Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict Page B

colors. Of course, the insidious vajazzling. Using hot wax and a detail trimmer (basically a tiny razor)—and if you so choose, a product such as Coochy shave cream—one can strip and shape one’s hair into a variety of shapes, which have each earned nicknames in the common parlance of the trade. There is the vafro, the sphynx (also known as the Yul Brynner or full monty), the Bermuda Triangle, the football or the furry hoop, the flame (also known as the teardrop or princess), the diamond, the marquise, the landing strip, pencil line, and the minimalist. There is the Chaplin, the postage stamp, the Hitler, and the rattail. I recently spent a week on a nude beach in Maui and was less fascinated by the exquisite bodies than by the precision craft on display in everyone’s pubic region, both women and men. The young women sported dynamic shapes and flamboyant dye jobs; the young men had waxed their bodies entirely and all their pubic hair, leaving just a strip over the top of their penises. The effect was to make their penises seem, well, huge, like long, dangling hoses. I know several men, heterosexual, who go in for full wax jobs of the areas that are most hairy, also known in the trade as “back, sack, and crack.”
    An entire current of contemporary art, pop culture, and commerce is dedicated to pubic hair. American Apparel recently featured storefront mannequins with fully hairy pubic regions. The artist Rhiannon Schneiderman created a series of portraits of herself wearing giant wigs over her pubic region. In England, Project Bush gathered together ninety-three women and photographed their pubic areas, in part to show young women and girls that it is entirely OK to have pubic hair. (One of Project Bush’s creators was horrified to discover that girls as young as eleven and twelve were getting Brazilian bikini waxes.) The performance artist Julie Atlas Muz uses her vulva and vagina as a character in her work, Mr. Pussy. Mr. Pussy is made to speak, smoke cigarettes, and offer cultural commentary during “his” performances. Muz performs as Mr. Pussy to draw attention to the fact that the public sees feminine pubic hair as something frightening, something to be removed and waxed away. And in so doing, Muz recapitulates in her own way Denis Diderot’s marvelous erotic novel
Th
e Indiscreet Jewels
, in which a magic ring placed on a woman’s finger will allow her vulva to speak, delivering her opinion and point of view “from the most honest part.”
    The trend that most disturbs me is women who have all their pubic hair lasered off, permanently, leaving them in a state of immortal prepubescence. I asked a group of such women why they would do such a thing—which is entirely irreversible—and the explanations made no sense to me. One woman said she did it because she was having her bikini line—just the sides—lasered off and why not just do the whole thing, for the slightest bit of price difference? Another said she never wanted to confront having gray pubic hair. Her comment reminded me of a friend who is going through horrible, excoriating chemotherapy, and who can’t stand it when her fellow patients complain that the chemo treatments make them look so old. “I don’t care about looking old,” she says. “I just want the privilege of being able to
be old
.”
    I’ve ventured into the weird world of pubic grooming a few times. After the Turkish hammam experience, it took my hair a full year to grow back. In my early thirties, my then four-year-old stepdaughter came to live with my husband and me for the first of many summers. I knew we would be changing into bathing suits together, and I knew her mother had voiced some doubt about whether the hair on my head—in the preferred vernacular, “the drapes”—was naturally that shade of shocking, unnatural blond. The truth is that it wasn’t; the color had been foisted