Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict

longer than a grain of rice. I would learn that in Islam, pubic and underarm hair is considered unclean for both sexes and is routinely shaved or waxed. In Syria, even though I felt like a filthy sex goddess / giant eight-year-old, I actually fit right in.
    Years later, I often reflect on the paradox of the American woman, influenced by porn-star culture, stripping off her pubic hair, coerced into a state of enforced genital infancy, and her similarity to Muslim women all over the world. They spend their entire adult lives never seeing a pubic hair on their bodies—but in their case, it is for religious reasons. In one culture, porn rules; in the other, God. The result is the same.
    In the past two decades, with the absorption of pornography into the American mainstream—pole-dancing aerobics classes, Abercrombie thong underwear for the six- to eight-year-old set, suburban couples making homemade porn movies, nip slips on television, Miley Cyrus basically doing anything—pubic hair has become a quasi-public marker of the self, a talisman of one’s essential style, even though presumably very few people see what your pubic hair actually looks like. Books have been written about the many possibilities for pubic coifs. Women celebrities talk about their pubic hair in an open and casual way, and I am still not used to hearing it. It always strikes me as misguided, as if they believe this open kind of conversation is an empowering feminist move, wresting sexual discussion away from men and using it as their own device to convey sexual bravura. I found it profoundly embarrassing when Jennifer Love Hewitt revealed to the talk show host George Lopez that she had “vajazzled” her vulva. “A friend of mine Swarovski-crystalled my precious lady—and it shined like a disco ball,” she said, adding, “Women should vajazzle their vajayjays.” It made her feel better, she said, after a nasty breakup.
    A brief aside on what vajazzling entails: someone strips all the hair off your vulva, labia, and anus and then glues crystals or pearls in some sort of decorative motif in place of the hair. (
Vajazzling
is a play on the words
vagina
and
Bedazzler
, which is a home appliance used to fasten rhinestones, studs, and patches to clothes and other material.) First of all: Don’t google this. (Or the phrase “Willie Nelson vagina tattoo.”) You can’t unsee it. (And you really can’t unsee that Willie Nelson tattoo. It haunts me.) Second: Why would you want to put glue all over your vulva? How can you function while coated, privately, in rhinestones? Exercise? Make love? The actress was, of course, promoting a book about “female empowerment.” What I saw was a desperate celebrity trying to make headlines before she U-boated out of sight forever.
    I WAS MORTIFIED when I heard Gwyneth Paltrow publicly ramble on about growing a “seventies bush.” Why do I want to know this? Does she think it makes her seem more human, more natural, more down to earth, to talk about her wild and woolly pubic hair? In fact, it seems overly thought out, processed through the neural pathways of seventeen public relations executives, and delivered on a talk show for the sole purpose of having people (just like I am doing now! Brava!) repeat it.
    In my twenties and thirties, I worked as a reporter and often subjected myself to projects that involved the body. There was a graphic front-page story for the
New York Observer
about my experience with colonic irrigation. I wrote a piece for the
New York Times
about women experimenting with Viagra for enhanced sexual gratification (I believe I was the first
New York Times
reporter to get the word
horny
into the paper of record). Later, I was asked by a women’s magazine to get a “vajacial” and write about the experience. During the treatment, an aesthetician performed a cleansing “facial” treatment on my vulva, explaining why it