Bearded Lady by Mara Altman Read Free Book Online Page A

was when I stood naked in front of a full-length mirror with my arms raised and noticed that with the hair under my arms, it looked like I had two decoy vaginas. I suspected that, somehow, those were used to much advantage during our cave woman days.
    The empowerment that I’d hope would come, though — it just didn’t. A lot of the time I just felt hairy, and everything was a little worse for it:
    The dishes are dirty... and I’m hairy.
    Something is rotten in the fridge... and I’m hairy.
    I have no money... and I’m hairy.
    I felt like my body was morphing outside of its jurisdiction — crisp lines were suddenly blurring. I was a coloring book and a little kid was coloring outside the markings. My eyebrows broke free from their usual shape and simultaneously were trying to visit my hairline and my nose. How did Frida do it? To feel momentary relief, I’d visit the Hairtostay.com website, which calls itself the “World’s only Magazine for Lovers of Natural Hairy and Hirsute Women.” It’s part female hair fetish porn site and part positive hair treatise. You can do everything from have hairy phone sex to peruse articles such as the one titled “Are Hairy Legs a Deterrent to Crime?” It wasn’t to commiserate with other hairy women that I went there, though. I went to stare at ladies that were hairier than me, so that I’d feel smooth for a change.
    It was finally December — time for my family’s annual vacation together. This year we were going to Southeast Asia, land of genetically hairless women. Right before we left, I bought a box of Sally Johnson pre-wax strips (that addiction had never evaporated) and ripped off my happy trail. I couldn’t take it anymore. And once it was torn off, I actually felt like I could breathe deeper.
    I was soon in Cambodia with my family. When we went to Angkor Wat, a temple complex from the 12th century, I asked my tour guide, Vutta, how Cambodians felt about women and body hair. “They don’t do anything to the hair,” he said. “Well, actually, they don’t really have the hair.”
    “So no waxing or shaving?”
    “Actually, the girls want to have light skin like you.”
    “But if they get light skin, they will have the hair that comes along with it.”
    “To be honest,” Vutta said, “the people here believe that a girl with the hair is lucky. She can get a better life. A better husband.”
    “Really?” I said. That was the most hair-positive belief I’d heard, probably ever.
    “But it’s not true,” he said. “They just believe it. We are so behind in our economy and society because people believe silly superstitions like that.”
    “So it’s not lucky to have hair?”
    “Not any more lucky than not having hair.”
    “Oh.”
    At this point, I began to think I was actually journeying backwards.
     
    ***
     
    On the final day, I got one of my legs threaded on the beach in Vietnam. I did it as an experiment. I’d never done threading on anything except my face before. Besides, the woman who did the threading had been chasing me for the past three days, pinching my hairy legs as I passed. I sat down on a little platform that she had propped up in the sand; it was about five feet from the water. I was shielded from the sun by a big umbrella. The hair, by this time, was about a half-inch long. The woman wound the thread around her hand and put one part of the loop in her mouth. She twisted the thread and then bent down and started ripping out my hair. It felt like a pack of mice were sinking their jaws into my skin over and over again. I grabbed at the sheet covering the platform below me. I felt the sweat slide down my arm as I yelled “Ouch!” again and again and again. She leaned over me and after each time I said ‘ouch’ she said, “No ouch later, later beautiful.”
    I was amazed that the same hairless aesthetic prevailed on the other side of the world.
    I quit after half of one leg. I couldn’t handle the pain. A razor seemed so much more