are you guys serious about going full bush in a bikini this summer?

I’ll do it if you do it

Nobody comes right out and tells you that womanhood is qualified by certain acts of gender performance. You figure it out by watching, listening, absorbing; you figure it out by noticing your own faults.

I have a lot of body hair. It’s dark, and thick, and it covers every inch of me.

I was six years old. We were gathered for a friend’s birthday party in the restaurant her father owned on east tenth. It was spring, and my bare little legs stuck out between my blue dress and Mary Janes. I blushed. There was hair on my shins where it shouldn’t have been.

It was silent reading time and a friend pulled down her sock and told me to touch her ankle. She had two older sisters, neither of whom seemed real to me. They were dreamlike, apparitions: figures of femininity that were keen to the elusive world of bras and smudged lip gloss and kissing boys. She had stolen one of their razors that weekend and patch tested herself.

Slamming doors on my mother was becoming a daily occurrence and we had already exhausted every argument for why I shouldn’t shave my legs.

“You’ll end up with strawberry bumps!” she said, indignant, pulling her pants up to her knee as if to scare me into submission. “When you’re ready, I’ll take you to go get waxed.”

She never told me what “ready” meant.

I was in the sixth grade, twelve years old, a transfer kid in Catholic school who had just learned how to swear. The first boy I ever truly fell in love with pointed at me and yelped.

“Jesus Christ! You’ve got even more hair than I do!”

I dug around the cabinet for my mom’s pink Gilette and took it off that night.

By fourteen the hair had spread and I was pinning my knees to my chest, holding up a hand mirror, and spending an hour and a half in the bathtub every other week. I experimented with waxing strips, kits, depilatory creams, scissors, razors, and scrubs.

At sixteen she finally caved. I laid on the table awaiting a bikini wax while she sat on a stool in the corner, much the same positions we assumed at the doctor’s office.

“How old are you?” the esthetician asked me.

“Eighteen,” I repeated dutifully.

It was something spiritual. The curtain had been pulled back, and I had finally been granted entrance. I was mature, now, I had bloomed, the procedure far more effective than any first period or anticlimactic loss of virginity ever could be. I was a woman -- except of course for that pesky landing strip.

I was making money scooping ice cream and I had a boyfriend, a high school diploma, and an obsession with Brazilians.

“Only pornstars get those,” my mother scolded. I rolled my eyes. There was no real alternative.

Shockingly, the pain wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

I soon found myself inducted into the cult. I went as frequently as I could, bought the slow-growth oils they prescribed me, exfoliated to slough away dead skin, and never ever took a razor down there.

It’s a sensory experience; almost sensual. She smooths warm, wet wax on you, waits for it to harden, holds you down taught and then pulls, a scorching pain radiating down into your bones as hundreds of hairs are pulled off at once and reveals soft, pink, puckered skin. The slight, lingering feeling of abrasion is somehow pleasant and I wonder if I am a masochist.

For two whole weeks after I relish in bald perfection.

At this point I’ve developed a certain numbness. I’ve grown more and more comfortable showing my parts to a perfect stranger, letting her pretzel me into whatever unnatural position is easiest for her. I’ve perfected my deep breathing technique, shutting down beauty salon chatter to signal that I’m here on strictly business.

“Wow, you’re doing really well,” my girls often tell me.

“Yeah, I’ve been doing this forever” I say before returning to inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth.

I’ve spent thousands of dollars. The check in girls would try to get me to buy the packages every time. I would refuse, reject, rebuff, until finally one day I relented. By my next visit I found out that my favorite girl had quit. How’s that for your fucking misfortune?

In the years since I’ve realized something else, too. I don’t really care about having body hair. I don’t mind the way it looks. Actually, I think the little fluff under my armpits is kind of cute. But I still can’t help the feeling that everyone is looking at me, and judging that I am some nasty kind of woman.

The Internet girls are now going around saying that this summer they’ll be on the beach, going “full bush in a bikini.”

So I just have to ask. Are you being serious about it? Because I’ll only do it if you do.