Mara Altman - Gross Anatomy

“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 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.”