INTIMACY OF A WAX
The line between platonic and sexual encounters is often quite thin; it depends upon how long you linger.
During the spring and summer months, I get waxed every five to six weeks, religiously. I dislike the way my pubic hair bunches in a bikini bottom and seeps with sweat when I walk from place to place, let alone work out. But during the winter, my vagina hibernates with the rest of my body and mind. The hair protects me and keeps me warm. Until one day in mid-March when I look in the mirror and see it’s long enough to trim with scissors. It’s time to emerge from hibernation.
At home in Los Angeles the same woman waxes my mom, my sister, and me. I’ve been going to her since I was fourteen, when I would cry in the waiting room in anxious anticipation of the pain I’d have to endure to eliminate my unibrow and remove unwanted hair from my lower back.
She waltzes in wearing a caftan, her doe eyes smiling wider than her mouth, and she asks me how I’ve been. I divulge everything—school, family, boys—while I lay on my back in the happy baby yoga pose and she pauses her process, eyes wide with satisfaction, to show me the cowlick of pubic hair that is now glued to her wax paper.
I’ve always marveled at the sense of trust and genuine emotional closeness I feel to my aesthetician and pondered the intimacy contained within a wax. Many of the philosophers and theorists I’ve encountered via my Modern Culture and Media syllabi have encouraged me to further analyze the process through a critical lens.
When I started college I was recommended a Providence waxer by an upperclassman friend. My expectations of an approachable and gentle young woman, similar to the one I go to at home, were not representative of the lady who now brings me out of hibernation each spring.
Her workspace is a windowless room inside a musty, subterranean hair salon inside a typical Providence colonial-style edifice with a residential facade. The receptionist never smiles. Every time I go, I’m in and out in fifteen minutes—an impressive feat for a full Brazilian wax, especially when I haven’t gotten one in three or four months.
She is an older woman, in her late 60s at least, with a heavy Belarusian accent that pierces through the air with her signature set of motivational remarks that might be more fitting for someone running a marathon than getting a wax. She does my entire vagina in five sheets, tearing the hair off my body like it’s lint off a sweater, leaving me yelping in pain and gasping for air.
“Good girl,” she says in between takes, “You are so strong!”
And then, the dialogue takes a surprising turn.
“You let me torture you and you don’t even complain,” she says, as she massages her “magical oil” into the folds of my vagina.
I can’t help but chuckle to myself. I don’t feel uncomfortable; I’d trust this woman with my life. But as she pulls the flaps of my vagina open in the same motion a guy would use before going down on me, I can’t help but ponder the abject sexuality present in this completely cosmetic transaction.
In Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he introduces the key concept of “lingering” to the analysis of a kiss. The line between platonic and sexual encounters is often quite thin; it depends upon how long you linger.
Bulgarian-French feminist, philosopher, and semiotician Julia Kristeva draws on Freud’s theories in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. I’m thinking about her essay while the waxer finishes her masterpiece and dusts my vagina in baby powder.
Kristeva defines abjection as a primal instance that escapes signification in the traditional symbolic order. It refers to a bodily breakdown response (i.e. horror, vomit, scream) as experiencing a loss of distinction between subject and object or the self and the other.
I am certainly at a loss of distinction and for words at this moment. The process of a Brazilian wax, especially one accompanied by commentary from this woman, is one that truly escapes all symbolic order.
“We just went through so much together,” she says to me sweetly. As I step off the table and begin putting my clothes back on, I can’t help but feel like I just had sex with her. I crawl out of her cave and from my hibernation into a euphoric and satisfying awakening that feels akin to ending a dry spell.
AUTHOR: Dorrit Corwin
ARTIST: Kendra Eastep