As Jia Tolentino states in Trick Mirror, “porn and modeling and Instagram influencing are the only careers in which women regularly outearn men.” No living writer is as acutely aware of the catch-22 of men looking at women and women being looked at as journalist and novelist Lisa Taddeo, whose first two books Three Women (2019) and Animal (2021) deftly explore female desire, obsession, and rage. And the patriarchy is particularly pernicious for rewarding, albeit in limited spheres, those who maintain a particular type of body (lithe, hairless) that makes the bodies of cis-heterosexual men sit up, stiff as wolves.
The violence of patriarchal beauty standards afflicts all bodies, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, or ableness. It took me nearly a decade afterward to accept my body without adhering to the aesthetics of porn. Subsequently I spent hundreds upon hundreds of dollars from my teaching salary tearing hair out of the most sensitive part of my body. It was the unfettered cruelty in his voice that stuck with me the longest, even after the words themselves had lost their sting. It’s disgusting, he said in closing, before exiting the room.
I scheduled my first Brazilian after a particularly vicious fight with my then-boyfriend who shouted something that, for years, filled me with a terrible, stultifying shame: The reason he did not go down on me wasn’t because he himself didn’t like to do it, but because my pubic hair amplified the odor of urine. She was always as gentle as she could be.
Sometimes, when our conversations went particularly deep, she’d delay the appointment by plucking the stray hairs along my inner thigh with a tweezer under her blinding fluorescent light. For three years, I scheduled Brazilian waxes every month with a soft-spoken woman named Crystal who lived with her boyfriend, dog, and mother and who caught me up on their domestic family life like one would a college roommate over Smirnoff.
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