Gross Anatomy

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in the US by G.P. Putnam’s Sons

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street, New York 10014

This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

Text and illustrations © Mara Altman 2018

Internal design © Ashley Tucker

Cover design © HarpercollinsPublishers 2018

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Mara Altman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008292706

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008292713

Version 2018-10-29

Dedication

For my mom

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

The Top Half

1. Bearded Lady

2. Some Nits, Picked

3. Face It

4. The Earth Moved. Trust Me.

5. The Big Dripper

6. My Cup Runneth Under

7. Actual Navel Gazing

The Bottom Half

8. The Air Down There

9. The Butt Paradox

10. PIlEup on the “Inner” State

11. The Human Stain

12. The Eleventh Toe

13. You’re So Vein

14. Bloody Hell

15. Wart, Me Worry?

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

Prologue

To become a master at any one thing, it is said that one must practice it for 10,000 hours. I have been living in my body for 306,600 hours, yet I still feel like a novice at operating this bag of meat. As soon as I feel like I’ve got everything figured out, something changes—boobs spring out of my chest, I sprout a mustache, floaters homestead in my eyeballs—and I’m left shocked, bewildered, and yet ultimately quite curious. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve wondered, especially after a spicy meal, why evolution wasn’t smart enough to build us with buttholes made out of something more durable. Lead piping, perhaps?

I’d like to say that I spend my time trying to cure cancer, eradicate hunger, and put an end to global warming, but my brain is naturally inclined toward questions about the human female body. I spend most days wondering about the potential aerodynamic advantages of camel toes and why, when we are built to sweat, I often find myself hiding in a public restroom, drying off my pit stains to pretend that I don’t have glands. Why does my dog, every time I squat down, make a beeline for my crotch? The only other thing she’s drawn to with such consistency is the garbage can.

I want to be one of those people who, in the morning, sip an espresso while filling in the New York Times crossword puzzle—what a respectable hobby!—but instead I’m busy wondering why, as I hump, I never sound nearly as cool and moany as the porn star Sasha Grey in the film Asstravaganza 3. Is there a meet-up group for sex mutes?

Let’s, for a moment, suspend the idea of self-accountability and attempt to blame these bodily fixations on my parents. They grew up during the 1960s and were the kind of hippies who were so hippie that they refused to be called hippie. “Hippies were so conformist,” my mom has always told me.

My parents first met in high school and then dropped out of UC Berkeley together. They began growing plants—mostly cacti and succulents—in their backyard and then, to make a living, sold them to local grocery stores and via mail-order catalogues.

My mom never wore any image-altering materials—no makeup, deodorant, perfume, push-up bras, or high heels. She has refused antiaging creams and would never dream of fillers. (When she read this, she said, “What are fillers?” Sheesh!) She didn’t even shave her legs or armpits, and still doesn’t to this day. I thought all that was normal female behavior until late elementary school, when I noticed that other moms didn’t have a great black muff under their arms when they waved their children in from the playground. I imagined that astronauts could spot my mom from space. “Houston, we have a problem—there appear to be two errant black holes near San Diego’s suburbs.”

While I felt proud of her uniqueness, I also felt terrified of being ridiculed because of it. I explained to her that it was perfectly possible to wave at me less zealously while gluing her elbow to her side.

So for a long time, I didn’t know a lot of woman things. In my twenties, I thought that women tipped the wax lady to keep her quiet.

My father, meanwhile, turned his nose up at anything he deemed unnatural. He hated perfume and artificial scents of any kind. When I tried a spritz of my friend’s bottle of White Musk from the Body Shop, he screwed up his face and rolled the car windows down. When he caught me wearing lipstick, he looked at me like I’d just murdered a giant cuddly panda bear to use its innards as war paint.

Growing up, I had a different concept of femininity. I came to think that artificially enhancing my appearance in any way showed a lack of self-acceptance, that it meant I wasn’t strong enough to be who I really was. All the girls out there who were wearing makeup, dyeing their hair, and covering their stink were frauds. I, who stepped forth into the world doused in her artisanal BO, was real. Of course, keeping it real doesn’t mean that I didn’t often feel uncomfortable. I found myself in a constant battle between self-righteousness and shame. Eventually I learned that one’s identity can be complemented, not always concealed, by how one chooses to express oneself superficially.

Ultimately, I matured in an environment that made me hyperaware of our social norms because I was constantly conscious of how I was never managing to meet them. Though I now partake in many of the beauty practices that I grew up shunning, maybe it’s because of my upbringing that I always catch myself asking, “But why?”

Then again, I’m not sure I can blame my parents for everything. Their aversion to razors probably doesn’t account for why I spent the last couple of days mining modern literature for hemorrhoid references or spent an hour unwinding after a rough week by watching Dr. Pimple Popper’s blackhead-extraction videos on YouTube.

In any case, I’m not saying that I’ve got it together more than any other woman; it is precisely my own volatile and apprehensive relationship with my own body parts, such as my bowels, bunions, belly button, and copious sweat glands, that has compelled me to go forth in search of answers from everyone from the goddess worshippers of Bainbridge Island to the top lice experts in Denmark.

This book won’t cure a bad hair day or a yeast infection, or anything else for that matter, but it is my hope that by holding up a magnifying glass to our beliefs, practices, and nipples, this book might serve as a small step toward replacing self-flagellation with awe, shame with pride, and vag odor with, well, vag odor is kind of inevitable. But get this, PMS might actually be a superpower!

1
Bearded Lady

It was the turn of the century. I was nineteen years old and a student at UCLA, a school bathed in milky young complexions and spicy Mexican food. I joined friends for dinner at a taco joint on Sepulveda Boulevard, where a dark and deeply handsome young waiter named Gustavo took considerable notice of my face. I will never forget that name, Gustavo. We flirted over the horchata and made googly eyes over the guacamole. My friends evaporated into the atmosphere until it seemed like there were only two of us left in the room. Every time he passed our table, he glanced furtively in my direction, and I returned his interest with the dividend of a smile and the promise of much, much more. It even seemed possible that, at some point in the evening’s marathon mating dance, we would speak about more than the Thursday-night specials.

Finally, the check—and our moment—arrived. Gustavo placed the bill in front of my friends and leaned down to my expectant ear. I tingled with excitement about what he might whisper. A phone number … an address … a marriage proposal …

And then they came tumbling from his luscious lips, like poop from a piñata—five simple words that have seared themselves forever into my memory.

“I like your blond mustache,” he said.

It is now eleven years later, and I’m on the cusp of marriage to a wonderful man who is covered in hair. He not only makes me feel happy; he also makes me feel smooth. I am writing this story for him, because I have something to tell him.

Dave, I have something to tell you.

I am a bearded lady.

No, not like those women you see at the circus. More like those women you see on the street, in magazines, at the corner coffee shop. Yes, Dave, they’re bearded, too. You don’t realize it, though, because we are all (except for quite a few Southeast Asians; I’ll get to that later) engaged in an endless process of removing the additional and unwanted hair we inexplicably, annoyingly came with.

You see, evolution played a cruel trick on the supposedly fairer sex. It involves chin hair, nipple hair, mustache hair, thigh hair, and—yes—even toe hair. Dave, by God, it’s true—we have fucking toe hair! Just like you! But the difference is that we spend millions, no, make that billions, of dollars to have it waxed, lasered, shaved, and otherwise removed from our bodies so that when you see us naked, you won’t run screaming into the night.

I’m telling you this now, before we get married, because I am, unfortunately, plagued with two parallel conditions: an inordinate amount of body hair and a genetic predisposition toward brutal honesty. These would seem to be contradictory forces, particularly since I’ve spent thousands of my own precious dollars in a futile attempt to look as though I’m not a hairy beast. I strapped myself to a wall in Spain and endured the pain of hot wax; I went for monthly laser treatments from a doctor in Bangkok who almost turned my face into a failed lab experiment; I own enough pink disposable razors to affect the quarterly income of Gillette. I’ve scraped, shaved, yanked, tweezed, and plucked nearly every visible surface of my body, not to mention certain sections I discuss only with my therapist.

I guess I’m telling you this also because I’m trying to figure out why I care. I know you love me no matter what. I realize no one—even you—will ever see the silky brunette strands that occasionally emerge from my nipple. I acknowledge that I’m not the victim of some cruel hormonal joke; I know that plenty of women have it worse than I do.

That raven-haired beauty in front of me at Vinyasa Yoga on Nineteenth Street, Thursdays at four p.m., sports actual muttonchops. But why, when I look in the mirror, do I see Roddy McDowall in Planet of the Apes? How can I rid myself of an obsession borne by women since the dawn of time? What weapon do I have to combat the societal standard that all women must be smooth, supple, hairless creatures? When will I be permitted to let my hair down? Not my head hair, but my armpit hair, my facial hair, my leg hair, that little “happy trail.” And is that even what I want?

You love me for who I am, right? So why do I want to be somebody else?

I was in my eighth-grade physical education class in suburban San Diego when I learned that there was a really bad kind of body hair to have. And that I had it.

It began with a group of girls, sitting cross-legged on the grass. Our uniforms—maroon drawstring shorts and a gray T-shirt, not that I recall every single solitary detail of that day—revealed our different stages of development. My shirt had ALTMAN written out in black permanent marker just under the peeling, screen-printed figure of our mascot—a crusader. Again, you just kind of remember these things.

While the PE teacher went off to grab soccer balls, we just sat there doing nothing, the sun beating down on us. To pass the time, I was contentedly grabbing one fistful of grass after another and then ripping it out. Grass. Out. Grass. Out. Repeat ad what felt like infinitum.

Finally one of the girls, April, got up and put her hands on her hips. She looked me up and down, but mostly down. She then took a jump back and flung her arms in the air. “Ewww, you don’t shave?” April shrieked. “That’s SO gross!”

I let go of the grip of grass I had in my hand. The blades of grass fell to the ground, like so many hairs. The girls looked at my legs. I felt like Sissy Spacek at the end of Carrie. The hairs sparkled in the sun like beads of blood. Under that withering Southern California sun, they wouldn’t stop making a spectacle of themselves.

Other girl legs were splayed around me. It was the dawning of a new era as my eyes scanned them, pair after pair: Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. Shaved. And then, finally, back to my furry gams, announcing themselves so brightly that they were probably inadvertently transmitting SOS signals to airplanes.

I’d known that women shaved, obviously. At least it had been absorbed by my subconscious. But it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I was supposed to join the tradition. I was one of them—a girl—and I had to act accordingly, or be shunned like a leper. My hair apparently represented a possible contagion.

As my fur was inspected by the nearby contingent, a warm rouge attacked the back of my neck and then snuck hotly around to my cheeks. I could pull my legs into my chest and then stretch my shirt over them. I could run away. I could pretend that I didn’t hear April and hope that she disappeared. I grabbed another handful of grass and pulled it out, wishing that at that moment each and every one of my leg hairs could be reallocated with such ease.

I was already a little behind. Wait, make that really behind. I was roughly a foot shorter than the average eighth grader and had not yet developed a sense of fashion, unless “fashion” could be described as five different colors of sweatpants.

When I was twelve, my mom asked me if I wanted jeans and I declined for practical reasons. “They are too stiff and cold in the morning,” I explained. Going shopping was out of the question. I didn’t fit into anything in the juniors’ section so I had to go to the kids’ sizes, where all they offered were variations on flower-print shirts and polka-dotted socks with lace.

Another issue was that I’d practiced gymnastics competitively for the past eight years, and as a result, what had developed were not my breasts, but my thighs. There was a group of guys who, when they spotted me at recess, would shout, “It’s muscle girl. Flex!” Those were not the bulges I wanted them to notice.

I couldn’t navigate my developmental abyss with conventional tools. So when I got home that day, I dug through the Everything Drawer in the kitchen and found the perfect implement: a battery-operated lint remover. I tucked it into my backpack and went to my room to begin my work.

For some reason I didn’t feel like I could ask my mom or dad for a razor. I felt guilty even considering the request. I knew if I did so, I would be knocking their entire modus operandi. They saw the world through their late-1960s Berkeley-colored glasses and maintained a loyalty to All Things Natural—countering societal conventions like hair removal, and maybe having something to do with nostalgia for John Lennon’s unkempt eyebrows. Meanwhile, my mom hadn’t removed hair on any part of her body, ever.

And my dad professed to love it. “I’ve been very happy with this hairy little creature,” Dad would say.

In addition to his shaving shibboleths, Dad often made the point that he did not like it when women wore makeup or perfume (yes, that includes deodorant). Basically, we were a hair-positive household that practiced a Don’t Hide How You Came doctrine. But instead of feeling free to be who I was, sometimes this hairy-go-lucky attitude felt confining. Again, I have to bring up the White Musk. My dad wasn’t cool with even a little spritz of White Musk, and who didn’t like White Musk?

Apparently, the entire family had met secretly at some point without me and formed a pact against all forms of body enhancements and alterations.

Once, I’d put on some lipstick and my older brother asked, “Why are you wearing that stuff?” The question was so laced with condemnation that I felt like he’d found me shooting up heroin.

I pointed out to him that he was dating a girl who shaved and wore blush and concealer and lipstick and eye shadow and mascara and also some sort of raspberry scent that I felt certain I’d once also whiffed at the Body Shop. He said those weren’t the parts he liked about her. But at thirteen I could connect the dots; he was attracted to girls who gussied up. Guys liked girls who gussied up. Still, I couldn’t help feeling ashamed that I’d tried to change my innate lip shade in front of my makeup-mocking family.

When my brother went back to his homework, I looked in the mirror and rubbed off the fakery. I wanted to fit in.

But getting rid of my hair wasn’t exactly about improving my looks. I didn’t quite comprehend what a female leg should look like at that point anyway—and I wasn’t trying to attract a guy yet. At thirteen, guys remained as untouchable as tropical fish in an aquarium. I admired their firm fins and bright colors as they passed, but we could never blow bubbles together. They didn’t even notice my nose pressed up against the glass.

No, I had to remove hair for basic schoolyard survival, or risk permanent exile to the farthest reaches of the lunch area. I dreaded the idea of being called “gross” again. During that time of major pubescent shifts, April made it her job to strain out confusion—a self-appointed quality-control officer on the San Marcos Junior High School playground, barking at any girl who failed to maintain her proper place on the feminine side of the distinct gender line.

That meant no leg hair, ladies.

For the remaining hours of that school day it had felt like forty million sniper eyes were laser-focused on my legs. Even the slightest pupil flicker bound in my direction caught my attention. The embarrassment was vaguely equivalent to having toilet paper hanging from your shoe, but not really. You can’t shake off leg hair. I know; I’ve tried that, too.

So I locked the door to my bedroom and pulled out the lint-remover contraption. I flipped on the switch. It started buzzing. I lowered it to my calf, feeling equal measures of shame for having hair and for buzzing it off with a machine. I cringed as it made calf contact, expecting excruciating pain. But it really only tickled, asserting itself as a machine manipulated for the wrong purpose.

Hair was not lint. I needed a plan B.

I couldn’t steal a razor from my mom, like my girlfriends could from theirs, because she didn’t have any. Although my father used blue Bic disposables for his cheeks, the commercials made it quite clear that legs needed pink.

After a week of wearing pants, I finally got the gall to ask my mom about shaving.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

To leave her ranks, I’d be a traitor. She’d be out a hairy compatriot. Me, her only daughter—her own flesh and blood—straying from the path.

But. I. Couldn’t. Not. Do. It.

I nodded.

Mom bought me a disposable pink razor and some shaving cream and accompanied me to the master bathroom. She handed me the equipment and sat on the toilet seat, expectantly, as I planted my foot on the edge of the bathtub.

“Now what?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess you just slide it up your leg.”

“You think that’s all you have to do?”

“Try it,” she said.

Clearly, she was clueless.

“Like this?” I said, moving the razor over my shin.

The razor left an empty path in its wake. Look, Ma—no hair!

I could now return to the schoolyard and show April my shiny, glamorous new gams.

By sophomore year, I was finally getting on track. Much to my pleasure, my pubes had sprouted. I’d look at them in the shower and think, I made those! I remained in hair heaven for two entire anxiety-free years. If I’d have known that they’d be the only two years of relative hair peace I’d ever experience, I would have taken time to appreciate them more, maybe made a documentary. I was riding high, experiencing my first boyfriends. I discovered that boy pubes looked a lot like girl pubes.

Did I mention that I had pubes? I had pubes! We all had pubes!

But then, all of a sudden—late in my junior year of high school—an assemblage of keratin and protein had conspired beneath my skin to march out of a large number of tiny holes. And not just holes hidden where no one could see them. They were on my upper lip!

I’d noticed these little hairs on my upper lip before, but I’d ignored them—they were little blond wispy nothings. But now they were getting a little darker and a bit longer. If I caught myself in the right light in my bedroom, I could see a vague resemblance to Tom Selleck.

How in the fucking shitball motherfucking hell did I get a mustache?

Only males had mustaches. I was not a male. Or was I?

I remembered that my mom had this stuff called Jolen, in a small turquoise box with white lettering. When I was younger, I used to watch her work its magic. She would mix some powder with cream. The substance would get fluffy and bubbly—the astringent compound burning our nostrils. She would spread the yogurt-like goop on her upper lip and wait ten or so minutes before washing it off. Underneath the bleach, the hair would get so light that it was practically invisible.

At the time, I wasn’t able to see the apparent hypocrisy. If my mom was so liberal and wanted to stay “all natural,” then why would she lighten her upper-lip hair?

That was a question I would be able to ask only later.

For now, I took that turquoise box from her cabinet. I decided that news of my mustache would be known only to my closest friends, Shannon and Natasha—one a blond Caucasian and the other Cambodian, both of whom grew very fine and small amounts of hair (and the latter of whom is so hairless that waxers, over the years, have often felt guilty charging her full price for any one service; looking back, I should have had a hairy Italian girlfriend or two).

Shannon and Natasha bleached with me. With the white goop swabbed thickly on our upper lips, we looked like we were starring in a road production of “Got Milk?” We turned it into a ritual. While the bleach did its work—tingling and then slowly building up to a stinging sensation—we turned off all the lights so that my bug-shaped glow-in-the-dark stickers would burn green, and sat in a circle, singing aloud to the Cranberries.

In your head, in your head

Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie …

After I washed off the mixture, I felt relieved.

That hair, as far as I was concerned, became invisible. I just had to keep up the ritual every two to three weeks.

I was all set.

Until I met Gustavo.

How many people had noticed my “blond mustache” and didn’t tell me? I tried to recall different boyfriends and situations. I’d kissed plenty of boys by then. Had they gotten mustache burn from my face? Is that why Sam didn’t ask me on that second date? Or Jonathan? Or Bill? Is that why that cashier at Vons, the grocery store, was looking at me strangely when I bought razors for my legs? How did I not realize that with my olive skin tone, bleaching my hairs until they were practically white might create a situation on my face?

Gustavo was the first man to ever mention my body hair, but I had collected enough data to make me pretty sure that men were, as a gender, opposed to it.

A few years before, I was listening to Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew talking to this complete jerk on the radio show Loveline. The caller was complaining about his girlfriend’s nipple hair. He said he found it nasty and couldn’t get turned on when he saw the little strands. He was thinking of breaking up with her. I was shocked to learn that women got nipple hair—and thrilled to check and discover that I’d been mercifully spared that fate—but now, three years later, as I stood in horror after spotting my very own first nipple hair, I knew I faced certain rejection from any man who encountered this new deformity.

I was beginning to understand that there was a very small window of what was “acceptable” and I had ventured beyond it. It wasn’t long after the Gustavo Fiasco that I noticed, while staring down at my bikini area, that my pubic hair had been marching, steadily and without heed, down my legs as if it could practice homesteader rights on the rest of my body.

I was now nineteen years old, and it was time for my first visit to a bikini waxer, whom I came to think of as an aggressive border control agent, getting rid of undocumented pubic immigrants. When she entered with the wax strips, I smiled awkwardly and asked the question that I’d be asking for the rest of my life in any and every hair-removal situation.

“Am I normal?”

She said that I was, but I didn’t believe her.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“We’ve all got hair,” she said.

I knew that we all had hair, but that wasn’t the question. I wanted to know where exactly I stood on the hairy scale, because that was becoming the problem. Ladies were ripping out their hair before I got a good look at it; therefore I was feeling like a beast among a hairless breed.

She proceeded to rip out the hair that jumped the border—about half an inch—but then she spotted the hair on my stomach. For quite a while, I’d had a light “happy trail” from my belly button downward. It was the inspiration for a nickname—Happy—that I’d acquired at fifteen. For a while, I’d considered the name cute.

“You want me to get that, right?” she said, spreading the wax on it before I answered.

“Why, is that not good?”

Rip.

“Well, you probably want to get rid of it,” she said, throwing my happy trail in the trash.

And that’s how I learned that apparently happy trails aren’t as happy as they sound.

By the age of twenty, I was finally coming to terms with the fact that no hair was considered good hair except for the hair on your head, eyelashes, and eyebrows, and those only if they were in the right shape. Arm hair, it seemed, got a pass as well, even though it didn’t look any different from leg hair, which is weird. But even toe hair had to go. I didn’t even know that I had toe hair, but then it turned out that I did, which was bad. I’d always remember that I forgot to get rid of it when I’d fold my torso over my legs in yoga, and then I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from staring at it.

For the crotch, news of the Brazilian style—going completely bare—that would soon sweep the USA had not yet reached my ears. I still thought it was normal to keep all the pubic hair except for the bits that peeked out from my bathing suit. And though I trimmed a little off the sides every now and again, I was proud to have a bush. And I continued with the normal stuff—shaving, plucking, and waxing. I also fell into a dependent relationship with Sally Hansen home wax strips—prewaxed plastic in a rectangular shape. I just had to rub it between my palms to heat up the wax and then I could rip out my hair myself. The problem was that I had issues with getting all the excess wax off, so by the end of the day, I’d end up with an accumulation of colorful fuzz and lint that made wherever I waxed look like my skin was growing patches of sweatshirt.

When I went to Spain for my year abroad as a college junior, I got my legs waxed while being strapped vertically to a wall with a leather belt. I felt a bit vulnerable, but I didn’t question it as long as the wax did its job.

I went to India in 2003, the year I finished undergrad, to work at a newspaper, and got my entire face threaded. I said I wanted only the upper lip and eyebrows done, but Smita just kept going. She touched my cheeks and said, “Face?” I shrugged. She took that as a signal to wind up her thread and tear out all the fuzz from my cheeks, chin, and jowls.

Paid professionals were always trying to get rid of more and more of my hair. It happened again when I went to a bikini-waxing joint in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a few years later. I just wanted a little off the sides, as the bush had been growing out for quite a while. When the waxer saw me—saw that part of me—she looked into my eyes with a fortune-teller’s boldness and shook her finger back and forth.