Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in the US by G.P. Putnam’s Sons

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street, New York 10014

This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

Text and illustrations © Mara Altman 2018

Internal design © Ashley Tucker

Cover design © HarpercollinsPublishers 2018

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Source ISBN: 9780008292706

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008292713

Version 2018-10-29

Dedication

For my mom

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

The Top Half

1. Bearded Lady

2. Some Nits, Picked

3. Face It

4. The Earth Moved. Trust Me.

5. The Big Dripper

6. My Cup Runneth Under

7. Actual Navel Gazing

The Bottom Half

8. The Air Down There

9. The Butt Paradox

10. PIlEup on the “Inner” State

11. The Human Stain

12. The Eleventh Toe

13. You’re So Vein

14. Bloody Hell

15. Wart, Me Worry?

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

Prologue

To become a master at any one thing, it is said that one must practice it for 10,000 hours. I have been living in my body for 306,600 hours, yet I still feel like a novice at operating this bag of meat. As soon as I feel like I’ve got everything figured out, something changes—boobs spring out of my chest, I sprout a mustache, floaters homestead in my eyeballs—and I’m left shocked, bewildered, and yet ultimately quite curious. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve wondered, especially after a spicy meal, why evolution wasn’t smart enough to build us with buttholes made out of something more durable. Lead piping, perhaps?

I’d like to say that I spend my time trying to cure cancer, eradicate hunger, and put an end to global warming, but my brain is naturally inclined toward questions about the human female body. I spend most days wondering about the potential aerodynamic advantages of camel toes and why, when we are built to sweat, I often find myself hiding in a public restroom, drying off my pit stains to pretend that I don’t have glands. Why does my dog, every time I squat down, make a beeline for my crotch? The only other thing she’s drawn to with such consistency is the garbage can.

I want to be one of those people who, in the morning, sip an espresso while filling in the New York Times crossword puzzle—what a respectable hobby!—but instead I’m busy wondering why, as I hump, I never sound nearly as cool and moany as the porn star Sasha Grey in the film Asstravaganza 3. Is there a meet-up group for sex mutes?

Let’s, for a moment, suspend the idea of self-accountability and attempt to blame these bodily fixations on my parents. They grew up during the 1960s and were the kind of hippies who were so hippie that they refused to be called hippie. “Hippies were so conformist,” my mom has always told me.

My parents first met in high school and then dropped out of UC Berkeley together. They began growing plants—mostly cacti and succulents—in their backyard and then, to make a living, sold them to local grocery stores and via mail-order catalogues.

My mom never wore any image-altering materials—no makeup, deodorant, perfume, push-up bras, or high heels. She has refused antiaging creams and would never dream of fillers. (When she read this, she said, “What are fillers?” Sheesh!) She didn’t even shave her legs or armpits, and still doesn’t to this day. I thought all that was normal female behavior until late elementary school, when I noticed that other moms didn’t have a great black muff under their arms when they waved their children in from the playground. I imagined that astronauts could spot my mom from space. “Houston, we have a problem—there appear to be two errant black holes near San Diego’s suburbs.”

While I felt proud of her uniqueness, I also felt terrified of being ridiculed because of it. I explained to her that it was perfectly possible to wave at me less zealously while gluing her elbow to her side.

So for a long time, I didn’t know a lot of woman things. In my twenties, I thought that women tipped the wax lady to keep her quiet.

My father, meanwhile, turned his nose up at anything he deemed unnatural. He hated perfume and artificial scents of any kind. When I tried a spritz of my friend’s bottle of White Musk from the Body Shop, he screwed up his face and rolled the car windows down. When he caught me wearing lipstick, he looked at me like I’d just murdered a giant cuddly panda bear to use its innards as war paint.

Growing up, I had a different concept of femininity. I came to think that artificially enhancing my appearance in any way showed a lack of self-acceptance, that it meant I wasn’t strong enough to be who I really was. All the girls out there who were wearing makeup, dyeing their hair, and covering their stink were frauds. I, who stepped forth into the world doused in her artisanal BO, was real. Of course, keeping it real doesn’t mean that I didn’t often feel uncomfortable. I found myself in a constant battle between self-righteousness and shame. Eventually I learned that one’s identity can be complemented, not always concealed, by how one chooses to express oneself superficially.

Ultimately, I matured in an environment that made me hyperaware of our social norms because I was constantly conscious of how I was never managing to meet them. Though I now partake in many of the beauty practices that I grew up shunning, maybe it’s because of my upbringing that I always catch myself asking, “But why?”

Then again, I’m not sure I can blame my parents for everything. Their aversion to razors probably doesn’t account for why I spent the last couple of days mining modern literature for hemorrhoid references or spent an hour unwinding after a rough week by watching Dr. Pimple Popper’s blackhead-extraction videos on YouTube.

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!

1
Bearded Lady

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.

When I was twelve, my mom asked me if I wanted jeans and I declined for practical reasons. “They are too stiff and cold in the morning,” I explained. Going shopping was out of the question. I didn’t fit into anything in the juniors’ section so I had to go to the kids’ sizes, where all they offered were variations on flower-print shirts and polka-dotted socks with lace.

Another issue was that I’d practiced gymnastics competitively for the past eight years, and as a result, what had developed were not my breasts, but my thighs. There was a group of guys who, when they spotted me at recess, would shout, “It’s muscle girl. Flex!” Those were not the bulges I wanted them to notice.

I couldn’t navigate my developmental abyss with conventional tools. So when I got home that day, I dug through the Everything Drawer in the kitchen and found the perfect implement: a battery-operated lint remover. I tucked it into my backpack and went to my room to begin my work.

For some reason I didn’t feel like I could ask my mom or dad for a razor. I felt guilty even considering the request. I knew if I did so, I would be knocking their entire modus operandi. They saw the world through their late-1960s Berkeley-colored glasses and maintained a loyalty to All Things Natural—countering societal conventions like hair removal, and maybe having something to do with nostalgia for John Lennon’s unkempt eyebrows. Meanwhile, my mom hadn’t removed hair on any part of her body, ever.

And my dad professed to love it. “I’ve been very happy with this hairy little creature,” Dad would say.

In addition to his shaving shibboleths, Dad often made the point that he did not like it when women wore makeup or perfume (yes, that includes deodorant). Basically, we were a hair-positive household that practiced a Don’t Hide How You Came doctrine. But instead of feeling free to be who I was, sometimes this hairy-go-lucky attitude felt confining. Again, I have to bring up the White Musk. My dad wasn’t cool with even a little spritz of White Musk, and who didn’t like White Musk?

Apparently, the entire family had met secretly at some point without me and formed a pact against all forms of body enhancements and alterations.

Once, I’d put on some lipstick and my older brother asked, “Why are you wearing that stuff?” The question was so laced with condemnation that I felt like he’d found me shooting up heroin.

I pointed out to him that he was dating a girl who shaved and wore blush and concealer and lipstick and eye shadow and mascara and also some sort of raspberry scent that I felt certain I’d once also whiffed at the Body Shop. He said those weren’t the parts he liked about her. But at thirteen I could connect the dots; he was attracted to girls who gussied up. Guys liked girls who gussied up. Still, I couldn’t help feeling ashamed that I’d tried to change my innate lip shade in front of my makeup-mocking family.

When my brother went back to his homework, I looked in the mirror and rubbed off the fakery. I wanted to fit in.

But getting rid of my hair wasn’t exactly about improving my looks. I didn’t quite comprehend what a female leg should look like at that point anyway—and I wasn’t trying to attract a guy yet. At thirteen, guys remained as untouchable as tropical fish in an aquarium. I admired their firm fins and bright colors as they passed, but we could never blow bubbles together. They didn’t even notice my nose pressed up against the glass.

No, I had to remove hair for basic schoolyard survival, or risk permanent exile to the farthest reaches of the lunch area. I dreaded the idea of being called “gross” again. During that time of major pubescent shifts, April made it her job to strain out confusion—a self-appointed quality-control officer on the San Marcos Junior High School playground, barking at any girl who failed to maintain her proper place on the feminine side of the distinct gender line.

That meant no leg hair, ladies.

For the remaining hours of that school day it had felt like forty million sniper eyes were laser-focused on my legs. Even the slightest pupil flicker bound in my direction caught my attention. The embarrassment was vaguely equivalent to having toilet paper hanging from your shoe, but not really. You can’t shake off leg hair. I know; I’ve tried that, too.

So I locked the door to my bedroom and pulled out the lint-remover contraption. I flipped on the switch. It started buzzing. I lowered it to my calf, feeling equal measures of shame for having hair and for buzzing it off with a machine. I cringed as it made calf contact, expecting excruciating pain. But it really only tickled, asserting itself as a machine manipulated for the wrong purpose.

Hair was not lint. I needed a plan B.

I couldn’t steal a razor from my mom, like my girlfriends could from theirs, because she didn’t have any. Although my father used blue Bic disposables for his cheeks, the commercials made it quite clear that legs needed pink.

After a week of wearing pants, I finally got the gall to ask my mom about shaving.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

To leave her ranks, I’d be a traitor. She’d be out a hairy compatriot. Me, her only daughter—her own flesh and blood—straying from the path.

But. I. Couldn’t. Not. Do. It.

I nodded.

Mom bought me a disposable pink razor and some shaving cream and accompanied me to the master bathroom. She handed me the equipment and sat on the toilet seat, expectantly, as I planted my foot on the edge of the bathtub.

“Now what?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess you just slide it up your leg.”

“You think that’s all you have to do?”

“Try it,” she said.

Clearly, she was clueless.

“Like this?” I said, moving the razor over my shin.

The razor left an empty path in its wake. Look, Ma—no hair!

I could now return to the schoolyard and show April my shiny, glamorous new gams.

By sophomore year, I was finally getting on track. Much to my pleasure, my pubes had sprouted. I’d look at them in the shower and think, I made those! I remained in hair heaven for two entire anxiety-free years. If I’d have known that they’d be the only two years of relative hair peace I’d ever experience, I would have taken time to appreciate them more, maybe made a documentary. I was riding high, experiencing my first boyfriends. I discovered that boy pubes looked a lot like girl pubes.

Did I mention that I had pubes? I had pubes! We all had pubes!

But then, all of a sudden—late in my junior year of high school—an assemblage of keratin and protein had conspired beneath my skin to march out of a large number of tiny holes. And not just holes hidden where no one could see them. They were on my upper lip!

I’d noticed these little hairs on my upper lip before, but I’d ignored them—they were little blond wispy nothings. But now they were getting a little darker and a bit longer. If I caught myself in the right light in my bedroom, I could see a vague resemblance to Tom Selleck.

How in the fucking shitball motherfucking hell did I get a mustache?

Only males had mustaches. I was not a male. Or was I?

I remembered that my mom had this stuff called Jolen, in a small turquoise box with white lettering. When I was younger, I used to watch her work its magic. She would mix some powder with cream. The substance would get fluffy and bubbly—the astringent compound burning our nostrils. She would spread the yogurt-like goop on her upper lip and wait ten or so minutes before washing it off. Underneath the bleach, the hair would get so light that it was practically invisible.

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.

Little did I know the worst was yet to come. What happened next made me yearn for the days when a blond mustache was my only problem.

I was twenty-three. I was about to start a one-year journalism master’s program at Columbia and was getting a facial at Mario Badescu Skin Care salon on East Fifty-second Street in Manhattan. Everything was going well until the buxom Russian woman examining my face with a bright light rubbed my chin.

“You zchuld git reed of dis,” she said.

How did she see them? I thought I was the only person who knew.

She busted my years of self-denial. Toppled them. Crushed them into tiny shards. It’s like when you have a big red volcanic pimple and you just convince yourself that you’re making it out to be a much bigger deal than it actually is and most likely no one notices it, but then some friend says, “Ouch, that looks like it must hurt.” And they are pointing at your big red volcanic pimple that no one is actually supposed to be able to see, so you say, “What must hurt?” and they say, “Your big red volcanic pimple.” And you cover your face with one hand and say, “Oh, you can see that?” And they say, “Well, it is a big red volcanic pimple.”

So it was true. I had chin hairs that people could actually see. They were real. Like, actually there.

Hairs growing out of my chin!

I mean, I knew about them, of course, but I also didn’t. I believe my inability to recognize them as an entity—as a growing, living, real part of my body—stemmed from my self-preservation instinct. I’d even plucked them before, but I’d managed to convince myself immediately afterward that I hadn’t. My chin was smooth, dammit!

But now the jig was up. I started scanning my chin every morning for one of those evil hairs to reappear. I began carrying tweezers and a mirror in my purse.

I told no one of this new calamity. At least when I discovered my upper-lip hair, I knew that other women shared my shame. Upper-lip waxes were offered at salons. I’d never seen a chin wax mentioned anywhere, and I didn’t want to ask anyone about it, in case they told me they’d never heard of such a heinous thing.

I started having these disturbing fantasies that totally freaked me out: I have a mental break and go to a loony bin, but there’s no one there to pluck me. When I envision Insane Mara, I’m more embarrassed about the stray hairs than I am about the fact that I’ve completely lost my mind and am trying to make love to a trash can.

Or what about when I’m old? Old Mara’s hands are going to be so shaky from all the meds and her eyesight will be deficient, so there’s no way she’s going to be able to pluck with any kind of proficiency.

Or maybe Old Mara has Alzheimer’s and her grandkids will come visit as she stares at a wall and thumbs the hem on her shirt. “Is Grandma a he or a she?” they’ll say. I’m more embarrassed for Alzheimer Mara’s hair than for the fact that she thinks her nephew is her husband.

Or I get run over by a car on some New York street and I’m in a coma. My family rushes to Coma Mara’s bedside and they look at one another in shock, not because of my medical status, but because they realize I’m different from what they thought I was. “Oh my!” Mom says. “Did any of you know Mara had a goatee?”

I knew that there were many more important issues going on in the world and that my worrying about such an insignificant bodily matter was selfish and maybe even bordering on narcissistic, but I couldn’t help my feelings. I was irrational. Global warming was spawning under my skin. Genocide was happening on my face.

I finally had to talk to someone about it, and it was during my winter break from Columbia that it finally burst forth.

“Mom, I’ve got chin hair!”

“But I don’t see it.”

“It’s there,” I said.

She came in closer.

“Don’t come too close!”

“Why not?”

“’Cause then you’ll see it!”

She blamed it on my dad’s side of the family and never spoke of it again.

I continued to pluck my way through my master’s program, and from then on kept my chin hairs to myself. But in the midst of all this, I began dating a guy. We were fooling around—nuzzling, hugging—one day in Central Park. Tenderly, he put his hand on my face. “I love the fuzz on your face,” he said. “It’s so soft.” He then made a downward stroking motion from my cheek all the way to my chin. That moment may have seemed romantic to him, but it was the closest I’d ever come to shitting myself besides that one time I had dysentery and was stuck on a twelve-hour bus ride from Dharamsala to Delhi. I turned in the other direction as quickly as possible and encouraged him to fondle my hoodie.

I would never put myself in that position again:

Natural sunlight.

Bare face.

Man at close range.

After attending grad school, I moved to Bangkok for a job as a features writer at a Thai newspaper.

In retrospect, not the best idea in the world for a hairy Western five-footer with budding self-esteem issues.

Thai people, as it turns out, aren’t hairy. They don’t have any hair except on their heads. They seemed like magical people to me with all their hairlessness, like they lived in some kind of fairy-tale world. I kept looking for hair, scanning crowds for it to reassure myself that I was normal. Maybe I was overreacting—at this point I’m pretty sure I had some form of body-hair dysmorphic disorder—but I often felt like if I stopped plucking, I’d be able to grow more impressive facial hair than most Thai men. That thought made me feel so unsexy that it’s hard to properly explain.

That’s when I decided to try “permanent reduction” methods for the first time. It was 2005 when I finally signed up for laser. Once a month, I would go to a Bangkok hospital called, I swear, Bumrungrad. I’d lie on a gurney in a brightly lit room. All blank white walls, slightly yellowed by time. A doctor would come in with gloves, goggles, and a mask on over his face. A nurse would cover my eyes with darkened goggles and swab jelly on my skin. The doctor would then spend about ten minutes zapping my face with something that looked like the suction side of a Hoover. I had to fold my tongue over my upper front teeth so that when they did my upper lip, I wouldn’t feel the pain of the laser reaching my gums or whiff the slight smell of melting enamel. After, they’d give me icepacks for my red face, which emitted so much heat that my cheek, if placed on a woman’s abdomen, could probably help relieve menstrual cramps.

It couldn’t have been very healthy, but I wasn’t thinking about that then. I had one goal in mind: complete eradication. I’d ride home on the back of a motorcycle taxi and stay home for the night, until the swelling had receded.

I should have realized that there was a problem. I’ve always been kind of cheap. For example, I won’t pay ten bucks for a sandwich that would give me nutrition and probably pleasure—six is my top price—but I could somehow rationalize spending a thousand dollars for someone to fry my face.

On my last visit, they elevated the laser a bit too high and it burned my upper lip. I still have the scar. It’s about the size of a raindrop. When I’m cold, it turns white.

When people ask where I got the scar, I tell them, “One time I was making soup—some sort of bean stew—and it was boiling so wildly that it splattered me…. Yeah, just like that, third-degree burn. Crazy, right?”

Yeah, right.

It was embarrassing to admit that I made myself look worse by trying to look better. It still is.

Even right now.

Yep, still embarrassing.

But not only was I embarrassed; I also felt ashamed. I was back to being that kid poised with the lint remover over my leg—feeling equal shame for having hair as for getting rid of it. Why couldn’t I just be okay with who I was? Why was I spending so much money and time hiding myself?

But if you thought I’d stop it with the laser after realizing all that, then you haven’t been reading this very closely.

Two years later, in the middle of my second laser treatment back in New York, I began to consider the possibility of a medical problem. I felt like I was fighting a rare battle—but I wasn’t sure because, theoretically, if other women were like me, it would be a battle fought alone and behind closed doors. If other women were waging it, I wouldn’t know. But then again, could any of them have so many wanton whiskers? This couldn’t be what was supposed to be happening to a woman’s body.

So I went to my gyno for a follicular assessment and possible intervention.

Unfortunately, she had some bad news for me: I was normal. She explained that there are three common reasons for unusual quantities of hair on women. They either have polycystic ovaries or hormone imbalances, or they were simply born with hairy genes. “Many Eastern Europeans have a lot of dark, thick hair,” Dr. Chrisomalis said. I could have sworn that she was examining my chin as she spoke.

A waxer once told me that she knows what she’s about to deal with before people even take off their pants because the eyebrows reveal everything. Why couldn’t my doc just check out my eyes, then?

“But it’s got to be something else,” I pleaded. I’d recently contemplated the possibility that I’d hit early menopause—there had been some hot flashes, I’m pretty sure—and I’d never given up that early idea that I might be part man. I speculated now that my nuts just hadn’t descended yet. “I’ve got hair even on my …”

But I couldn’t tell a medical professional about the nipple hair. And what would be the point, anyway? I’d plucked that morning especially for her.

“I don’t think you have PCOS,” she said. “Other symptoms are weight gain and acne, but if it’d make you feel better, we can do some tests and maybe some blood work on your hormone levels.”

She extracted some of my blood and scheduled me for an ultrasound. That actually got me a tiny bit excited. It would be awesome if something was medically wrong. I’d be officially diagnosed and on my way to a cure. I could stop going crazy.

But the ultrasound revealed nothing wrong with my ovaries. No cysts. There weren’t even any hidden male gonads. When my gyno got back to me about the blood tests, she said that all my hormone levels were normal.

“Normal? Are you sure?”

“Totally normal.”

So my doctor was telling me it’s normal to be a hairy beast. I was relieved, terrified, and lost.

I couldn’t quit the laser. I continued treatments at a place called American Laser, on Broadway near Twenty-second Street in Manhattan. In the waiting room, they had magazines like People and OK! in a pile. I think they put them there for a reason; they wanted me to look at Kim Kardashian’s poreless and follicle-free face and get turned on about having my body blasted with a machine I didn’t understand in the slightest.

I dislike those magazines and think of them as vapid and a waste of time, but that’s only because I can get sucked into them for hours and I always end up feeling guilty about my desire to know how many hours a day Angelina leaves her kids with the nanny, instead of using my time to start understanding the crumbling economy.

So I’d get into the laser-treatment room, conjure the hair-free cover girl, and tell the laser lady to put the damn thing on the highest they could without causing my face permanent damage.

“It’s going to hurt,” she’d say.

“I don’t care,” I’d say.

“Tell me if it’s too high.”

“It’s not high enough!”

Hair brought out a little bit of psycho in me. I never acted like that anywhere else, except for maybe when I’m baking. (I get really bossy when I’m baking.)

The American Laser office was in the same building as a casting agency. Sometimes on the elevator ride up, I’d pretend to mouth some scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire and reapply ChapStick in the mirror so that no one would suspect that I was actually lasering.

No, silly, I’m not hairy. I’m an actress.

I also kept it from the guy, Dave, whom I’d started dating in 2008. I would throw away the laser appointment cards so that he couldn’t find them and instead use code—“lunch with Leslie” or just an exclamation point—when I wrote down the appointment in my calendar.

When I moved in with him in 2010, a whole new challenge emerged. Close quarters put my secret in jeopardy. I carried out my depilatory duties like they were a covert Navy SEAL operation. I had extra razors and tweezers in my gym bag and purse and hidden in bathroom corners. Mixed martial arts fights were my saving grace. Dave would be attached to the couch for hours at a time, watching hairless men grapple each other, while my stainless-steel Tweezerman and I got it on in the bathroom. If Dave asked what I was doing in there for so long, I’d tell him I was picking at pimples or that the milk in my coffee was working its way through my intestines. That usually shut him up.

The point is, I’d rather have Dave think I was shitting than plucking. His knowing that I was so hairy would have rendered me faulty, almost broken—like he’d driven off with a lemon from the used-car showroom. But I also yearned for him to know and accept me as I was. I realize it doesn’t help our relationship that the only thing I can think about when we cuddle is how to position myself to keep him from seeing any stray hair that might break free. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t even be writing this if we weren’t already engaged. Publicly divulging my hairiness during my dating years would have ruined my ratings on Jdate and Match.com.

You can’t sell a car by pointing out the jagged, deep dent on the driver’s side.

I hate that I feel that way, but there it is.

And as long as I’m talking about things I hate—this is a little off the point, but you know what always kills me? It kills me when girls compliment my eyebrows, because in the aughts, eyebrows with girth came back into fashion. “Wow, they’re so nice and thick. I wish I had those,” friends would say. The compliments are always by women who are fair-skinned and light-haired. I’ve never had a thick-browed lady say one thing about my eyebrows. You know why? Because they know the behind-the-scenes story. If any of those light-haired ladies knew what those two caterpillar-shaped suckers actually meant, they’d back away from the situation with their hands up.

Anyway, I kept up the laser treatments for three years.

After my last appointment, I asked to speak to the office manager.

“It didn’t work,” I said.

I wanted my chin as hairless as a piece of polished granite or my money back. Even though I knew the truth—that laser can be very good for dark hair (pubic, armpit, man beard), as it targets the melanin in the follicle—it has a much harder time getting rid of fine and lighter hair like the gang of strays I had on my face.

“Well, the face is a very stubborn place,” the office manager said. “We always tell all our clients that. If you want, we can sign you up for another treatment.”

“Why should I sign up for another treatment when it didn’t work after three years?”

“The face is a very stubborn place,” she reiterated.

“If it’s stubborn, why should I do more laser?”

“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.”

“I don’t really think of that very often,” she said.

Finally, an answer that I could believe!

“But yes, because having hair on your face or somewhere else not great is a very emotional thing. If you’re uncomfortable, you withdraw. So yeah, I feel good about what we do.”

The truth is that I understood what she was talking about. I’ve felt the same way. But I wondered if she thought our society could ever become hair-friendly enough to eliminate the discomfort.

“I just can’t imagine it,” she said, stroking her hairless chin. “It’s like saying being heavy is better … it’s the same thing. Like it used to be okay, having an extra twenty pounds was the look, but I don’t think we’re going to regress back to that. We’ve evolved.”

Barshop, throughout our interview, had continued to look down at her phone and text; she was doing it again. Right now.

“I can tell you want to go,” I said, summoning politeness from some deep recess of my rage.

“Oh, you’re so sweet,” she said.

No, I’m not, Cindy. I actually hate you a little bit.

Cindy was, truly, the nemesis of a woman’s ability to choose. She’s the type of person who narrows beauty into such a small space that hardly anyone can fit in; she makes us hate ourselves. Now, when I look in the mirror and feel misery about the ugly strays straddling my chin, I realize it’s her eyes that I’m looking through.

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 suffered 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?

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.

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 14, 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 have a lot in common. She’s so freaked out about her own hair that her husband doesn’t know she Nairs her face and bleaches her arms.

Her biggest fear is that when she has a baby, her husband will 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?”

Meanwhile, nothing really dramatic occurred as my 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’d reach my arms upward, I’d think I’d spotted something—like a rodent—in the periphery, but then when I’d swing 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 were 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 cavewoman days.

The empowerment that I’d hoped would come, though … it just didn’t.

A lot of the time I just felt hairy, and everything was a little worse for it:

The dishes are dirty … and I’m hairy.

Something is rotten in the fridge … and I’m hairy.

I have no money … and I’m hairy.

I felt like my body was morphing outside its jurisdiction—crisp lines were suddenly blurring. I was a coloring book and a little kid was coloring outside the markings. My eyebrows broke free from their usual shape and simultaneously were trying to visit my hairline and my nose. How did Frida do it?

To feel momentary relief, I’d visit the Hairtostay.com website, which called itself “The World’s ONLY Magazine for Lovers of Natural, Hairy Women.” It was part female-hair-fetish porn site and part positive hair treatise. You can do everything from have hairy phone sex to peruse articles such as the one titled “Are Hairy Legs a Deterrent to Crime?” It wasn’t to commiserate with other hairy women that I went there, though. I went to stare at ladies who were hairier than I was so that I could feel smooth for a change.

It was finally December—time for my family’s annual vacation together. This year we were going to Southeast Asia, land of the genetically hairless women. Right before we left, I bought a box of Sally Hansen prewaxed strips (that addiction had never evaporated) and ripped off my happy trail. That was the one hairy part of my anatomy that I just couldn’t take anymore. And once it was torn off, I actually felt like I could breathe deeper.

I was soon in Cambodia with my family. When we went to Angkor Wat, a temple complex from the twelfth century, I asked my tour guide, Vutta, how Cambodians felt about women and body hair.

“They don’t do anything to the hair,” he said. “Well, actually, they don’t really have the hair.”

“So no waxing or shaving?”

“Actually, the girls want to have light skin like you.”

“But if they get light skin, they will have the hair that comes along with it.”

“To be honest,” Vutta said, “the people here believe that a girl with the hair is lucky. She can get a better life. A better husband.”

“Really?” I said. That was the most hair-positive belief I’d heard, probably ever.

“But it’s not true,” he said. “They just believe it. We are so behind in our economy and society because people believe silly superstitions like that.”

“So it’s not lucky to have hair?”

“Not any more lucky than not having hair.”

“Oh.”

At this point, I began to think I was actually journeying backward.

On the final day, I got one of my legs threaded on the beach in Vietnam. I did it as an experiment. I’d never had threading on anything except my face before. Besides, the woman who did the threading had been chasing me for the past three days, pinching my hairy legs as I passed.

I sat down on a little platform that she had propped up in the sand, about five feet from the water. I was shielded from the sun by a big umbrella. The hair, by this time, was about a half-inch long. The woman wound the thread around her hand and put one part of the loop in her mouth. She twisted the thread and then bent down and started ripping out my hair. It felt like a pack of mice were sinking their jaws into my skin over and over again. I grabbed at the sheet covering the platform below me. I felt the sweat slide down my arm as I yelled “Ouch!” again and again and again.

She leaned over me, and each time I said “Ouch,” she said, “No ouch later, later beautiful.”

I was amazed that the same hairless aesthetic prevailed on the other side of the world.

I quit after half of one leg. I couldn’t handle the pain. A razor seemed so much more humane. I was also having trouble letting go of the hair. I hadn’t come to an understanding with my body hair yet. That is, I still didn’t really like it. I felt guilty for favoring my leg without the hair, being so thrilled with how smooth it looked—that is, until I sat down and spoke to my mother. I’d been putting it off, but it was time, since it was our last day of the trip. She would be going back to California, and I would be heading back to New York.

My mom and dad were sitting on wooden chaise lounges on the beach. Mom was in sunglasses, a hat, and a bathing suit, comfortably showing off her legs and pits. They weren’t as intense as I remembered them. I don’t think an astronaut would be able to see them from space, which is how I used to feel when she’d pick me up after school, waving for me to come over with her tank top on.

I sat down beside her, crossing my hairless leg under the hairy other one. “So, were you guys bummed when I started shaving?”

“I wasn’t that happy about it,” said my dad. “Natural is better, but it’s your business. I just thought it might be a problem for you later, get you on the wrong track.”

“Which track?” I asked.

“Well, you cut your hair and they branch and then you cut it again and they branch.”

“Are you thinking about pruning trees?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “that’s how I see it.”

I’d always assumed that my mom didn’t shave because of her radical self-acceptance—and I yearned to be like that, to accept myself in my all-natural state—but we never really had a conversation about it before, and here she elaborated.

“I got into the politics,” she said. “I also read a lot of Zen and Buddhist texts, and it really felt like accepting who I was was more important to me than looking a certain way for society.”

As she said that, something clicked for me that hadn’t before. The Jolen!

“Well, if you’re so Zen and comfortable with yourself, then why do you wax your upper lip hair?” Her Jolen bleach habit, by this time, had turned into a wax habit.

She paused to think about it for a moment. She started and then stopped. Then started again. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “I wax my upper lip, and I think my face looks better when I do. It’s probably that it worked into my cosmetic feeling about myself, so I guess I can’t claim to be this Zen person who would flaunt all.”

I’m pretty sure it was at that moment that my perspective began to shift, but I wouldn’t realize it until I was back in New York. For the moment, I just thought it completely coincidental that on the evening I had that conversation with my mom, alone in my hotel room, I decided to shave off all the hair I’d grown for the past two months.

Weeks after we got back from Southeast Asia, I was sitting on the sofa with Dave in our East Village apartment. I hadn’t done laser for nine months. I’d just finished writing the 14,000 or so words you just read. I put a sofa pillow in my lap and inched toward the corner of the couch. I stared at him until he looked away from a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit rerun, the one where some guy has a fetish for recording people urinating in public bathrooms and accidentally witnesses a pedophilic sex crime.

Maybe I could have waited for better timing.

Or maybe, maybe, it was the perfect time.

“What?” Dave said, noticing that I was focused on him, not on Detective Stabler’s interrogation.

“I want you to know that I have chin hairs,” I said.

He smiled slightly, cocked his head to the side, and returned his focus to the fetishist.

“I’m serious. I do.”

Dave looked over at me now, searching his mind for the appropriate thing to say, but I didn’t give him a chance to respond.

I told him in rapid-fire narrative the whole story of my hair fixation as fast as the man in the old Micro Machines commercials—the doctor, the laser, the morning pluckings, the purse tweezers, and how when he looked at me in a certain way, I feared that he wasn’t actually looking at me, that he was searching for errant follicles on my face.

Slowly, Dave began to lean forward. Closer. And closer. Still closer.

“What?” I pleaded. “What?”

Dave didn’t say anything. Suddenly he was only inches away; he could see every pore on my face, every hair on my body. His big, soft brown eyes loomed over me like microscopes.

I wiggled in fear of being found out.

Then he slapped me lightly on the cheek. “Get it together,” Dave said. “It’s just hair.”

Good point.

We leaned into each other, arms and lives forever intertwined, and turned back to the television set.

2
Some Nits, Picked

It all started the day before my birthday. Now that I was married, my in-laws wanted to take me out to dinner to celebrate my turning one year older. We went to a nearby Italian restaurant called Supper. My husband’s brother and his wife joined us with their two kids, Alana and Adam. The place was lit in that wonderful New York way where you can barely make out who is sitting next to you. I could mistake a Pilates ball decorated with a beard and curly hair for my husband. You have to use sonar to find the bread basket. It’s the best atmosphere for pimples.

After dinner, we walked several blocks to get ice cream at a place called OddFellows where they hand-press their own waffle cones. The smell—sweet and delicate—is exactly how I imagine the scent of Betty Crocker’s armpits.

I do not often interact with kids; they scare me because they’ll look at you and say things like “Why is your nose crooked?” or they will smile, stare straight into your soul, and then say something creepy like “You’re going to be dead.”

I constantly judge if I want to have kids depending on the kids I observe around me. When I think of the kid in Jerry Maguire, the one who has glasses and that adorable case of asthma, I want to get pregnant immediately. But when I see real human kids who aren’t reading off a script in a romantic comedy, I usually want to tie my tubes.

My mom, who wants nothing more than for me to proliferate her genes, knows this about me and gets very concerned if there are kids around us who are misbehaving. She will say, “It’s different when they are your own.” In the past year, she has grown even more sensitive to crying babies than I am. Once, we were at the grocery store looking at Triscuits and she said, “You know, it’s different when they are your own.”

“Well, we can buy them,” I said. “They’re on sale for $2.95.”

She cocked her head sideways, and it was only then that I noticed the distant wails from the dairy aisle.

But on this particular evening, things were different. The kids and I ordered the same flavor of ice cream—sprinkles. This made us feel bonded. Alana linked her arm through mine as Adam hooked onto my other arm. They did not look up and say, “You have hairy nostrils.” Instead they smiled and giggled as we walked in tandem. They yelled, “Let’s walk faster! Faster!” We powered forward, weaving around the crowds, leaving all the other adults behind.

It was one of those rare moments when I thought, I could do this: I could have kids.

After ice cream, everyone headed back to our apartment for a final cohesive farewell. When the kids entered, they wanted to sit on my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. This was not a hand-me-down. This was my first and only real piece of adult furniture. And I went big. Again, in case you missed it, we’re talking about an aqua-colored velvet sofa chair.

I finally understood why my mom got so upset when people called her first luxury car—a LeBaron convertible—beige. “It’s actually champagne,” she’d correct them.

Every piece of furniture I had before this piece—it was so elegant that it certainly qualified as a “piece”—was inherited from the street, and the only other sofa in our house was a little maroon number that I’d guess was about fifteen years old and probably hosting the plague.

The new sofa chair felt all the more precious because we almost lost it before it made it into our apartment. In the spacious furniture store, the chair had looked tiny, like an ottoman for gerbils, but after lugging it up two flights of stairs, the deliverymen found that it wouldn’t fit through our doorway.

“Fucking shit,” shouted one.

The other one wiped sweat from his brow. “Jesus Christ. This again.”

Apparently, it’s not uncommon for people’s furniture fantasies to be much bigger than their apartments.

“Did you even measure it?” asked the deliveryman who most looked like he wanted to break my face.

“Yes,” I said. I left out the “with my mind” part.

I’m usually great at spatial stuff. I can look at a pot full of leftover soup and then select Tupperware to match the amount to perfection. It is one of my greatest gifts.

Johnny, the super in our building, eventually saved the day by taking off our front door, giving us a critical extra two inches. To put our door back on, he then charged us sixty dollars. I got upset with him for price gouging, but then I remembered that time he retrieved a hairball the size of a llama out of my shower drain and that reminded me that he should be given the Medal of Honor and be added to Mount Rushmore.

I mention all this only to explain that on the fateful night that the children arrived, I had been experiencing inappropriately strong protective and possessive impulses toward my chair. Ever since the chair was delivered several days earlier, I’d had trouble sharing it with even my husband. It seemed unwise to have something so fluffy and pristine touched by too many asses. What I once viewed as abominable—the plastic sofa cover—I now thought of as a brave and courageous choice made by grannies the world over. What a beautiful ancient practice!

So when the kids walked in and wanted to plant their butts on my chair, I felt a lot of resistance, but we’d also just returned from such a lovely evening together. I had been so engrossed by our jaunt back to the apartment—they were so fun—that I’d barely even noticed New York City’s classic eau de parfum, a bouquet of rotting rat corpse melded with stale urine, which was constantly brewing on our corner.

Also, and most compelling of all, my husband was giving me his famous and highly effective death stare. The only thing that was missing was a red laser beam shooting out from each of his pupils. He could see it in my face, in my posture, that I didn’t want our niece and nephew to sit in my new chair, and he did not approve of that inclination.

Reluctantly, I gave the kids permission to sit down.

They sat for a moment—scooted around—but then they quickly became bored. Part of me was relieved that they exited the chair without defiling it while the other part of me was offended that they got over the revelatory seating so fast. I sat down in their stead while they returned to the living room rug, where they dismembered Mr. Potato Head.

We said goodnight and then my in-laws left.

The next day was my actual birthday. It is the one day out of the year that I have profoundly unreasonable expectations for how I should be treated. Logically, I believe it is a gift to be on this planet and we should all spend the day of our birth picking up litter, but something comes over me and I become a complete beast. I feel terrible for my loved ones. By evening, my husband is usually calling me the Birthday Maranster (Mara + monster = Maranster). I even get upset at inanimate objects. Red traffic lights piss me off. Do they not realize that on this day many years ago I came out my mother’s womb and therefore, in my presence, they should turn green?

I don’t know how I came to feel so entitled. The only thing my parents did for my birthday was let me choose what we were having for dinner. I always picked poached sole over steamed rice with a splash of Knorr instant hollandaise sauce. Besides that, it was business as usual.

I took the day off work, because clearly no one should have to work on her birthday. My friend Maggie took me to a spa called Aire Ancient Baths. The atmosphere in that place is sex dungeon meets Spanish conquest. The bare brick walls, candlelit chandeliers, and stagnant bodies of water made me think of medieval genocides and cholera outbreaks, but in a romantic time-travel way.

We spent two hours shifting from hot tub to sauna until we got hungry for lunch. We went to the locker room to shower and change. I finished before Maggie; she has so much hair that it takes an hour to blow-dry, while mine—though prolific all over my body—is so thin on my head that all I need to dry it is for one ant to exhale onto my head. Instead of getting annoyed at how long she was taking, I checked my phone for birthday messages. I selected the text from my brother-in-law. Even though we had celebrated with them the night before, I suspected he wanted to wish me a happy birthday on the actual date.

“It was nice to see you guys yesterday and spend some time together. FYI both kids had lice in their heads. Didn’t know until we got home last night. Sorry about that!”

Uh, what?

I’d been married for a while, so I wasn’t sure if things had changed, but I thought protocol was to call, not text, if you’d possibly transmitted a disease.

I read the text again. I tried not to overreact, but this was happening to me on my birthday!

I thought back to how I’d been so reluctant to let the kids sit on my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. I wasn’t an asshole. My sixth sense had intuited that they were contaminated.

I needed immediate mental health support. I got Maggie’s attention by yelling above the roaring dryer. She is an inherently positive person. She could see someone lose a leg in a car crash and still probably find something uplifting to say about the disaster. “At least her leg is still intact!” She’d say it like dismembered extremities have been known to go on to get postgraduate degrees and lead productive lives.

She sat on a bench while I paced back and forth, recounting all the possible points of physical contact I’d had with the kids the night before. I mentioned the dark restaurant, the ice cream shop, and how we’d skipped back to my apartment. At the time, it had seemed like such a sweet and quaint Sound of Music moment, but now I wondered if it was all a ruse—the lice made them do it in order to get close to my head. And to think, after that night, I’d almost been convinced that I wanted kids.

“You won’t get lice, Mar,” Maggie said.

By this time, we were already outside, waiting to cross at a light that apparently didn’t realize that it was my birthday.

“How do you know?”

She reminded me that I’d hardly touched the kids. I had to be in closer contact. Lice don’t fly. “Did you rub heads?” she asked for the fourth time.

“No.”

“Then see,” she said, “you’re fine.”

By the time I met up with Dave for my birthday dinner, I was ready to commiserate with someone, but he wouldn’t cooperate.

He’s usually the one concerned with external dangers—murderers, burglars, and tiny fanged creatures—while I worry more about internal dangers like cancer and the possibility that my heart may explode. But as I shoved birthday enchiladas into my mouth, there was a serious role reversal at play.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

“But. There. Were. Lice. In. Our. Apartment,” I said for the eighth time.

I imagined the little insects were exactly like criminals, but instead of wanting to hurt or steal from us, they wanted to eat our heads.

“We’ll be okay,” Dave said.

That night, I felt tingling on my scalp. The sensations seemed real, yet then again maybe they weren’t. I nudged Dave awake and asked him to investigate. He rolled his eyes, but humored me nonetheless, because we took vows, dammit.

As Dave positioned me under a lightbulb and parted my hair, I was reminded of lice-check days in elementary school. The first time was in kindergarten. The nurse came in with latex gloves and told us all to sit cross-legged on the carpet. She directed us to lower our chins to our chest and wait patiently until she got around to each and every one of us. I was terrified about what she was going to do until she stood behind me and laid those virtuosic hands onto my head. My eyes rolled back and my arms got gooseflesh as she parted my hair into tiny chunks and looked through each nook and cranny of my scalp. Lice check, I thought, should last forever. Parasite detection felt so good.

From that day forward, I got excited whenever a nurse appeared with latex gloves (an impulse that would eventually fail me).

In the meantime, my friends and I began to play “lice check” during slumber parties. We would take turns being the nurse and the potential parasitic host. I cannot quite imagine what my parents must have thought if they overheard our conversations. “But now it’s my turn—you have to check me for lice!” They probably thought I wanted to become a nurse when in actuality I wanted to grow up and get massages.

As I got older, I experienced a new kind of hair caress—the kind attempted by boyfriends. I always wanted to tell them that they weren’t doing it quite right. Hair caressing should have direction, a point of view. Their method, I realized, lacked purpose. I wished I wasn’t so shy and could have just told them exactly how I wanted it: “Do it to me like you’re checking for blood-sucking insects!”

What I’m saying is, I totally understand how childhood can influence the development of sexual fetishes.

“I don’t see anything,” Dave said, turning off the light.

I spent the next two weeks under orange alert. I didn’t necessarily think I was going to get lice, but I wasn’t going to be stupid and ignore the fact that lice-infested children had been in my home. I took precautions. The aqua-colored velvet chair was under quarantine as a potential hot zone. I didn’t care that science says that it’s highly unlikely to contract lice in any other way than direct head-to-head contact.

I started out learning novice stuff—a louse can lay six eggs a day, it can survive underwater for several hours, and infestations occur most often at schools in September (and September it was) because children come back after a long summer break and immediately mingle their head fauna—but I eventually got into mating practices. I dug way too deep. This info wouldn’t help me, but I couldn’t stop. It was ghastly stuff. If a louse dies while copulating, then the pair can’t separate. The one that survives has to carry around the other’s dead body, connected via the genitals, for the rest of its life. I didn’t know whether to think it was tragic or beautiful—surely dying in each other’s orifices was more romantic than in each other’s arms, but still.

I kept going down the information black hole. When a louse needs to eat, your head becomes a real-life nightmare. A small tube with teeth on the end protrudes from its mouth and pierces the scalp. As if that weren’t obscene enough, the tiny menace then spits on the wound. The spit is what makes some people itch, but it’s also magical and keeps the cut from clotting, so the louse can endlessly consume the blood through the two pumps in its head as if it were standing under a never-ending soda fountain. Lice take four to five meals a day, during which they consume the equivalent—if they were our size—of ten gallons of blood, and even with all that liquid, they don’t pee. Their urine evaporates through their respiratory system while their excrement, tiny dry pellets, goes through the more traditional anal route.

I later spoke to Kim Søholt Larsen, an entomologist from Denmark with a PhD in fleas and a specialization in lice and ticks, about this behavior. “If they urinated, your hair would stick together and you would immediately figure out that you have lice,” said Larsen. “This is how they hide themselves.”

They’ve had a lot of time to hone their terror techniques, because they’ve been hunting our plasma for millennia. The only good thing I found out about head lice was that they aren’t body lice: Body lice carry disease.

In the meantime, I still had Dave check me at the slightest provocation. If I felt anything, I’d turn on the bright overhead lights, flip my head over, and have him gander at my scalp. We were searching for insects that looked like black sesame seeds; irritated red skin near the ears and neck; and tiny white dots—lice eggs or nits—that informational lice blogs described as looking like “dandruff that won’t move” near the base of my hair.

I did not moan from pleasure during these encounters. It wasn’t that Dave was bad at lice checking, but I found that the practice didn’t feel as hedonistic when it wasn’t recreational—nothing like a real fire to take all the fun out of a fire drill. Dave would toss a couple of strands here and there and tell me that everything was going to be okay.

“There’s a very low possibility that you got it,” he said, over and over again. “The kids were here for like two minutes.”

During that time, I got so invested in looking for lice that I forgot about my usual terror of tumors. In some ways, it was kind of nice to mix up my concerns. Tumor hunting gets very one-note after a while.

Life continued. If I felt an itch, I made Dave look. Otherwise, I was content just to have a valid reason never to let anyone ever sit in my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair again.

By the time ten days rolled around—which was the amount of time it would have taken any new eggs to hatch—I’d probably had Dave check my hair about fourteen times and we hadn’t found one louse. Finally, I felt confident that we had eluded the little bastards and that we were in the clear. It was perfect timing, too, because we had only two days to prepare to take off for our honeymoon.

Dave had had a hard time getting time off work, so we had waited two and a half years after our wedding to take the Japan honeymoon of our dreams. I had spent three months planning the affair. Over eleven days, we would be visiting four bustling cities. We began busying ourselves with packing and plans of what we’d eat.

We arrived giddy and exhausted at Narita airport. Over the next few days, the stresses of the last couple of weeks completely disappeared. I even eased up on the idea of an elective hysterectomy. We became fully engrossed in our new surroundings. We went early in the morning to Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, and we visited Shinto shrines and Zen rock gardens.

After a few days, we took a train to Hakone, a small mountain town renowned for its hot springs. We stayed in a ryokan, which is a traditional Japanese inn. Our room was beautiful and highly flammable. The whole thing was made of wood and bamboo tatami mats. In fact, tatami mats are how they measure the size of rooms in Japan. They don’t say a room is twenty by thirty-five feet; they will say something like “It’s seven tatamis.” (In the United States, we don’t have a form of measurement that’s nearly as charming. If we tried, it would turn into something awful like “My house is three cement trucks and a granite countertop that caused four people to lose their fingers in a Brazilian quarry.”)

A soaking tub was on our balcony. Dense green foliage gave us privacy. We wore robes at all times of the day, because they even brought us our dinner.

Soon we were taking bullet trains, regular trains, and a ferry to find our way to Naoshima, a small island with a phenomenal hotel inside a modern art gallery. In the morning, the seventh of our trip, I went for a walk by myself to admire the magnificent sculptures on the grounds, such as the massive polka-dotted pumpkin by the artist Yayoi Kusama. I continued walking along the shore, ankle-deep in water. I looked out over the serene and vast horizon and felt so much gratitude.

I then noticed that I was scratching the back of my head. How long had that been happening?

After taking a shower, I roused Dave and we went to breakfast. “I think I’m having a reaction to the shampoo,” I told him over eggs and miso soup. I figured that using all the different shampoos at the different hotels was making my scalp feel irritated.

“Yeah, probably,” he said. He also mentioned that it was unusually humid for us so it’s possible that I was having a heat rash.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “The climate really is different here.”

He told me that the psoriasis on his scalp was acting up, too.

“That makes sense,” I said. He always had more trouble with his psoriasis when we traveled.

Later that afternoon, we made our way via bullet train to Kyoto, where we would spend our final three days. After that, we would have one night in Tokyo before heading back to New York.

When we reached Kyoto, we were exhausted, so we grabbed a quick dinner at a tonkatsu place before going straight to bed. When we woke the next morning, we both had a cough and runny nose. Nonetheless, we explored Ninomaru Palace and Kinkaku-ji temple and attended a kimono fashion show.

By that point, Dave and I were both having coughing fits, but my back also itched painfully. It was an odd symptom for a cold. I got onto the internet and typed in, “Why does my back itch …” And then the search engine autocompleted “… when I cough?”

That was comforting. I obviously wasn’t the only one. The explanation I found said that when we cough, the nerve fibers in the diaphragm can become irritated by overstimulation. Because there aren’t a lot of nerves in our organs, the brain gets confused—there is a crossed signal of sorts—and makes you feel like your back is itchy when it’s actually not.

The takeaway: My itchiness was clearly an illusion.

That evening, we were so bad off that we went to a pharmacy. The two-story shop was floor-to-ceiling packed with fluorescent boxes. No one spoke English and none of the medicines had English translations. They weren’t even in Roman letters. If they were in Spanish or Italian, I could have at least tried to pronounce the words and then pretended that I knew what they meant. But with Japanese symbols, I was so hopeless that I might as well have been trying to read a pile of pick-up sticks.

After a half hour, we gave up and bought two mystery boxes of drugs. For all we knew, they could have been to treat a dog’s case of heartworm and to give me an erection for twelve months. We brought the medicine back to our hotel, knocked back a couple of gel caps, and sat watching the news in Japanese. An hour later, I was still scratching. During a commercial that depicted a woman having an intense flirtation with what looked like a fried chicken cutlet, I looked over at Dave.

I stared at him until he said, “What?”

“Do you think it’s possible that the itching is from lice?” I said.

“I doubt it,” he said.

It did seem unlikely. It had been almost a whole month since we’d seen his niece and nephew. If I’d had lice, wouldn’t they have made themselves known weeks earlier?

I asked if he’d check just to be sure. The light wasn’t great in the room, so I sidled up to the bedside table lamp. I turned my head upside down as he looked through my hair.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

I was pleased with that answer, so I turned over and went to sleep.

The next day we had a cooking class and then switched from our hotel to a ryokan in town. We wanted to get a little more of that traditional Japanese feeling. Despite being ill, we went for the multicourse kaiseki dinner. Between the pickled vegetable course and the fish stew course, a small brown bug fell onto Dave’s arm. He immediately flicked it off.

“Where did that come from?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

It almost looked like it had dropped from his head. There were a lot of quirky things in Japan. A raccoon dog, called a tanuki and known for its colossal scrotum, is supposed to bring good fortune. Replicas of the big-balled animal greet you at the front door of many restaurants. In a country that adores a rodent with gigantic testicles, why wouldn’t a bug appear out of nowhere?

After our final day in Kyoto, we headed back to Tokyo. We had dinner at a sushi joint in the Ginza district. I itched so badly that I couldn’t keep my hands out of my hair for more than one slice of fish. That night, I couldn’t sleep, so I went to the swimming pool as soon as it opened. For the first few moments, the water put out the bonfire of pain on my back and head. When I got back to the room, I had to ask Dave to check for lice again.

He still didn’t see anything, which was actually a huge relief, because if I had lice, it would be somewhat of a cataclysmic event for Japan. I had been up and down the country using the bullet train. I used blankets, pillows, towels, taxies, ferries, and small Jacuzzis. I laid on tatami mats and rubbed up against restaurant booths. I had leaned against walls, tried on yukatas (thin cotton kimonos), and wrapped cute scarves from expensive shops around my head.

“It’s probably an allergy,” Dave said, which sounded entirely plausible even though I’d never once experienced an allergy.

“Yeah, we’ll figure it out when we get back,” I said.

By this point, we were ready to get home. The same man who’d picked us up at the airport eleven days earlier drove us back. I noticed how he’d decorated his car headrests with intricately woven lace doilies. So many people in Japan went the extra mile to make everyday objects more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing. I was impressed. I laid my head back onto those beautiful covers as I watched the city go past.

At the airport, we had a little extra time, so I went into a corner shop. I browsed books and then I began trying on neck pillows. My mom always told me not to try on stuff like that in stores because you never know the hygiene of other people who have tried them on before you, but I’ve never been concerned. The pillows were so soft and came in so many colors.

As I tried them on, I became a little obsessive—it happens periodically—and suddenly felt like as long as I tried on every different color, then somehow that would mean that the plane wouldn’t crash.

Dave was getting antsy, but I managed to finish my mission before he dragged me off to our gate.

When we got home twenty hours later, we went straight to bed. I woke up on a glorious Sunday morning, and the first thing I did was jump into my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. I could once again enjoy that plush swiveling piece of gluteal glory, because it was finally out of quarantine.

After fully indulging, I started to unpack our bags, piling our dirty clothes onto the other sofa. While I was doing that, Dave woke up and suggested that we go to the farmers’ market. We’d been eating gluttonous meals for the past eleven days and he thought we should get some fresh veggies.

I left our clothes strewn in the middle of the room as we went out into a chilly but sunny New York morning. We walked together in the East Village along Avenue A, up toward St. Mark’s Place. We were talking about what we would make—some kind of soup? No. A roasted chicken? Maybe. Something with black beans? That sounded good.

I remember happy dogs walking by with their owners. The clank of boots on the sidewalk cellar grates. Pulling my sunglasses down over my eyes. The burn at the back of my head. The stinging sensation that occurred each time I touched my scalp.

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. The vendors—their piles of gourds and apples—were in sight.

“You have to check my head one more time,” I said.

“Right now?” Dave said.

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t even care about standard pedestrian practices. I stayed put in the middle of the sidewalk, like an obstinate boulder dividing a rushing river, as people walked around me. I dropped my chin to my chest and waited until Dave appeased me.

When I was in Japan, I could easily dismiss the sensations as if they were some kind of awkward travel bug—the customary stomach upset we expect when traveling to a new place—but now that I was back home, I could finally recognize that the shit I was feeling was not even close to normal.

Something had to be wrong.

By this point, playing lice check had lost all its former cachet. Dave was exasperated—he’d probably checked my head at least thirty times—but he did his duty and took his designated position behind me. My hair was in a bun, so I expected him to start rummaging around in there. Instead there was silence and the heat of direct sun.

“Do you see anything?” I said.

“Um,” he said.

“What?” I said.

There was another long pause.

“What?” I said.

He came back around to face me. The corners of his mouth were drawn down. “It must be because there’s better light here,” he said.

Crabs Pubic lice, or Pthirus pubis, are the couch potatoes of the lice kingdom. They are characterized by their sluggish and sedentary lifestyle. I can’t blame them; I’d be that way, too, if my house was a porn set. Each louse is a millimeter, which means it would take twenty-five of them, back to front, to add up to an inch. They have a roundish gray body with six legs. The two in back are capped off with crustacean-looking claws, which is how they got their nickname: crabs.

They are not found in the crotch because they are fools for genitals, but because pubic hair is their method of transportation. Like a train needs tracks to move, crabs need pubes. That’s why they can also be found in other coarse hair like eyelashes, eyebrows, armpit hair, and beards. We originally caught pubic lice from gorillas three or four million years ago. That’s why pubic lice like pubes. Pubes are the closest thing we have to thick and tough gorilla hair. The fine hair found on our scalps does not give them enough purchase to move around.

Crabs don’t do much besides suck our blood and lay eggs—about three a day—for the two to three weeks of their short lives. Like head lice, they can’t jump or fly but can only scuttle from hair to hair. That is why sex—pube to pube—is their best opportunity to colonize a new home. They can also, though extremely rarely, be caught through infested bedding. A myth looms large that crabs can be transmitted via a toilet seat, but if that’s how your boyfriend is telling you he got his, then it might be time to find a new boyfriend or to finally have that talk about opening up the relationship.

One textbook, Medical Entomology for Students, explains quite insightfully that having lice makes one “feel lousy.” Crabs can cause itching and irritation, but they are also easily exterminated: Wax off your bush or use insecticides.

Though crabs—blood-sucking wingless genital goblins—sound apocalyptical, we actually have them on the defensive. They are becoming endangered because of habitat destruction. In one study, “Did the ‘Brazilian’ Kill the Pubic Louse?” researchers found that the dwindling number of crab infections coincided with the wax-it-all-off trend, which began around 2000. It’s hard to get good data—people often don’t report embarrassing parasites that have staked out their perianal region—but a 2009 study from East Carolina University reported that less than 2 percent of the population harbors papillon d’amour (which is the sexy French name for crabs). “Their forests are disappearing,” Danish lice expert Kim Søholt Larsen told me. “They are endangered because they don’t have anywhere to live.”

“What do you mean?”

He told me that there were so many black sesame seeds moving around that he couldn’t even count. He said it looked like a horror film where bagel toppings came to life.

My first reaction was to laugh. Gosh, isn’t that funny. I have a lice infestation. I went through an entire country spreading a parasite during my honeymoon. LOL!

Uneasily, Dave joined in on the laughter, too.

Then we pretended that whole episode didn’t just happen. We continued walking toward the farmers’ market as if we were different humans—ones who didn’t currently have minuscule animals eating away at their flesh. It was the most acute case of denial I’d experienced since I was twenty and still suspected that I might grow another ten inches.

“So we’re going to get broccoli and what else?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to see what else looks good.”

We were half a block away from the vegetable stalls when we both paused and looked at each other.

“Wait, we can’t go to the farmers’ market right now,” Dave said.

I furrowed my brows as the realization finally dawned on me, too. “Holy shit,” I said, “I have lice!”

An hour later, I was sitting on a chair in our apartment hallway. Dave stood behind me, brushing through each segment of hair with a fine-tooth comb. We had bought just about every lice-murdering product at Duane Reade, and upon getting home, I had doused my hair with the toxic shampoo. There were nontoxic methods, but I wanted poison! I wanted complete decimation! The fumes—strong and searing—were making my eyes sting, and I relished the implications of this particular burn.

Dave sounded bilious as he explained the scene he was confronted with: “It looks like a city was napalmed and the civilians are trying to escape.” Many lice ran down my back. I couldn’t count them all, but I’d guess there were at least a metric shit-ton. On a piece of paper towel, Dave showed me an abnormally large one. “Look familiar?” he said.

It looked exactly like the bug that had fallen on his arm in the Kyoto ryokan.

(To this day, that bug is still inexplicable. I looked it up and there is no such thing as a queen louse. I try not to wonder about that too much. Mostly, the lice were as billed: dark brown and the size of sesame seeds.)

While I sat there, I thought back to all the neck pillows I’d tried on at the Narita airport. I wondered if lice inject you with psychotropic substances that make you think it would be a great idea to rub your head all over everything. (I’m sorry, people of Japan!)

Dave, oddly enough, had only four lice in his hair. When we did some research, we found out that they were repelled by the acidic shampoo he uses for his psoriasis. It was nice for him to realize that there was at least one positive to having a skin disorder.

Even though I didn’t tell him at the time—it was my duty to make him feel guilty for being a subpar lice-checker—committing genocide on my lice population was one of the most romantic things that he’d ever done for me.

I didn’t speak about my parasite to many people, because having lice is stigmatizing and they scare people, as they damn well should: Those suckers hurt and they are immensely contagious from head-to-head contact. Those evil little bastards exploit our love of hugs. That’s how they’ve survived for like a billion years. Nits have been found on Egyptian mummies. Vikings even carried delicately crafted lice combs in their belts alongside their most essential item: their sword. They—muscular masculine marauders from Scandinavia—were so freaked out by the little bugs that they got buried with their combs in case they needed to battle lice in the afterlife.

One of the few people I told was my dad. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You know the story about how me and your mom got lice, right?”

He was referring to the time they both got crabs when they were twenty. Even though I’ve heard the story several times, I still don’t know it, because I’ve worked hard after each telling to block it out.

“Dad, I didn’t get genital lice!” I said.

He told me that was too bad because it meant that my lice story was a helluvalot less interesting than his.

When I got off the phone, I spent the next day wondering how lice knew which patches of hair they belonged to—did I have to worry that my head lice could suddenly, due to positioning, become pube lice? Luckily, I found the answer to that was no. Head lice can move around only on thinner head hair, while pubic lice evolved to navigate coarser hair.

Except for one particularly bad day when I contemplated lighting my head on fire, I brightened up over the next few weeks. I also stayed incredibly vigilant. If you leave one louse or nit behind, you can easily reinfect yourself. I knew it was overkill—many entomologists say you cannot catch lice from anywhere except head-to-head contact—but because I’d spread all my infested baggage all over our apartment as soon as I’d gotten home from Japan, most of our place was under quarantine. That, of course, included the increasingly superfluous aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. I did find humor in the fact that something widely considered a childhood affliction was preventing me from using the piece of furniture that symbolized my burgeoning adulthood. It felt like someone, somewhere, was trying to sabotage my maturity.

After two weeks without any evidence of lice or nits, one is considered in the clear. Until that time, I kept up a daily routine. Every morning, I’d wash my sheets, shampoo my hair, comb it out with a tiny-tined comb, and then investigate any detritus with a magnifying glass.

During this process, I came to realize that if it weren’t for me, then all those tiny beings wouldn’t have had life. I gave them life. They gestated near my follicles, hatched from my strands, and “breast fed” from my scalp. They could not survive without the heat from my head. You give and you give. They take and they take. Throughout it all, you worry nonstop. Is this what it feels like to be a mom?

3
Face It

A friend once told me that I look exactly like Matza Ball Breaker, a girl on the Chicago roller derby team. She called our resemblance “uncanny.” So I searched for Matza Ball Breaker on the internet. When I saw her, I was mystified. We both have hair on our heads and a chin below our mouths. We could also both claim a set of eyes. Most likely, she, like me, had a vagina as well. Other than that, I was left deeply confounded. My supposed doppelgänger looked nothing like me—or at least the concept of me that exists in my head.

Even though I’ve seen my image—photos and reflections—for thirty-four years, I’m confused as to which—if any—portrays reality. How I appear to myself is not at all consistent; my image is like a moving piece of newsprint that I can never fully read.

The me that I see in the mirror is often, though not always, more attractive than the me I see in photographs. When I see photos, it feels as though I must have been kidnapped as the shutter tripped and had Yoda placed in my stead.

There is nothing worse (except for murder, of course, and finding a long wiry hair in your entrée) than hearing someone say, “That’s a great photo of you,” only to get a glimpse of it and see staring back at you a mustachioed gnome with water-balloon cheeks and a grimace that could stunt-double for an elephant’s anus. If that is a “great” photo, then what am I when I’m captured at my everyday?

I’ve tried to get a handle on this discrepancy by pointing at various disagreeable photos of me and asking my friends, “Is that really what I look like?”

Then it’s often discouraging when they say, “Yes.”

In order to survive, I have to tell myself that everyone—all the people in the world—must be way overdue for cataract surgery.

No matter how sure I am, my perceptions are inevitably challenged. Recently, I snapped a selfie that I liked—there I am, I thought after taking my twenty-fourth shot—so I asked Dave for validation.

“How about this?” I said full of hope. “Is that what I look like?”

“Yes,” he said.

I was elated until he quickly added, “Except for your face is much rounder and your cheeks are bigger.”

Thus, the various manifestations of my appearance continue to confound me.

I was always uncomfortable with the author photo on my first book, but not for the usual reasons. This photo actually promised a little too much—unlike most, it didn’t make me look entirely like an Ewok—but friends and family reassured me that it was a fair depiction.

I spent many months going to events with a fear that I’d sense a palpable disappointment upon the audience’s realization that the real me didn’t live up to the poster outside. Everything was okay—if it was happening, people kept their snickering to themselves. I felt encouraged—perhaps I actually was attractive—until a loathsome evening in the middle of June at a small event space in Midtown Manhattan.

Before the reading, a woman lingered in the back by the table of books. She had my book in her hand and was rifling through the pages. She nonchalantly asked me who I’d come to see.

“I’m actually reading tonight,” I told her.

“Which book?” she asked.

I told her it was the one in her hands.

She turned the book over and appraised the photo. “Oh, that’s you?” she asked. I sensed a bit of incredulity.

“Yes,” I said.

She laughed and gave me a knowing glance. “I have some glamour shots, too,” she said.

After all the evidence—the misleading doppelgängers, the fickle photos, and the many unreliable reflections that chase me around the city in storefront windows—all I can say about my appearance with any certainty is that I have brown hair, a mouth, and a couple of ears. I’ve been wondering about it for years, so I finally wanted to know, why is it so difficult to get a real read on our own appearance? Is there a true version of the self, and if so, can we ever see it?

At first, I suspected that the inconsistency I experienced with my looks was solely an issue with the medium I used to view myself. There was something mysterious that happened—I became uglified—when my image hopped from a reflection to a photograph. Cameras, those bastard devices, had always misunderstood me.

To fill me in on what might be happening, I spoke with Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center. She said what many of us might already know: The mirror is a small white lie. It flips our image. Unless our faces are perfectly symmetrical—which happens only in the rarest of supermodel cases—we will likely feel uneasy when we see a photograph of ourselves. The nose that usually leans to the right in a photo leans to the left.

“It can look slightly off and therefore look funny to us,” Rutledge said. She explained that many of us prefer our mirror self simply because we see it more often. “We like what’s familiar,” she said.

“We like what’s familiar” sounded like an off-the-cuff generality, but it’s actually science. We tend to develop a preference for things—sounds, words, and paintings—for no other reason than that we are accustomed to them. This concept, called the Mere Exposure Effect, was proved in the 1960s by a Stanford University psychologist named Robert Zajonc. (Finally, there’s an answer to the shoulder-pad craze of the 1980s. Just by being repeatedly exposed to something—even if it’s heinous—you can come to think of it as a good-looking fashion statement.)

Another issue with the mirror is that we all, unconsciously, shift into flattering positions—hide the double chin, suck in the stomach, pop the hip—but it takes only one candid photo to haunt all that hard work and make you second-guess everything. I thought my arms were svelte little hockey sticks until a camera came along at an angle I was unaccustomed to and captured them in a way that gave me a month of night sweats.

Photographs, like mirrors, also don’t tell the whole truth. Depending on lighting, focus, and lens size, they can distort us in various subtle ways.

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