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been worth dying for. As depressing as that was, I kind of admired it.
    Maggie brought her hands to her mouth and her eyes got big. “That’s a monstrosity!” she said. “That’s bat-shit crazy.”
    “Mags,” I said, “I think I would have been one of those chicks. I would have stuck my face right into some radioactivity.”
    Clearly, I still had some issues.
     
    ***
     
    I kept calling up many academics for information. Oh, who am I kidding? I was calling them for comfort.
    Bessie Rigakos, a sociology professor at Marian University, has studied why women remove their body hair for the past eight years. Her biggest challenge in finding answers has been that she cannot find a big enough portion of women who don’t remove body hair to use as a control group in her studies.
    Before volunteering for her next study, I began with the basics. Why do we remove our body hair?
    “I research hair removal,” she said, “and I do it myself and I still don’t know why we do it, which is amazing.”
    I felt better already.
    She went on to say there are so many factors involved that she just can’t pinpoint which is exactly the cause. “I wish I had the answer,” she said. “Is society controlling it or are women controlling it?”
    Keep going, Bessie. I’m wondering the same thing myself.
    One thing she definitely believes is that hair removal gives women positive feedback, and is thus a positive force. “Just like how when kids pee in the potty, they are rewarded,” Rigakos said, “when women adhere to beauty standards, then they are rewarded in society.” Somehow that analogy lost me, and I hung up the phone with Rigakos just as uncertain as before, but at least I felt academic validation in my uncertainty. Rigakos had a doctoral degree in hair-removal studies from Oxford, or something like that.
    Next, I called up Breanne Fahs, a professor of gender studies at Arizona State University. Fahs was incredibly passionate on the subject and spoke rapidly. Which was good, because I was getting married in less than three months and needed some quick answers.
    “It’s amazing how people imagine hair removal is a choice and not a cultural requirement,” she said. “If they say it’s a choice, I say try not doing it and then tell me what you think.”
    “What would happen?” I asked.
    She said the practice of growing body hair can be so intense that it can show women how marginalizing it is to live as an “Other.” By “other,” she means growing hair will give you a taste of what it’s like to be queer, fat or have disabilities. “You experience this tidal wave of negative appraisals of your body,” she explained.
    “How do you think it came to be this way?” I asked.
    “At the root of this is misogyny,” she said. “It’s a patriarchal culture that doesn’t want powerful women. We want frail women who are stripped of their power.”
    She explained that in Western culture men are fundamentally threatened by women’s power, and eroticize women who look like little girls. “We don’t like women in this culture,” she said. “Pubic-hair removal is especially egregious. It’s done to transform women into prepubescent girls. We defend it and say it’s not about that, that it’s about comfort. They say they don’t want their partner to go down on them and get a hair stuck between their teeth as if that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to them.”
    When I got off the phone with her, I’ll admit I felt pretty tense. She made hair removal sound like it was the beginning of the end of this civilization. I didn’t need that kind of responsibility.
     
    ***
     
    I needed to know if there were any reasons why, evolutionarily speaking, humans might be more attracted to hairlessness. I have to acknowledge that during my reading, I did find evidence that even though hair removal wasn’t popular in early America, it has happened on and off for as long as humans have existed. Archeologists believe