Bearded Lady (5 page)

“Dude, ladies irradiated themselves to remove hair!”

“What?!” she said.

I’d found out about it 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 1920’s, there were already reports that exposure to radiation could be dangerous. Yet clinics continued to stay open and offer the hair-removal service. By 1940, it was outlawed, so these radiation salons began operating via back alleys like illegal abortion clinics. The women were lured in by the “pain-free” procedure and kept there with the brochures that espoused everything from social acceptance to the socio-economic advancement that would come from obtaining “smooth, white, velvety skin.” They specifically targeted immigrant women who might feel marginalized due to their foreign (and hairier) origins, which I related to being a hairy Jew. Maggie understood; she’s a hairy Italian.

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 WWII. 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 bat-shit 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 kept calling up many academics for information. Oh, who am I kidding? I was calling them for comfort.

Bessie Rigakos, a sociology professor at Marian University, has studied why women remove their body hair for the past eight years. Her biggest challenge in finding answers has been that she cannot find a big enough portion of women who don’t remove 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 is exactly 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 she 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,” Rigakos said, “when women adhere to beauty standards, then they are rewarded in society.” Somehow that analogy lost me, and I hung up the phone 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 up Breanne Fahs, a professor of 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.” By “other,” she means growing hair will give you a taste of what it’s like to be queer, 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’ll 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 happened on and off for as long as humans have existed. Archeologists 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 rhumsa, which was made with arsenic trisulphide, quicklime and starch. In The Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, author 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 removed it by singeing 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...

That 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 up anthropologist Nina Jablonski, a professor at Penn State, to find out if there would be any reason, evolutionarily speaking, why 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 jaws, longer foreheads, big eyes relative to the rest of the face, plump lips, small nose and shorter distance between mouths 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 and women’s upper lip 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 a male, peach fuzz also develops on their upper lip.

“That is the normal state in many mature women,” said Jablonski.

So my mustache that I flipped out about as a high school junior was actually a normal symptom of puberty? Sweet! Though a little late.

But wait. Jablonski then noted that there remained reasons why women would feel compelled to get rid of it.

First, she offered the obvious notion that most women don’t want to be mistaken for a pubescent male.

“It gives mixed sexual signals,” she said.

Mixed?

Second, she said that women, as they get older, have more androgens and fewer estrogens.

“Facial hair becomes more visible and less ‘peachy’ as women age,” she said. “And they get even more obsessed with removing it because they want to look ever more youthful.”

So basically, I gathered that women with less facial hair appear younger and since more facial hair is correlated with menopause and therefore a higher age, having less could essentially give signals of continued fertility.

Got that?

And isn’t that the driving force of humans and all animals, really? We’re all in this, theoretically, to reproduce, right? So maybe, from a strictly academic perspective, I’d been getting rid of my face hairs all this time so that men would see me as a qualified baby maker before I’d even really consciously thought about if I wanted to make babies myself.

Now I was hopelessly confused.

***

The next day, I was talking to my friend Erin. I was finding that as I researched hair, I was becoming desensitized to the taboo and could speak more freely about my own hair issues, so I ended up telling her about my latest chin hair.

Erin, much to my delight, admitted to having some chin hairs, too. “I discovered back in high school while I was in math class,” she said, bringing her hand to her chin. “I was just thumbing my chin like this and then there was this little thing.”

She had discussed the hair with two of her friends who also had chin hair and they had employed one another to be emergency pluckers if one ever fell into a coma or became otherwise incapacitated.

“Seriously?” I said.

I was somewhat astonished, but also pleased to know that I wasn’t alone — in the chin hairs or even more unexpectedly, in the ongoing fear-of-coma scenario.

Over the next couple weeks, I interviewed close to twenty women about their body hair, of whom more than a few also had a plan in place for their strays if they ever were not able to pluck on their own. For some, the surrogate plucker was their mother. For others, it was a sister or a friend. So far, I haven’t heard of the position being filled by a husband or boyfriend.

It felt good to know that I wasn’t alone, but it also bothered me to know that so many of us lived in such fear that our biological side would show. It was bad enough that we occasionally had to be seen in natural sunlight.

***

So on November 14th, I began growing out my body hair. I contemplated growing the chin hairs, too, but I figured that I would probably incur some minor to medium psychological damage as a result. I wasn’t substantially practiced in the Zen arts of shrugging off contemptuous remarks. Even a friend, Ali, warned me, “Don’t do it for your own mental health.” Ali and I actually had a lot in common. She was so freaked out about her own hair that her husband didn’t know she uses Nair on her face or bleaches her arms. Her biggest fear is that when she has a baby, her husband will probably see her breastfeeding in daylight. “He’ll see my boobs and they are going to be so sore so I don’t know if I’ll be able to pluck,” she said, “and does it bother your child if there are weird hairs there?”

Nothing really dramatic occurred as the hair grew in. It was sparser than I’d expected. My legs were not particularly hirsute, popping up with fine dark hair about a quarter to a half-inch long. They looked the way a wood floor at a salon would look after a stylist had trimmed a balding man. The armpits, however, came in fuller. They developed a brown fuzz, which was surprisingly soft. Sometimes when I reached my arms upward, I thought I’d spotted something — like a rodent — out of the periphery, but then when I swung my head back to look, I’d remember that it had actually been my new armpit locks.

I felt some anxiety about going to yoga and the gym — where my legs and underarms would most be on display — wondering what people were going to think of me. But mostly I felt like a rebel. I wanted someone to say something and I wanted to defend my choice, but no one even seemed to look in my direction. Only once did I see two girls laugh and point at my armpits. I was self-conscious about it, but I also felt a little relieved. All these years of hair angst haven’t been for nothing. People actually can be judgmental schmucks!

The absolute coolest thing — and it wasn’t actually that cool — was when I stood naked in front of a full-length mirror with my arms raised and noticed that with the hair under my arms, it looked like I had two decoy vaginas. I suspected that, somehow, those were used to much advantage during our cave woman days.

The empowerment that I’d hope would come, though — it just didn’t. A lot of the time I just felt hairy, and everything was a little worse for it: