Welcome to Beauty and Death, a new column that will examine beauty rituals. Why do we continue to invest time, money, and energy into our bodies despite the inevitability of death? Is it because these rituals stave off signs of mortality and distract us from our questions about the meaning of life? Melissa Broder wants to find out.

Last night I dreamt that a strange woman told me I looked amazing for 45. I'm only in my thirties. In the dream I was trapped in an airport, Sartre's No Exit style, and the airport was full of people I knew in high school. I ran around the airport asking everyone—flight attendants, pilots, women from my graduating class—if I was aging nightmarishly. I was distraught. The women all said no, but what were they going to say? The men didn't understand my agony and could not give me the specific antiaging affirmation I needed.

"I'd still hit it," they said.

Mara Sprafkin

No one but me could comfort me. I either needed to laugh at this woman's opinion or ignore it, both of which would have to happen as a result of some inner resilience. But who can bestow upon herself that kind of disregard for the opinions of others? I do not believe it is possible for me.

I know that aging is something we all must do. I take some solace in the fact that no one is immune: that the very young with their dewy glow will someday go through the process as well, wrinkling and crinkling their way into skeletons. And yet I feel so alone in it—that aging is a cruel trick only being played on me. Or, at the very least, I feel that I alone should be exempt from the process. Perhaps there are some people who enjoy a good article about how to be beautiful at any age: 30, 40, 50, 60. But I don't want to be "any age." Time is breaking my heart.

One way I have tried to stop time is with my pubes. I have aimed, in my choices of pubic hair stylings, to maintain an "au courant" vagina. I want to do what the young are doing. Specifically, I want to impress younger men, so that I myself—upon gaining their approval—might feel young.

Mara Sprafkin

For a long time I went totally bare. I reckoned that if I waxed all my pubes off, I was likely to please partners who sexually imprinted on 2005-era porn, when all pornstars were bald. It seemed a strong move, a zero-sum game: wax it off, waxer takes all. But then, through a hybrid of more contemporary porn and personal anecdotes among friends, I caught wind of a new and popular style amongst young women: a much more natural look with a waxed underside and a sizable triangle bush in front. Had I been doing it all wrong by waxing it all off? Was I merely a throwback, hoping my porn-time equivalent of Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" could save me from nature's inevitable lash?

Mara Sprafkin

In an effort to pin down the "right" pube style, I began doing research. I conducted Google searches for "sexiest pubic hair" and "young pube trends." But most people seemed dispassionate in their preferences. As long as the point of entry was accessible, pussy was pussy—beautiful in its own right—and the hair was secondary. I asked my waxers what the most "beloved" and frequently requested pube styles were amongst twentysomething women, in an attempt to go purely with commercial popularity. They usually responded that it depends on the person and what they are comfortable with. Who are these comfortable people?

I began asking my current partner what he prefers. He would never give me a solid answer, saying he liked it all. But one time, I let a large patch in front grow in longer than usual and he went crazy for it. My partner is 10 years older than me (and about 20 years older than the age demographic I usually go for). He cultivated his tastes based on Playboy in the '80s; of course he is turned on by hair. But his pube preferences could do nothing for me in terms of quelling nature's relentless march to the grave. He's even closer to death than I am! So I waxed it all off again.

It is my hope that my vagina will be open season again for younger men before I die.

The truth is that I want to be prepared for anything. I want to be all pubes to all people. Despite the fact that my partner and I are currently monogamous, it is my hope that my vagina will be open season again for younger men before I die. I need that potentiality: the hope that this isn't my last first kiss, the final person I fuck. I want to know that there is the potential to move backward, rather than forward, in time.

Every day I picture a future younger someone—imaginary, but real to me—telling me I have a time machine down there. I need this potential witness, a point of reckoning at some future date, so that I may continue to go on. An effort must be made for this imaginary being. Surely I can't just keep getting older without any reprieve. What's to live for then?

Mara Sprafkin

As I lay myself bare here in my pubic pathos, I know that I open myself up to criticism. The question of what to do with one's pubes is a first-world problem. Body hair feminism is an affront to intersectional feminism and should take up no more space in public discourse. In a progressive utopia, we would all just do what we want with our pubes and stop talking about them already. Reader, I know this. But when I talk about pubes, I'm not really talking about the pubes.

But now, a pube for me is no longer a pube. I pretend that if I can control the activity on my pubic mound, I can stop time. Temporal waves span out before me and I am powerless to their undertow. Let me have my illusion of pussy control.

Eventually we all die, and it doesn't matter what our pubes were doing on Earth. We can't take them with us. Yet somehow, through my pubes, I feel that I am able to thwart nature, time, and death—even though, in the end, nature, time, and death will thwart me.

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