Gorilla My Dreams

by Gwen Cooper — August 22, 2007

If there were some sort of annual prize for World's Hairiest Woman, I would be the hands-down winner every year. Women from Syria and the Ukraine would complain and make angry public statements questioning the integrity of the judges--How could the same person win every year? they'd demand. But then they'd see a picture of me in a bikini, in all my hirsute glory, and sheepishly mumble something like: Oh, I see. Well, fair enough.

Since roughly the age of 12, body hair has been the bane of my existence. Whenever people compliment me on the thick, shiny black hair that grows on top of my head, I'm always quick to point out: "The sad part is that it also grows everywhere else." I have invested countless hours and ungodly amounts of money in keeping unwanted hair at bay. I shave, pluck, wax, and bleach in places where no woman should even have to think about fuzz--much less control it. Manos monos--or "monkey hands" in English--a Cuban boyfriend I had in Miami used to say affectionately, running his fingers over my hairy knuckles, until I added "knuckles" to the list of places on my body from which my aesthetician was directed to remove any signs of growth.

Hairiness seems to be something of a dominant genetic trait in my family. My grandmother used to tell the story of how she and my grandfather first met on a blind date. When their mutual friend pointed out my grandfather to my grandmother as the man she was considering fixing her up with, my grandmother's first response was: "I'm not going out with that hairy baboon!"

"And that's how I met your mother," was how my grandfather would conclude the tale, whenever he told this story to my mom. It's family anecdotes like this that make me glad I wasn't born a man; I shudder to think how much worse the problem would be with extra testosterone thrown into the mix.

And yet, with all the hair maintenance that I've struggled with over the years, the one thing I've never even considered is a Brazilian wax. Don't get me wrong--I'm vigilant about keeping my bikini area in check, especially in the summer (because nobody needs to see pubes when I'm lying on the beach). And with certain men, as an act of intimacy, I've allowed them to take a razor to my private areas--as a sort of erotic, I was here signifier. But, in my ongoing quest to remove all traces of hair from my arms, underarms, hands, legs, lip, brow, back, and belly, I can't help feeling there should be at least one indicator that I am, in fact, a post-pubescent woman.

And I have dreams of the day when some man will describe to a little girl how he, perhaps, initially recoiled from the idea of dating a woman so much hairier than himself, until the idea grew on him like so much peach fuzz. "And that's how I met your mother," he'll say.

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.