuzz from my cheeks, chin, and jowls.

Paid professionals were always trying to get rid of more and more of my hair. It happened again when I went to a bikini-waxing joint in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a few years later. I just wanted a little off the sides, as the bush had been growing out for quite a while. When the waxer saw me—saw that part of me—she looked into my eyes with a fortune-teller’s boldness and shook her finger back and forth.

“The man does not like dis,” she said. She put her fingers toward her tongue, pretending to pinch out hairs. “Plaaaa plaaaa,” she said. Then she got all dramatic and faked a male choking episode. She slathered on the hot wax and said calmly, “Very good dat you are here.”

When we were done, she unzipped her pants to show me her bald pussy. “Look at it,” she said. “Look. No hair.” Then she tried to convince me to sign up for laser. “Plaa plaa,” she explained again as she zipped up her pants. “They do not like dat.”

The only thing I really came to enjoy about hair removal was the inevitable ingrown. There is nothing—and I mean it, nothing—more fundamentally satisfying than extracting a hair that’s been growing in the wrong direction. Period. Call it my nurturing side.