Gross Anatomy

by Mara Altman

  * * *

  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 suffer
ed 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.

  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 wasn’t done yet. She went on to list the reasons women might feel compelled to rip off their totally natural upper lipstache.

  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?

&
nbsp; 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 one 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 having the chin hairs or, even more unexpectedly, in the ongoing fear-of-coma scenario.

  Over the next couple of 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.