The latest trend in South Korea is getting pubic hair transplants. One would think that it would be the opposite, with salons all over the West serving up specialties like the “Barely Legal,” in which all hair is removed from the area, designed to replicate the genitalia of an underage girl, as statutory rape seems to be all the rage, the Playboy, which is a very clever strip of hair, like an arrow pointing down to alert you to the point of entry, plus a variety of novelty designs that can be pretty much anything you can make a stencil for, from celebration of holidays (Christmas Tree, Easter Egg, Jack-o-Lantern, Turkey) to one’s own initials, various allegiances to sports teams, the @ symbol. You name it, you got it, on your pussy.
I once chose the ‘Barely Legal,’ not to placate the pedophiles in my life, but because I am rather on the indecisive side, and so if presented with a chart of options of pubic hair formation, I may lose many valuable hours better spent writing or fucking someone with my brand new bag. I had it done in Provincetown, MA, in the summer, where I make my makeshift seaside home, near a cabin in the woods of Truro, where my Swiss Family Robinson drag queen relatives reside, the Trappin’ Trannies.
The only salon offering the service at that time had only male aestheticians, which didn’t bother me, but may have been traumatic for him, as he was a young, gay man – and not only that, a huge fan of my work. His hands were shaking as he applied the strips of waxy muslin, digging himself practically all the way to China, because for some reason, I am fur lined. He sweat and apologized profusely as he ripped them off, and nervously babbled on and on about the time he had seen me on “Sex and the City.” I am altogether a fan of the discomfort of waxing the underworld, and the pain, excruciating and unbelievable, makes me very happy and brings me to a place where spontaneous songs from the film soundtrack of “Chicago”, such as “Roxie’s Suite” could spring forth without notice.
“.and the audience loves me. I love them, and they love me for lovin’ them and I love them for lovin’ me and we love each other and that’s because we didn’t get enough love in our childhoods, and that’s showbiz..”
“Is everything ok? Do you need me to stop?”
“No. I am fine. I’m just Roxieeeeeeeeeee – Hart.”
“That is nice. Could you turn over for me now please? I have never said that to a woman in my life.”
He was very nice about it, but gossip is sometimes a little too good to be kept in a bottle, and vintage dirt does no one any good, and so the entire township was abuzz the next day.
“Did you see the new film NOTORIOUS? It’s outrageous! She is fabulous!!!”
“Well, you didn’t hear it from me, but I have from the most reliable sources that – (leaning in) she has the hairiest asshole!”
Many screams loud, low, shrill, bass, alto – a veritable impromptu gay men’s chorus around the brunch table harmonizes with a cacophony of abject horror and delight.
“Hm. It figures.”
The ladies in South Korea ain’t havin’ it. They want the forest, and for the trees. Perhaps they are just tired of combing it over. The Phyto Volumizer just doesn’t give it enough – body. Who has the patience to get a weave? Besides, it looks too fake. The pussy toupee, the merkin, will have your man smirkin’, because it is held in by a comb, which is impossible to comfortably explain when caught up in the rapture of lovemaking.
“Oh, I just, uh, I got it cut and I didn’t like it, so I am wearing a fall until it grows out. Perhaps I should have mentioned it, but in our earlier conversation, there never seemed to be the appropriate context within which I could bring it up – uh – the opportunity had not presented itself until now. So there you go. I am wearing a piece. Is that a deal breaker?”
Rogaine isn’t really effective down there, the vitamin supplements and the Knox gelatin just aren’t rendering a crop worth waiting another growing season for, and so it is time for plugs. That’s right. The Hair Club. Sy Sperling eat your hair out. The surgical procedure doesn’t require a hospital stay, just a local anesthetic for your head and your hearth, and like Robin Hood, the surgeons steal from the rich and give to the poor.
This is very familiar to me, of women from my family, my old world posse. There in the modern Korean diaspora, women are invisible, so much so that they go out of their way to be noticed, which manifests itself in many ironic ways, like making themselves so thin with culturally sanctioned anorexia that it is impossible to ignore the disappearance of their bodies. The thinness almost advocates the invisibility, the girls shrink and become smaller and weaker, and while at the same time it is praised for the then necessary dependence of others in order to survive, the women almost always take it too far, in order to please the massive demands of the patriarch driven status quo, and become an embarrassingly large and taxing burden, by chewing up the scenery with starvation and silence and winding up in hospitals with force fed meals pumped directly into their stomachs, because their mouths refuse to open, for to speak, to eat, to call attention to oneself is considered highly unladylike. Femininity by any means necessary.
Plastic surgery with Inquisition style violence, surely in violation with Amnesty International regulations – but since unfortunately the victims pay for the pleasure, they are high crimes that will be left unpunished because they are self inflicted – is practiced daily as an aid to the invisibility by conforming to the idealized standard of beauty, which is, you guessed it, invisibility – impossible frailty, lack of presence and no substance and fear of challenge and no fight left – these are a few of their favorite things.. Skin is pulled back off the skull to grind the jaw bone down to reduce the identity, the space one burdens others with, the nerve – of having a face. Few Korean women are significantly overweight, so liposuction isn’t an option, because the fat isn’t there to vacuum out, therefore, Botox is injected right into the muscles of the leg and arm, so that the muscle will atrophy and for all practical purposes, DIE, shrinking the proportions of the offensive limb.
If only something could be done about the girth of the bone. They have a bone to pick with those darn bones. I am sure a new treatment is in the works to remove the entire skin and have that fat skeleton filed down with a deck sander. Blow away the excess and there you have it – finally, a streamlined skeleton! Not everyone has the time or money to spend on these surgical disappearing acts, so most opt for straight up starvation.
My cousin, a girl that my aunt wanted to be so invisible, that she is named Crystal. Crystal is clear, and you can see right through her. It was as if she never existed, because she was never acknowledged, and so she wasn’t ever there. She has two brothers, beautiful and big eyed, crushily handsome boys that were men already before their teens, for everything that came from their minds, their hearts, their mouths was loudly celebrated and publicized, and so they grew tall like trees with thick trunks and impenetrable bark made of pride and self assuredness. They are the family’s greatest treasures and claim to middle class fame. The elder has a boomingly successful accounting firm in Japan, with an invisible wife and perfect children, the boy growing brighter and stronger every day. I have not been given any information on the girl, but numerous photographs of the boy have been circulating on the internet, attachments that I never download because they are always of him, and I know what he looks like. The younger works in international trading, money back and forth, the things that turn the earth on its axis, terribly important, if I understand correctly, or if I gave a shit.
I never even knew my aunt had a daughter, because Crystal was less a girl, more a ghost, watching as her family lived and thrived and laughed and loved around her, and she just hovered above, unseen and unheard, merely felt once and again as a cold spot in the middle of a room. A door open and then shut, suddenly, without a summer breeze from an open window to explain it. Crystal lived beneath the family living spaces, on the main floor of their massive modern home in Seoul, less like a family member, more like an indentured servant. She bore no family resemblance, besides the anorectic thinness most of the women of my ‘tribe’ possess, which was odd, as her parents seemed to be the type to have sex only for the sole purpose of procreation, so if my clear cousin was a ‘love child.’ she probably would never been born at all.
That would never have been allowed. I never saw the inside of her bedroom, nor did I ever see the inside of her heart, as she wasn’t supposed to be there. As this was the agreement made by the members of the family, and of the society. Crystal clear on her assignation, her invisibility, she remained stealth for as long as she could. Then, when she started to appear, it was uncontrollable, unstoppable, uncontainable, and it wasn’t pretty.
There were numerous suicide attempts, too many to mention, but then, if you aren’t there anyway, who are you killing? She is forty now, no longer a ghost, but considered a ghoul, and she cannot be left alone for a second, for she will plunge a knife into herself, slit her wrists, stab you, do everything, anything – to show you that she bleeds red, not clear. Her blood is real, as is her insanity, and her unfathomable rage that is the result of the conspiratorial embrace between family and culture and the ‘idealized’ woman that they wanted her to be. She avenges her enforced invisibility by the fact that now, you cannot take your eyes off her, because she is visible, all real, all there, and righteously unforgiving. Her family must acknowledge her now, for they must pay for the fact that they ignored their daughter for so long, that they let society dole out the love owed to all children, regardless of gender, a society that openly stole from the poor to give to the rich, and keeping their daughter in the constant red, leaving a bright and intense child with a deficit of proof of her own existence, an inexplicable poverty of being.
Crystal’s revenge is not sweet, it is awful and bitter. She only wanted to be seen, and now she is, but nobody enjoys it, and they have tried to cloak their entire family with the invisibility that they once only used to conceal her, damning their achievements, making the great success of their sons null and void. I never see or hear of anything about this branch of my family these days. It is if they have disappeared off the face of the earth.