Category: Words

Personal grooming preferences. Very personal grooming preferences.

I’m going to end up in Mexican pubic hair jail.
–Me/On discovering that my pubic hair preferences differ from those of my travel companions on the way to Cabo

It’s been a little gloomy around the blog lately with all my thinking about body image. This is still going to be vaguely about body image, but it’s the lighter side.

Let’s talk about pubic hair.

I can honestly say that until I was well into adulthood, I never gave pubic hair much of a thought unless got it in my mouth. Then my thought was usually, “how am I going to get this pubic hair out of my mouth discreetly, because watching someone pick pubic hair out her teeth is not sexy.”

What? It isn’t! Don’t act like you’ve never gotten pubic hair in your mouth. If you haven’t, then you aren’t doing something very important. Or all of your partners are bare. If so, carry on.

My Mom is in Italy right now. I can write whatever I want.

Maybe there’s a fetish for pubic hair in the mouth, but I am definitely not going to Google it.

Sorry. Distracted. Not Googling.

Not only did I not ever think about pubic hair, but it really never occurred to me that a person could or would do anything with it but have it be what it naturally is. Other than keeping it short enough to stop it from sticking out of a bathing suit, of course. Considering how massively slutty I was, it seems odd to me that I never thought about it. I guess I never encountered anyone who had done much with theirs. Everyone had it back then.

It was a natural era.

Even people in porn had pubic hair. And normal looking boobs. Remember normal looking boobs and pubic hair? I don’t think you see them much in porn any more. Although it has been a very long time since I’ve looked. I could be wrong.

I’m sure they did some girlscaping even back then, but everyone had a bush in my limited experience with naked women in either porn or real life. The fact that there are actually pubic hair fashions now?

I find it baffling.

Waxing? I know a lot of people who do it. It sounds awful.

Shaving? Carefully? OK.

Lasers? Are you kidding? People are getting their pubic hair permanently lasered off. For one thing, I am never going to spend that kind of money on my pubic hair. No way. For another thing, there are certain parts of my body that I don’t really want to have lasers aimed at.

Plus, what if a full bush comes back into style again? You’d never get laid again.

Is that what happens if you don’t follow pubic hair fashion? You don’t get laid? There must be some reason that there are pubic hair style trends, and sex is the obvious one.

How are the trends enforced, aside from sexual shunning?

Is there a pubic hair police force? Pubic hair jail? That could be a funny short (hair) story. Hmmm.

Here is my funny anecdote about having no pubic hair. It doesn’t involve me, exactly. I’ve done the no pubic hair thing, but it’s not a funny story. It wasn’t tragic or anything. No terrible cuts or trauma. It’s boring. I went without for a while, didn’t like how it looked. Let it grow back.

Anyway. Back when I worked on the Oncology unit, I was chatting with one of our patients, and she mentioned how tired she was of being bald. I commiserated, and then she said “you know what the worst part is? Having a bald snatch. It’s awful. And they don’t warn you about it. All of a sudden ALL of your hair is falling out. When they say full body alopecia, they should be more graphic, because I was not emotionally prepared to have my snatch look like a bald chicken.” Then she looked at me and said “are you supposed to be talking about this stuff?” (I was a secretary)

I shrugged sympathetically and said “well, technically, you are doing all of the talking. I’m not advising you what to do about it or anything. I’m just providing emotional support.”

Then she asked me if I had ever had a bald snatch personally. Of course I lost it. Well first I said yes. Then she said “oh, that an inappropriate question, wasn’t it?” And *then* I lost it. I told her I didn’t like the way it looked either. Like a 5 year old girl.

We were still giggling when her doctor walked in.

“What are you two laughing about.”

“Pubic hair.”

“Uh…what about it? Am I going to be sorry I asked?”

“You doctors should really tell us that we’re going to lose ALL of our hair including our bush when we get chemo. I am not someone who looks in a mirror very much, but I have to look at the naked spot where my bush used to be every time I pee, and it’s very upsetting. I would have liked to be more mentally prepared for it.”

“Uh…I guess I never thought of it that way. We will try to be more explanatory at the office.”

More giggles. “Look, Michelle. I made him blush.”

Good times.

Body image

So for whatever reason, OK because it’s the end of fat camp, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about body image lately. Mine has never been great. I don’t think I know any woman who hasn’t gone through struggles with accepting the way she looks.

When I was a kid, I used to read my Dad’s Playboy subscription attentively. Possibly even more attentively than my brother did. Back then, the models used to look real. They had breasts that looked like they might actually move. They had some flaws. They were each shaped a little differently from each other. The women, not the boobs. Well. The boobs, too. Sure, they were more beautiful than most women, and they all had serious boobs, but they looked like actual human women.

I didn’t think I would ever look like one of those women, but they didn’t seem all that different from me. As the years went by, the women got more and more unreal looking to me. Surgical enhancement became more common. The pictures were more and more retouched.

Now? They’re all implanted. Their faces look like they’re made of plastic. It is physically impossible for any woman, including the ones in the pictures to look like the published result because they are only implanted but photoshopped to a point where no one could ever look like them. Necks and legs are lengthened, eyes are enlarged, waists are narrowed.

It’s the same, or maybe even worse, in fashion photography. They take girls who are already unusually tall and thin, and make them even more tall and thin.

Our natural tendency to emulate looks we see around us makes us think we should look like the images we see in the media. The women we see in magazines are not even possible in nature.

The other day at work, I was talking to a coworker about how hard it is to by clothes that fit properly. She’s tall and thin, I’m short and fat. It’s a universal problem, and our tendency to see our bodies as flawed makes it even more of a challenge because we make the issues about fit into a problem with the way that our bodies are built instead of just a problem with a garment.

The more unreal the images of us are portrayed in the media, the higher the rates of eating disorders, body dysmorphia and depression among everyone, but particularly young women. And these issues are occurring at younger and younger ages.

People have always altered their appearances, but it seems like we are taking it to extremes we never have before.

How did we get here?
How did we get to a point where people think that the feminine ideal is a look that is not even a human possibility?
How did we get a point where total hairlessness, plastic body parts,Botox and anal bleaching are considered beauty ideals?
Who even thought of anal bleaching in the first place?
How do we get images of real women back in the media?

Who is it who wants women to look like the images in the media anyway?

I only have questions.

If we saw ourselves the way others see us, how would we look?

Out she goes

It’s Friday night and she is going out. Of course she is going out. She always goes out. She doesn’t have a date, though. She never has dates. She has plans to meet a group of people. A group of men.

She’s one of the only girls who is a constant. Most of the other girls disappear. She’s not sure why she is always invited. She isn’t little and cute like they are. She isn’t perky. She isn’t blonde. She doesn’t chatter like they do. She doesn’t wear stylish clothes. She isn’t sociable. She makes some of them uncomfortable. She still gets invited, or rather is expected. She has dinner with them almost every night. If she doesn’t go for more than a day or two, someone calls to make sure she is OK. A lot of times, she’s one of the only girls there. They must like her for some reason, right?

She never lets one of them come to her house and get her. She doesn’t like to have people pick her up, because then she can’t get away if she wants to. She doesn’t ever want to be stuck.

She is getting dressed to go out. There is a pile of clean clothes a foot high covering her bed, and the floor of her room is littered with shoes and dirty clothes. She is wearing a blue polka dot tube dress with a red sweatshirt over it, and a wide black belt on her hips. Red tights, and black high heels. Her hair is still wet from the shower.

During the week, it doesn’t matter what she wears. Everyone is in jeans. Normal clothes. They just hang out at the house on the golf course. The house is great. It was used in a movie once. Marble floors, big fancy kitchen, a bar. But it’s still relaxed and cozy. Everyone hangs out there. Most of them are family. Someone cooks. Someone makes drinks. No one minds if she sits at the bar and chats, or if she studies. Sometimes she just sits on the floor and watches soccer with one of the guys, or even falls asleep on the cushions on the floor. She’ll wake up covered with a blanket. Sometimes she’ll crawl in bed with one of the guys, for company more than anything.

On the weekends, though, it’s a party. They’ll all be in suits. She has to be festive.

She is not happy with the way she looks. She never is. Nothing ever looks right on her. She always looks too weird or too fat or too boring. This is the fourth outfit she has had on. She does not feel like changing again. She doesn’t feel like going out. She doesn’t feel like staying home alone. She doesn’t know what she feels like. She doesn’t feel like anything.

At the last minute, she cuts the neckband out of the sweatshirt so she doesn’t feel like she’s choking. She cuts it too low, and it falls off of her shoulders, so she puts in a row of safety pins on one side so it stays on. She crinkles her nose at it in the mirror, then shrugs. Punk, it is. She takes off the normal black high heels, and puts on torn fishnets over the red tights and high top tennis shoes over the fishnets. She puts duct tape over the tears in the fishnets so they don’t tear even more.

Then she takes those off the high tops and puts on a pair of gold shoes with bows on the toes. Then she puts the tennis shoes back on. At least her feet won’t hurt.

She looks in the mirror.

She looks like Cyndi Lauper ate Madonna.

She feels fat. She feels ugly.

Hair. She hates dealing with her hair. It’s always messy, but never in a good way. It falls in her eyes, it escapes from a pony tail, it won’t stay pinned up, it won’t hold a curl. If it’s permed, it’s too poofy. If it isn’t permed it’s too straight. There is nothing to do with hair like this. It’s too fine. At least it’s soft. She blows it dry and pins it up on top of her head in a messy knot, hoping it looks like it’s messy on purpose instead of because she doesn’t know what to do with it.

Make up is fine. She always liked makeup. It’s easy. She doesn’t put much on. At least she has good skin. Eyeliner. Lipgloss. Done. She likes her face. Her eyes aren’t too bad. People have always told her she has beautiful eyes. Men tell her she is beautiful, but she doesn’t believe them. Mostly they just want to fuck her. Why should she believe them?

As she gets ready, she gets a call from one of the guys, telling her where everyone will be that night. They always ask if she’s going to come and have dinner first or just meet them there. She decides to stop by Joe’s on her way to the party so she tells him she’ll meet them. The party is usually in one of the ballrooms at the Hilton, but might be at the house on the golf course, or the one on the hill, or the one on Fox Hollow. Sometimes it varies.

Joe is her friend’s Dad. Kind of a second father, since she spends so much time over there. She stops by a lot, especially if her Mom is out of town or at work. Joe always seems happy to see her, and although she gets a lot of compliments about the way she looks or how well she does at school, she never feels like people like her. She always knows he does.

When her dad says “is that what you’re going to wear?” it’s in a voice that makes her feel like he thinks she’s ugly. When Joe says the same thing, he smiles and adds “no one else thinks of wearing things like you do, you nut” and she feels charmingly eccentric instead of like an ugly freak.

She makes sure she has some change in case she needs to make a phone call. Grabs her purse. Then takes her lip gloss and driver’s license out and sticks them in the pocket of her sweat shirt and leaves her purse on the bed. She hates keeping track of her purse.

She doesn’t bother to bring much money. Enough for one drink in case she decides to leave the party and stop somewhere by herself on the way home. None of the guys would ever let her pay for anything, but at the parties there’s always an open bar anyway. If she does stop at a bar, by the time she finishes her first drink, someone will have bought her another if she wants one. If she plays the game and makes eye contact. A lot of the time she doesn’t drink at all. Just watches everybody. Watches the game of people circling each other.

She drives down the hill to Joe’s without calling. She knows she is welcome. Walks in without knocking like she always does. He gives her a hug and a beer, steps back and says “what did that sweatshirt ever do to you??” shakes his head, and tells her she looks like she came out of a magazine. They drink a beer at the kitchen table and talk for a while. He always seems to be interested in how she thinks, what she says. She gets up to leave, thanks him for the beer. BEER in all caps.

Then she drives to wherever the party is. …

20140504-192537.jpg
Michelle at the house on the golf course, 1983-ish
Sitting on the kitchen counter, post concert.
Clearly not a party night!