“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