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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 up the image of downy soft blonde 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. I’m not usually into the Nazi analogies, but if the boot fits... It’s because of people like Muir that I’ve put myself through so much pain removing my hair over the past 15 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 blonde. I could feel it. Or maybe Cambodian.
    Muir used the actress 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 began talking about trends for the bikini and she quoted Cindy Barshop, who founded and runs the Completely Bare salons, which Barshop named after her own initials. The salons specialize in laser hair removal. Barshop was most recently in the news for PETA’s condemnation of her new fox fur merkins (also known as pubic wigs). Yes, in a paradoxical move, she wants you to rip off your own fur and then glue colorful feathers and animal fur to your genitals.
    I knew what she was talking about. I’d just recently experienced my first full-on bikini 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. I just felt strange not having hair there. I’d always been so proud of it 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, Cindy Barshop 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