Bare

Warning: this blog post involves discussion of genitalia traditionally categorized as "female," as well as descriptions of bodily functions.

Yesterday, with very little preamble, I shaved most of my hair.

Clarification: I still have all of my head hairs, eyebrow hairs, nose hairs, leg hairs, and almost anything else you can think of; I shaved my armpits and my crotch.

Why is it that words describing the pelvic area tend to be (a) alarmingly clinical, (b) awkward to say, or (c) derogatory?

I was in the shower around 11:45 in the morning, having just shaved my armpits (step 1 of my body hair management cycle, which continues with step 2 - leave pits alone for six weeks and concludes with step 3 - repeat), and I looked down at the mess of curls that I'd been ignoring since January and said to myself, "Maybe I'll smell better if I shave." Never mind that I hadn't showered in five days, no, my pubic hair was the sole reason why I felt disgusting. (To be fair, it had been feeling rather sticky for a few weeks; no matter how much soap I shoved at it, nothing seemed to change.)

I'd forgotten how thick my hair is. Some angel of good intent at the back of my mind wavered, "You'll clog the drain even more!" I was undeterred; I'd started already, and if I gave up, I'd feel lopsided. The way it felt was of much more concern to me than how it looked; who was going to see it? Every time I would wipe after peeing, I always felt as though some of my hair would come off on the toilet paper, and was almost disappointed that it didn't.

I was coming to the bottom of my can of shaving cream, which was great news for moving in three months, but not great news for hair removal this instant. I drew the razor sideways, up, down, and always there was more hair, no matter how much I scraped off the blades with my thumb. I found my concentration sharpening despite -- or maybe because of -- the fact that, devoid of any ocular aids, I couldn't see with any clarity what I was doing. And then, suddenly, it was gone.

The razor I was using wasn't small enough to catch anything that couldn't be pulled flat by my free hand, so I rinsed off, washed my hair, pulled the bar of soap across the places where I felt icky. I turned the shower off, toweled myself mostly dry, and squatted across the toilet seat with the pair of nail scissors I was accustomed to using for trimming. I was shocked at how much I could see, at how much I'd been missing. I didn't need a mirror to look at myself anymore.

Trimming the hairs that I'd left, breathing, wanting to be fully present in this space despite my anxiety that I would be late for work, I took in the pinkness, the different shapes, and wondered if and to what degree they resembled the diagrams I'd seen as a child in science textbooks: "these are the labia majora," "this is the clitoris," all sorts of useful knowledge that we promptly forget because we think we'll never need to use it. I thought of a friend's story about an OB-GYN who hadn't known what labia are. I thought of the conversation I'd had the previous night with someone who thought "female-bodied" was the best way to talk about people who were born with vaginas. (This was offensive to me because my body and my gender are not determined by my genitalia. There is no single best way, but some better alternatives include "AFAB", an acronym for "assigned female at birth," or simply "people with vaginas" or "people who were born with vaginas.") I thought about my sexuality, and how I've coated it in a veneer of only doing what I wanted without actually knowing what I wanted, and maybe that's one of the reasons I don't have sex anymore. I thought about the way people gender me without even seeing me, without knowing for sure that this is what's beneath the layers of clothes and puns and deceptively loud laughter and self-deprecating humor.

And I thought, I don't need my labia to be "normal," whatever that means, because by existing I am already abnormal. I don't need my hair removal to have a reason except that I feel gross and I want to see if having less hair changes that. I don't need to sexualize myself. I don't need to sexualize myself.