The Last Taboo

The Last Taboo

People used to use the expression “the big c” when referring to cancer. Nowadays, women proudly display tattoos on breast scars. Men talk about rising or falling PSA numbers, indicative of the possibility of prostate cancer and children’s pictures are strewn all over Facebook  holding placards reading “Pray for me, I have been cancer free for 245 days”.

Divorce was a hushed event, domestic violence happened behind closed doors and evidence of abuse hidden behind sunglasses and long sleeves. Children with polio were kept from view as were most children with Down syndrome.

 Homosexuality was in the closet. Kids in class were made fun of for being fairies, people lost their jobs but mostly it was innuendo until Stonewall. There are still people who for various reasons choose to not disclose their sexual preference, but main stream television and main stream politicians have opened the door.

Even the popular book Fifty Shades of Grey has brought to the forefront some sexual picayunes that were private thrills people thought about bought magazines furtively or if they were lucky found a partner they could secretly use their pink fur lined handcuffs with.

Commercials on television plug pharmaceuticals for products ranging from leaky bladders to severe depression.

And I am sure there are many other taboos that were not discussed in public or even in private but now grace our billboards and Facebook pages.

However, I admit to hiding behind a closed door of shame. It is my last taboo and I want to come clean.

The subject is women’s facial hair. God Bless Frida Kahlo. She didn’t hide her mustache. She used it in her artwork like Hugh Hefner used breasts.  I mean look at a photo of her.

Absolute beauty, in spite of her crippled body.

What admiration I have for Frida.

 In 1987 I started to notice them. I wrote a short poem, long lost except for one line, which described the hairs on my chin. It said something like “I see them when the light hits the bathroom window at just the right angle, ½ dozen of them, more or less."

I was shocked; I didn’t want to really count them. I was appalled.  I bought tweezers. I bought Nair for the face.  I knew my fate. Had I known my fate before I had children would I have brought any into the world? The physical flaws right there for anyone to notice, to stare at, to even question or make fun of.

Facial hair, what could be less sexy for a woman. Gotta hide it, bleach it, and wear foundation, anything so I didn’t end up looking like Now facial hair on women is not as uncommon as I was led to believe.  Although there can be  some medical reasons for the “problem, sometimes it is ones’ fate and  estimates put the number of women in this country who do some kind of facial hair removal process at about 20 million.

 Hormonal changes that begin with puberty can change the fine hair on a girl’s face known as vellus to become thicker. Although the more common place for this hair to show up is in the pubic region or armpit, sometimes it will pop its ugly head on a girls face.

  As women get older and hit menopause hits, the ration of androgen to estrogen change and increases in facial hair can occur.

Heredity can also determine how much facial hair a woman ends up with because those genes determine how thickly hair follicles are distributed and at birth, the dice are cast. And of course, certain ethnic groups are more likely to develop facial hair than others.

Now, on a personal level, my mother, as she got older, spent a great deal of time sitting on the couch with tweezers in hand. When she developed brain cancer, she lost a great deal of hair during treatment but those stubborn chin hairs did not yield to radiation or chemotherapy and when she died, and her skin retracted, my middle sister, who also tweezes her chin, complained to the funeral parlor make up person about that detail those of us with facial hair notice, that she should have shaved my mother’s face before applying make-up.

 By the way, my other sister bleaches her mustache and her daughter who is 17 and was a child model now gets laser treatment for her mustache.

My daughters are blond and although one of my daughters has some peach fuzz you can see in the sunlight, I hope they are either lucky enough to not develop the dark hairs my sisters and I have or are liberated enough to realize it makes them no less beautiful.

 For me, I have bleached, tweezed, waxed, threaded, lasered and have had electrolysis and have had no luck. I have used a prescription cream that costs $75 a tube and that works well, as long as I can afford to use it as directed, twice a day.

Is it worth it? My children and husband love me. My husband says he doesn’t even notice my hairs unless he catches me rubbing my chin to feel those stubbles.

 I have grown up with a standard of beauty that I will never meet, frizzy hair, flabby belly, larger than average nose and a flat butt.

 A famous soap company had a wonderful campaign letting all women with other body “flaws” know they were beautiful no matter what their body type. The advertisement did NOT mention facial hair. It has been a taboo topic, but I am out of the closet. I have hairs on my chin, hairs on my neck and along with the wrinkles on my face and my flabby belly, I am woman anyway. And I am beautiful.

I am a skeptic

I have two identical stickers on the back of my car that say   “I doubt it”. I admit it…I am a skeptic.

Let me explain how it started. The year was 1968 or 1969 and my friend Melody called me on my princess phone. And said “Robin, did you hear, Paul is dead”. I hadn’t heard anything on WMCA so I asked her what she heard. We spent the next two hours dissecting the Sgt Pepper album cover that most definitely had funeral flowers shaped like a guitar but with Paul’s name hidden within the shape of the guitar. We played records backwards to hear John’s ominous voice eerily say “ I  Buried Paul”. But, why would the Beatles not tell us Paul had died? Well, some conspiracy theorists said that since Paul was the most popular Beatle, nobody would listen to Beatles music anymore if he was dead, so they came up with an elaborate plan to hide his death. But, they put clues all over the place, so people could figure it out if they were smart enough.

I was also a fan of Mark Lane, a great civil rights activist who wrote a book about the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy called Rush to Judgment. Actually he wrote several books about the subject.

My personal life has also been filled with many beliefs that have had little proof of truth, but sure made me and some of my peers feel good. I was macrobiotic for years, with the belief that I could prevent or cure cancer if only I ate a perfectly balanced macrobiotic diet, not too yin, not too yang. Years later I found out the wife of the founder of macrobiotics in the United States died of cervical cancer. Other friends of mine eschewed anything cooked, claiming that cooking killed all nutrients in food and further stated there was a commune somewhere in South America where people lived on only lemon juice and sunshine. Other people lined up at the health food store I worked at for sugar pills, aka homeopathic medicine, Bach flower remedies, and herbal potions that I have since found out could be very damaging to ones liver.

I had my astrological chart done (Leo sun, Virgo moon, Capricorn rising for those who are curious) and praised mercury for good communication or  blamed mercury if poor mercury was retrograde (which for those who are not aware, means that mercury “appears” to be going backwards in the sky)  .

I have had reiki treatments, had my aura read, chakras opened up, been prayed for, had foot reflexology, taken bovine extracts of thyroid or was it pancreas, because a kinesiologist tested my arm strength while holding unopened jars of the stuff, and have even had psychic readings.

And then something happened. I took some science classes in 1981. I learned about one celled organisms and I learned about body systems. I learned and understood some laws of physics and the magic of some chemical reactions.

I realized that the magic of science, which can be observed, predicted and proven or not proven, was much more interesting to me than wishful thinking. Proving causation was much more satisfying than association or anecdotal theories of events.

My life changed dramatically after that and shortly after I became a mother and needed to research vaccines. Now granted the research was not easy back then because it seemed there was only two pieces of information, from doctors or from Mothering magazine, the original granola mommy, baby wearing, co sleeping, anti- vaccination glossy magazine I subscribed to.

I still decided to vaccinate and only after Rebecca developed a very high fever after the second round of shots, did I give up the “p” part of her vaccine. Both my children have received all other vaccines available to them at the time.

Well years of child rearing passed and then came 1995 and we went online. And in 2010 or so Facebook became a regular part of my life and I insisted it was a way for me to know what was going on with my children so far away.

But….I have learned so much more than where my daughter had dinner or my other daughter’s rock climbing adventure.

I learned that our own government planned and executed 9/11.

I have learned that BIG Pharma keeps real cancer cures under wraps because they won’t make much money off it.

I learned that 10 walnuts a day helps cure cervical dysplasia.

I know about poison jet contrails and I know Obama was born in Kenya. I learned that if I drink enough water before bedtime, I won’t have a heart attack and Johns Hopkins did the research on it, so it must be true. I also now know that if I am in trouble, I can put my pin number into the atm in reverse and the police will be summoned.

Some of these claims are innocuous and some may be obvious lies but I worry. I worry about the child whose parents read about homeopathic treatment for strep and don’t get effective treatment for their ailing child. I worry about the man who thinks he cannot be having a heart attack because he drinks all the water Johns Hopkins tells him to drink and I worry about the woman who takes colloidal silver during pregnancy because she was told it cannot harm her or her baby.

But mostly I worry about my friends, who because of confirmation bias hold unwavering viewpoints about politics, health and world events and refuse to discuss and even ostracize others who proclaim to be open minded but only as much as the opinion or belief is supposedly open minded or new age.

I know that those who believe in aura might say mine is black, after all I don’t believe in auras, but if there is another life or a heaven or hell, we can discuss it then!