Due to financial and emotional insecurity, I didn’t wander into the world of professional hair removal until last week, when I casually decided to book my first Brazilian. As is the case with many beauty practices, I have complicated feelings about hair removal. I’m suspicious of anything that is expensive, painful, and labeled as “self care” or “a treat.” But my suspicion does not outweigh my curiosity.
I had a brief foray into home waxing in college, which was terrifying then and hilarious now because I’m not currently crying naked on a bathroom floor trying to coax hard wax out of my pubes with olive oil, peanut butter, and a pair of children’s craft scissors. But otherwise, my experience stopped at wax strips removing cute softies from my face, not the fortified forest below.
There are two foundational memories I have regarding the legendary Brazilian wax. The first is any time I saw media that featured a woman wearing a swim suit and the second was the 2002 Bikini wax sketch on SNL featuring Nia Vardalos and Rachel Dratch.
Despite my broad education, I didn’t actually know what a Brazilian was until recently. I read Cosmo and was exposed to the early internet as much as the next Millennial, but I had no idea that Brazilians traditionally included the labia and the butt crack, because we did not acknowledge these parts of women until 2015. I assumed it was just removing all the hair from the pubic mound and hip creases. In fact, the messaging I absorbed from the media had me convinced I was a massive weirdo for having hair in those places until recently. I AM ALMOST FORTY.
Part of what’s kept me from exploring waxing is a cute practice I call “shame stacking,” which is being ashamed of something and then feeling shame about that shame. It’s super fun and anyone can do it! For hair removal it goes like this:
“I’m ashamed to have body hair in normal places where normal people have body hair.”
Shame Stack:
“I’m ashamed of this shame because as a modern feminist I know body hair is normal and giving into the shame of body hair is letting the patriarchy win. My shame about body hair is ruining feminism and it is my fault sexism still exists.”
See how fun?
I’m a big fan of bodily autonomy and think hair removal should be elective for all: if folks want to do it, that’s great! If they don’t— also great! But if I’m very honest, it feels required for me specifically. I look at many women I’m close to who have gloriously unshaved armpits with admiration and envy. Just like the gnawing, instinctual urge I have to make my body smaller, I remove my body hair with a level of auto-piloted compulsion. I know that’s just my internal misogyny stealing my time, but it’s not a switch I can turn off with ease.
One could make the argument for confidence or comfort: if I’m more comfortable moving through the world without a bushy bush, that’s a great reason to remove that hair! But the reason I’m more comfortable walking around without a bushy bush is because I’ve received decades of messaging that my body hair is yucky and I should not be yucky because the value I bring to anything is exclusively in my conventional, westernized hotness, for which I must suffer.
It’s the same reason that it is much more comfortable to move through our culture in a smaller body—physically/mentally/emotionally.
I know these voices I hear about hair removal are wrong, and I know they’re not mine (mine is shriller). They’re adopted voices, but they’re still loud and persistent. By way of mental gymnastics, I concluded that if I’m going to cave to one of these fuggin’ guys (internalized voices), caving to hair removal was the least harmful, and sometimes all we can do is make the least harmful choice. And I’d be supporting a local business! #livelovelocal
Just like shame stacking, I can justify stack, too (get you a girl who can do both). I chose a Brazilian because I’ve been shaving for nearly three decades1 and I still sometimes cut myself with the razor. When I do, it’s rarely in a spot that I can keep an eye on and make sure it doesn’t get gross or infected. It’s somewhere sensitive, out of sight, and hard to clean that keeps me up at night because I’m certain I’ll develop sepsis from trying to landscape my butt fur and I’ll have to go to the hospital and it will be so embarrassing to be a feminist admitted to the ER for bowing patriarchal beauty standards that I’ll die not of sepsis, but of shame.
Credit where credit is due: the esthetician was way better than Nia Vardaloz and almost as funny. She was welcoming, communicative, and answered all of my one-hundred-sixty-two questions. When I told her I had never experienced a professional wax and I was there for a Brazilian, her eyebrows politely left her forehead before she smiled and said, “Okay! We’ll go at your pace, and if you decide to modify the procedure at any time we can certainly do that.”
She had me disrobe from the waist down and lie on a massive silicon pad that reminded me of the ten months when my parents had a water bed. I placed the “privacy screen” (a slightly thicker piece of tissue paper) like a fig leaf atop my hairy bits, which she unceremoniously removed the moment she walked back in the room.
She then proceeded to spread warm wax on my bikini line and rip it away along with any hair. After the first pull she said, “Oh, you’re a sensitive bean! You’re getting red already.” Which led me to wonder: are beans sensitive? And are there people who aren’t sensitive to having hot wax rip hair directly from their follicles?
I found one more shame to stack on during the procedure, when after a few pulls, I heard my cracking voice say, “I think I’d love to modify to a regular bikini! Thank you!”
As I left, I bought an after-care kit and tipped her one million dollars, resisting the urge to ask her how she came to this career. Had she dreamed of ripping hair out of people since she was a little girl?
Later, my partner asked me if it hurt and I didn’t know how to answer. It felt like someone was ripping out a lot of my pubic hair all at once, but my bar for pain has been warped when I’m thinking about desired aesthetic. Pain levels of the bikini wax were up there with my rib tattoo, but shout out to the bikini wax for not lasting eight hours. Shout out to the tattoo for not needing regular “maintenance.”
A fun side effect of the Brazilian: I only wanted to sit like the douchiest dude on the subway for two days after to keep as little of my hip creases touching anything as possible. Later that evening, in a pair of loose cotton granny panties under even looser pants, I man-spread at an outdoor concert and people-watched. One woman was gentle parenting her small child who’d locked herself in a bathroom stall. She was a picture of saintly patience and managed to both listen to her small child and give me a kind smile as I walked by. Another maneuvered her tiny smiling baby beneath a cover—navigating public space, full boobs, and a hungry mouth with an amount of skill that awed me. And because I am the main character of my life, I thought: had they ever had a Brazilian? Did they handle it better than I did? They’re probably smart enough to know they don’t need a Brazilian or they’re so bold that they did it when they were younger but don’t really care about those things anymore. They seemed so much cooler and smarter than I have ever been. Surely they have never kowtowed to the patriarchy in such a foolish enterprise as mass hair removal.
The great news is now that I know what waxing is all about, I never need to go back again. My next appointment in is September.
Tell me everything you know about waxing:
Ever since fellow 5th grader Amanda R. told me my leg hair was gross, because it’s super normal for 10-year-old girls to care about body hair.
BRB, adding “shame-stacking” to the OED.
Sugaring > waxing, and the most painful parts seem to be those that overlap in the Venn Diagram of Bikini and Brazilian. And I have anxiety sweats before each appointment of course.