CHAPTER 8
A Vagina Travelogue
Let’s talk about the ’90s vagina.
This is not to imply that the American woman suddenly discovered her vagina during the first (awkward, I know) Bush administration. But a generation after the sexual revolution of the ’60s, after the feminist activism of the ’70s, and after numerous advances in medicine and public policy related to women’s health, social momentum had helped alter American attitudes. By the 1990s there was more widespread candor about the erotic, cultural, and even political power of female sexuality. Women and society were becoming more and more open to all things V.
Exhibit A was Eve Ensler’s 1996 play The Vagina Monologues, which became a cultural phenomenon. The one-woman show was a direct and defiant meditation on a word uttered 128 times onstage. Groundbreaking theater, Monologues was not. Since the ’50s, the American stage had been the home for displays intended to inspire sexual debate through provocation. But to its intended audience—the mainstream ’90s liberal—the unrelentingly explicit oratory was something of a shock.
For two years, Ensler had been sitting down with women—some two hundred in all—and coaxing out stories about their intimate and often complicated relationships with, as the play puts it, their pussycats, their pookis, their coochi snorchers, their mushmellows.1 It started as Ensler’s own attempt to bridge the disconnect between her own mind and body. “My vagina was something over there, away in the distance,” she would write. “I rarely lived inside it, or even visited.” Her alienation from her sexual self had been especially fraught: she had been raped in her youth, and that violation had resulted, as she would put it, in feeling deprived of “my motor, my center, my second heart.”
By articulating the word “vagina,” however, she found that she could reclaim it. When she made it a mantra of a kind, some of its associated shame began to fall away. According to Ensler, “After you say the word the hundredth time or the thousandth time, it occurs to you that it’s your word, your body, your most essential place.”
The Vagina Monologues was a series of testimonies, humorous lists, and vignettes taken from Ensler’s interviews. Some were repeated verbatim, others were composite depictions, many were enlivened through the blender of the playwright’s vivid imagination. The play was structured thematically: menstruation; cunnilingus; “My Angry Vagina”; “If Your Vagina Could Talk” (“Don’t Stop… Remember me?… Enter at your own risk… Where’s Brian?… Yes, there. There”); the aroma (“Earthy meat and musk… Wet garbage… A brand-new morning”). There was a segment entitled “Reclaiming Cunt.” There was a survivor’s tale from a “rape camp” in Bosnia. There was a story about an elderly woman who had never achieved orgasm, and another about a woman of color from the South who had been sexually exploited as a preteen and teenager. There was a piece called “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy”—a lesbian soliloquy that ended with a valiant attempt at finding the vagina’s orgasmic voice by differentiating styles of power moaning.
The labia, the clitoris, the vagina, and their environs were presented in all their guises, from the nub of self-pleasure to the birth canal.
Soon after its premiere in the basement of Manhattan’s Cornelia Street Café, The Vagina Monologues was playing to packed houses, winning awards, and inspiring theatergoers who would come up to Ensler after performances to offer their own testimonies, sometimes about their recovery from sexual violence. Ensler, with her coal-black 1920s bangs, had a chimerical presence that heightened each monologue’s impact and a comic timing that helped cut through the audience’s angst over the intimacy of the subject matter.
When the production opened in cities outside New York, however, there was pushback. The V-word was sometimes excised from ads and theater vitrines. In certain towns, when ticket buyers phoned the box office, a recorded voice would refer to the play as “Monologues.” A publishing house made a financial commitment to print the play in book form, then got cold feet. Even though the play spoke to thousands upon thousands of women, its title alone—regardless of its theatrical merits—was met with community and institutional resistance.
So be it. It was unstoppable. Within two years, notable women would take to the stage in New York (Gloria Steinem, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie Perez, Susan Sarandon, Lily Tomlin) and London (Christiane Amanpour, Isabella Rossellini, Sophie Dahl, Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet) and give voice to Ensler’s voices. Jane Fonda would participate in a subsequent performance—to cheers that rattled the rafters at Madison Square Garden—reportedly calling the process “one of the most memorable and empowering experiences of my life.” Glenn Close persuaded the audience to rise and repeat, in unison, “Cunt… Cunt… Cunt…”
The Monologues only grew. The play raised money for causes associated with V-Day (an “empowered” Valentine’s Day alternative that was first held in 1998), which would become a global initiative to confront sexual violence. College campuses took up the charge. There was a “sex for one” workshop at Brown, a “cunt workshop” at Wesleyan, a “cunt-fest” at Penn State. In theater lobbies, snacks were sold in the shape of ladyparts. As Ensler would describe it, “Women in Islamabad, Pakistan [staged scenes from the show] for their sisters who were there from Afghanistan—everyone laughing and weeping.… [There was] a seven-language performance of the monologues in Brussels.… [People were] learning to sign ‘clitoris’ in a performance by deaf women in Washington, D.C.”
The notices weren’t universally glowing, by any means. Christina Hoff Sommers, the conservative author, would deem it “atrociously written… viciously anti-male… and, most importantly, it claims to empower women, when in fact it makes us seem desperate and pathetic.… One of the many laudable goals of the original women’s movement was its rejection of the idea that women are reducible to their anatomy.” Some of the backlash from feminists was particularly harsh. Betty Dodson, the sexologist and self-described feminist sexual activist, saw the show early on, and then again at two of its star-studded galas. She dubbed it “a bait and switch operation. The ruse is to get everyone excited about hearing famous women saying the words vagina, clitoris, and cunt only to bring us down with statistics about rape and the sexual abuse of women, especially in other countries.” Germaine Greer went so far as to chide Ensler for the title, professing a preference for the more “inclusive ‘pussy’ or ‘snatch.’” But this, to be fair, was splitting hairs.2
Ensler would win out in the end. The Vagina Monologues, through the power of a cathartic theatrical experience, became a campaign against misogyny, exploitation, and discrimination. The play was also making a statement about sexual repression and violence against women in forms that were particularly acute in the 1990s: genital mutilation (in Africa), rape as an instrument of war (in the Balkans, Rwanda, Liberia, Indonesia, and elsewhere), human trafficking (across the globe), forced marriages, honor killings, discrimination against LGBT individuals, spousal abuse, sexual abuse of children, harassment, and the curtailing of reproductive rights.
The play was undeniably of the ’90s. It placed a long-private word—and all of its functions, fallacies, and mystique—into the very public realm. It tried to explore aspects of female sexuality in front of a mainstream audience. It used celebrity star power to promote its message. But in many ways it sprang from the values of previous decades—and second-wave feminism. One of its stridently un-’90s characters is pro-hair-down-there: “You cannot love a vagina unless you love hair.… Hair is there for a reason—it’s the leaf around the flower.” She is also anti-thong: “That’s the worst.… Who thought that up? Moves around all the time, gets stuck.” Another speaker even denounces what might be called genital gentrification, which broke out in the ’70s (with the flowering of feminine hygiene products) and by the ’90s had gone viral. “My vagina,” she says, “doesn’t need to be cleaned up. It smells good already.… Don’t believe him when he tells you it smells like rose petals when it’s supposed to smell like pussy.”
The Monologues, the culture wars notwithstanding, exemplified the demystification of certain aspects of female anatomy and sexuality. Concurrently, there were diagrams and demonstrations in the media about breast self-exams. On the Today show, host Katie Couric underwent an on-air colonoscopy (two years after her husband’s death from colon cancer in 1998). There were frank representations of women’s health issues—along with increasingly graphic sex advice—in women’s magazines. Marketing wizards were pushing sanitary pads that came in a blinding variety of absorbency and size and ergonomics, with or without wings or belts or scent.
There was a matter-of-factness to the culture’s verbal references to female anatomy, as if large segments of society had at last matured. While art, music, and pop culture had pushed boundaries in the ’70s and ’80s, its corresponding ’90s creations were sometimes less filtered: informed by everything from third-wave feminism, to LGBT pride, to a new generation intent on asserting its anatomy for its own sake, for the sake of exercising power, or as a sign of self-reliance. Among the most strident female-dominated rock bands was Hole, fronted by Courtney Love. The “I HEART Vagina” logo was inaugurated in 1998,3 raising awareness about cervical and ovarian cancer. Fiction that focused on female sexuality was tagged with the moniker “clit lit,” or “cliterature.” In Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, activist Inga Muscio encouraged women to take back the long-despised term on their path to empowerment. And academic maverick Camille Paglia, in her bestselling book Sexual Personae, reprised the vagina dentata—the archetypal depiction of a tooth-bearing vagina, the ultimate symbol of castration anxiety. “Metaphorically,” Paglia asserted, “every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered.” Yowza.
Still, the medical community and the largest cosmetics and pharmaceutical firms exerted an outsize influence. “Today every aspect of a woman’s life cycle,” writes Meika Loe, director of women’s studies at Colgate University, “has been medicalized—from birth to menstruation to childbirth to menopause to death—revealing a growing dependence on medicine that some say is risky and excessive.” And few procedures in the 1990s were more puzzling than those related to female genital reconstruction, or what came to be known as “designer vaginas.”
Women went in for vaginal rejuvenation surgery, which promised to restore a tightness approximating one’s younger years.4 There were labiaplasties (sometimes dubbed the Toronto Trim), which reduced the genital lips to make them look less distended or more symmetrical. There was vaginal liposuction that could plump up the labia, affording the beestung vajayjay. There were labial puffs, vulvar lipo, clitoral hood jobs, “g-shots” (zaps of collagen into the vagina’s interior wall, purported to give greater sensitivity), and hymenoplasty (surgically recreating a substitute hymen—popular among women in cultures that, when it came to matrimony, prized the virginal). Certain specialists, according to a 1998 overview in Harper’s Bazaar, would “perform such surgery only if it is a medical necessity for sexual dysfunction or hygiene problems. Other [surgeons were] happy to cater to cosmetic desires.” For women with severe issues, these procedures were a godsend. For those merely hoping for perkier privates, vanity beckoned.
Patients rushed to gynecologists’ waiting rooms. Once there, they read the testimonies in women’s magazines, such as this post-op accolade in the November 1998 issue of Cosmopolitan from a thirty-three-year-old woman with a collapsed uterus. Thanks to surgical intervention, she said, she had reclaimed her physical—and climactic—capabilities. “It’s kind of strange and wonderful. I’ve never been into masturbation before, but pleasuring myself now is fantastic—and triggers really sensational orgasms.”5
Two growing practices, yoga and Pilates, were drawing women’s attention to their “core.” Kegel exercises were effective for firming up vaginal muscles. And yet the designer vagina, hardly an au naturel procedure, seemed to vibe with the culture’s quick-fix mentality, with an American fixation on new modes of sexual display, and with the Boomer fears of aging (and the effects of childbirth and menopause).
David Matlock of Beverly Hills was, and remains, a pioneering vaginoplasty surgeon, whom some refer to as “the Picasso of vaginas.” (He has been featured prominently on the reality-TV series Dr. 90210.) Matlock would make the case, according to Fiona J. Green, a professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Winnipeg, that “as women’s fashions (such as ever increasingly skimpy swimsuit styles) more readily ‘expose large areas of skin in the pubic region,’ women are more likely to notice physical differences that were previously hidden.” Some would attribute this propensity to porn envy: women would see videos or photos of petite or perfect female genitals—sometimes airbrushed or digitized—and demand unrealistic equivalents. Green, paraphrasing Krista Foss, health reporter for the Toronto Globe and Mail, would point out that many patients were “women who experience feelings of insecurity, embarrassment, or fear of losing their male partners to younger, more beautiful and tighter women.” Others were younger, according to Foss, who in 1998 would write about Dr. Robert Stubbs, some of whose patients were “the 25-to-35-year-old trophy wives of sports figures for whom the sexual and psychological ideal is the price of entry into that world.”
Whatever the motivations for such surgery and sculpting, the incongruity was not lost on many feminists. While activists among them were speaking out against the practice of genital mutilation in Africa, North American women were visiting their gynecologists and cosmetic surgeons, electing to undergo vaginal and vulval procedures. Fiona Green, citing Betty Dodson and Leslie Hall, would insist that there was a fallacy inherent in reconstructing the vagina. Female orgasm was mainly related to clitoral response, irrespective of the vagina’s circumference. “In trying to modify female genitals to make them conform to the cultural norm,” Green notes, “the cultural norm continues to ignore the fact that female genitalia come in an assortment of shapes, sizes, and sensuality.”
The designer-vagina trend, from a certain perspective, was partly a Freudian snip—the result of a largely male-run medical community asking, “What do women want?” and imposing a cosmetic or orgasmic myth on the fair sex.
Fate, these days, has got the J Sisters by the short hairs.
For twenty-five years, the mysterious Brazilian siblings who brought the Brazilian bikini wax to America had ruled the cosmetological cosmos. Their Manhattan salon had become a shrine to models, socialites, and Hollywood stars. Their “technique” was featured in beauty magazines and on talk shows—even meriting a full episode of Sex and the City. But in the summer of 2016, the master waxers were suddenly on the wane. Workers’ commissions and wages allegedly went unpaid. Staffers abandoned ship to work in nearby salons. Some clients were bereft, adrift. Soon the J Sisters faced eviction, unable to afford the rent on tony West 57th Street. They were, in truth, victims of their own success. And having created a clean-shaven craze adopted by a generation of women, they began to realize that theirs were no longer the only tweezers in town.
The woman who had started it all was Janea Padilha, a diminutive sixty-something grandmother from the Bahia region of eastern Brazil—one of seven enterprising sisters (along with Judseia, Jussara, Juracy, Jocely, Joyce, and Jonice). After they opened their own New York salon in 1987, Janea decided three years later to introduce the Brazilian wax: a nude nether region, back and front, topped off by a frontal “landing strip,” or by a simple design or triangle, or by nothing at all. Bare Down There proved to be a thunderous success.
That, of course, was in their ’90s heyday. The J Sisters salon is now closed. But the spirit of the place remains. So, too, do the questions. What was the actual spark that compelled legions of women to grit their teeth, open their pocketbooks, and begin adopting this extreme fashion statement—to the point where today a mons sans (by wax or tweeze, laser or razor, depilatory or electrolysis, topical creams or oral drugs, salon or self-administered) is now as pervasive as a pedicure?6 And what on earth made Janea Padilha want to foist this primitive ritual on the Western netherworld in the first place? Perhaps the best way to arrive at some answers is to recount Padilha and her sisters’ many-threaded tale, which has never been told in full until now. It begins with a visit not long ago to their once-bustling domain.
On the main wall in the J Sisters waiting room, clients’ headshots are arranged in neat rows: Naomi, Cindy, Kimora Lee, and Tyra… Uma, Cameron, Lindsay, and Avril. A grinning Gwynnie, posing in a swimming pool in the altogether, has scrawled on her photo, “You changed my life.” Even Bette (“What a wax!”) is here, in an Annie Leibovitz rendering: immersed in a bed of roses. The wall’s celebrity pedigree confers on the Brazilian wax a whiff of privilege and exclusivity—gilt by association.
“Gwyneth comes for a mani and a pedi and sits out here,” one staffer says, beaming, standing amid more down-to-earth clientele. “Kirstie Alley walks around here in her bare feet.” Janea Padilha explains that in the close quarters of the waxing room, anatomically self-conscious patrons sometimes ask her to compare their privates to those of the women on the walls. “This area”—Janea motions to her loins, speaking in charmingly broken English. “If they’re blonde: do I look like Gwyneth Paltrow? Brunette ask about celebrity who is brunette.” But she always reassures them, “We are all the same!”
The waiting area has the feel of a large powder room: brocaded chairs, high-ceilinged chandeliers, faux-gold moldings. A glass display case is arrayed with J-brand waxes. On a wall rack, bikinis are hung like Day-Glo tinsel. And despite the harsh, clinical lighting, the mood is cozy: part East Side sleepover, part girls’ dorm, albeit one with stylists and waxers scurrying to and fro. Everyone, it seems, stops to greet Janea, a tiny dynamo who has built a career out of talking intimately with women—literally dozens a day—while they’re splayed on her treatment table.
“I meet people on the street,” she says, “and don’t remember they names. We talk, and I think and think—”
“If only they were naked,” a pedicure client interrupts, completing the thought. “And had their legs open!”
Atop the grid of glossies hangs a single faded photo. It shows Pedro Padilha, the patriarch, who died in 2002 at age eighty-six. The family fable is something out of Gabriel García Márquez. A train engineer turned meat-market supplier, the handsome Padilha often lived on the edge of poverty as he sired seven sons and seven daughters. His homebody wife, Judith, would monitor her kids’ outdoor group showers, admonishing them to wash themselves quickly but thoroughly. “In Brazil,” Janea recalls, “you know your body and your sister body. We were told by our parents, ‘Clean yourself.’ They show the boy how to clean”—she makes rubbing motions again—“the girl. We have to touch. We have to be comfortable. We have to explore our body. Eating together, sleeping together, taking shower together, and with very good respect for each other.”
The warm weather called for less clothing. The beach culture encouraged the adoption of a sexier style than those in other climes. Jonice, the youngest and most sultry sister, describes the custom of strolling up and down, day after day, in a skimpy bikini, a wrap, and stylish shoes. “We expose our bodies more,” she says. “A blouse without sleeves. No panty hose, no boots. You have to be in a tropical mind-set. You can be sexy anytime, all the time.”
In J Sisters lore, the seven daughters, one by one, left jobs at their local nail-and-hair parlor in Brazil and headed north to join their siblings at the midtown salon. Then, in 1990, Janea had an epiphany. She somehow got it in her head to introduce her maximum wax to her New York beauty clients—a homegrown practice she’d perfected in her homeland, first on herself, and then on a few venturesome spa visitors. Jonice was mortified. “I said, ‘Janea, I’m going to kill you.’ I was doing public relations for the salon and I didn’t think the American woman was ready for that. I thought it could have a negative reaction to the spa. This was 1990!”
But in January of that year, Janea, always disarmingly open and upbeat, persuaded one of her regulars—an executive assistant named Sari Markowitz, then twenty-eight—to go full Brazilian. “I’d had bikini waxes elsewhere,” Markowitz admits, “but never a Brazilian. I’d go there every week for a manicure, and Janea, who had just come over from Brazil, said, ‘Come, try it,’ with all the other sisters coaxing me on, and I kept putting them off. Finally, I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ And I know she wasn’t prepared, because they didn’t have a room dedicated for waxing—so we did it in the office. She pushed everything off the desk: the telephone, papers, pens, the stapler. And I was laying on the desk on my back with one leg over the fax machine and the other she was kind of holding apart. And it took about four to six minutes—all in, from beginning to end.” Markowitz didn’t realize it then, but she would turn out to be America’s Patient Zero of the Brazilian wax.
When she got home that night, she couldn’t help examining the results. “I felt, ‘Oh, wow.’ It was like a new hairdo. You kept looking down: ‘No, it’s gone. No? It’s gone.’ It was like: ‘Do the cuffs match the collar?’” The next day, over lunch, Markowitz described her new “do” to five friends, including an editor at Elle, each of whom went in for their own wax, and in turn told their friends.
Elle ran a story. Word spread among models and film stars.7 “At the time,” says Jocely’s husband, John Marquis, a sort of company adviser, “the top models were coming from Brazil. They were unbelievably sexy. And AOL started as this was taking off.” So, as Marquis explains, he bought a six-month banner ad. “Those little [ads] exploded across the U.S. and the world.”
Recalls Chris Napolitano, then an editor at Playboy, “Models were showing up and they were getting progressively groomed. It went from the taco or nacho or whatever they called it, to the landing strip in, like, five years.” As we talk, Napolitano takes out a chronological collection of Playboy centerfolds. Surveying the lot, he insists that Miss December 1991 bears “the first definitive shaping.” But the first utterly plucked Playmate, in his estimation, didn’t come along until Miss September 2001, long after the depubed had wended their way into all manner of porn.
In 1998, a New York Observer story about the waxing craze was passed around by fax and email; its opening line: “It’s not your mother’s vulva anymore.” And then, in a now-famous Sex and the City episode—reportedly based on a real-life session by Sarah Jessica Parker—Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw, goes in for a subtle touch-up at an L.A. spa but emerges, because of the language barrier, thoroughly defurred, and fuming. Quoth Carrie: “I feel like one of those freaking hairless dogs.”
“People knew what she was talking about,” recalls the curvy, devil-may-care sister Joyce Padilha. “Everybody had tried to hide about this, like [they were in] a secret club. Then, suddenly, ‘My God, she did it too!’ Now everyone knew about it.” Women descended on their local spas requesting a Brazilian or a thong wax. Elsewhere, it was called the Playboy, the Hollywood, the Smoothie. The hirsute would soon go the way of the pantsuit.
The appeal of the whiskerless wax, of course, didn’t develop in a vacuum. Larger societal forces in the ’80s and ’90s had been aligning as well. The go-go economy, dispensing disposable income across new demographics, helped manifest a pampering impulse in the culture (spas and nail parlors abounded) and a neat-freak ethos (evident in everything from the self-storage craze to the neighborhood-beautification boom). New sexual hygiene habits took hold, prompted by the AIDS crisis and the rise in STDs. In addition, the more tailored look was already creeping into porn, just as porn was becoming more accessible, thanks to satellite TV, cable, and the Internet. The body had become a public message board for self-expression (piercings, tattoos, sundry shavings). The thong, the belly shirt, and low-rise jeans were drawing more attention to the midriff and thereabouts. “In the ’80s and ’90s, you see this exaggerated focus on female genitals,” says the sexual-empowerment guru Nicole Daedone. “Here’s Madonna, who touches herself onstage and in videos and has published a sex book; she’s turned on and in control. There’s [newly popular] vibrators. There’s women on retreats exploring their genitals with mirrors”—as depicted in the 1991 film Fried Green Tomatoes.
In this environment, Janea’s breakthrough was also an act of turning back the downstairs clock. Some women were getting in touch with that virgin version of themselves. They were feeling younger, more unencumbered. And many, by extension, were inviting their partners to indulge in what had typically been a forbidden fantasy: a mature bod with the patina of innocence. For Daedone, the artifice and juvenilization pointed to a form of Ken-and-Barbie regression—a “sexual malnourishment,” she figures, that had set in among many members of both sexes. “Most men aren’t accustomed to a fully mature, sexualized woman with full hair,” she says, gesturing down with both hands. “So in order to play by the cultural rules today, most women try to stay prepubescent to keep our bodies small, our genitals small.… It’s [a social version of] neoteny—genetic arrested development. The danger is you end up with sex—without sex in it. Everyone’s looking the part, but you have ‘façade to façade.’ You’re not interacting.”8
As Daedone suggests, letting nature take its course has served the species just fine since well before the Stone Age. But Janea was into promoting a twenty-first-century look—genitalia 2.0. The bottom line, Janea now says, is that “the sex is better.” To her way of thinking, less hair means better friction for both partners, more exposed nerve endings, more skin-on-skin intimacy. Some clients, says Janea, often show up weeks early for follow-up appointments, which tend to be about five weeks apart. “They say, ‘The wax is aphrodisiac.’ Or, ‘I need to wax for my new boyfriend.’ I say, ‘I just saw you. Come back in five or six weeks.’”
And oral sex would become the Brazilian wax’s killer app. “[A Brazilian] heightens the pleasure and sensuality in every place,” insists J Sisters customer Dani, a marketing executive in her fifties, who requests that her real name not be used. “You just have the tongue and the intensity of the movement, without any barrier. And the intensity of the orgasm is definitely longer.”
The rest, as they say, is history. The J Sisters, though unsuccessful in trying to trademark the phrase “Brazilian bikini wax” in the early ’90s,9 consider it their creation. Indeed, a decade later, Jonice would field the call (she doesn’t recall the exact year) when a man telephoned for some background, saying the term “bikini wax” might be added to the Oxford English Dictionary. “When they called to ask for the definition”—Jonice hits her head to mimic her stunned reaction—“What can you say? I told him, ‘What? Its real meaning? It produces a better orgasm!’”
A lot has changed since that wax over the fax machine. From the dorm room to the locker room to the bedroom, the young and the active can go for months, even years, without spotting as much as a curl. Mothers and daughters now visit salons to “get done” as a sort of bonding experience. Beauty venues have devised waxing tactics that are more user-friendly (meaning: less painful). But for the J Sisters, the standard preference remained the original, back-to-the-roots basics: 90ºF wax applied to the entire business; cloth strips tugged with furious force for ten minutes; $75 a visit.
The salon, over time, would cut back on requests for freaky designs (a mate’s initials, for example) and radical dye jobs, but they welcomed the hardship cases that other spas might refuse: the heavily pierced; the gorilla-like men recommended by their dermatologists. Recently, a bride-to-be, four days before her wedding, arrived from Germany—by limo, straight from JFK—just to have a wax. “She take the car service back to the airport,” Janea says in disbelief. “Don’t even shop!” Clients would range in age from seventeen to eighty-two. And all because of Janea’s little brainstorm.
Or was it?
The Brazilian bikini wax, it so happens, wasn’t immaculately conjured one night in a bubbling vat. The depilous pudendum, in some form or another, actually dates back to Cleopatra’s day, at least, and sculptures from ancient Greece depict females, unlike their male counterparts, without genital hair. “[Many of] the women in cultures around the Mediterranean have been hairless from the neck down,” says my Turkish friend Emel, a German-raised marketing executive who has been living in the United States and Europe for over a decade. “Waxing has been practiced in the Middle East for centuries and, later, southern European countries, [through the] expansion of the Ottoman Empire. In Islam, pubic hair is seen as unappealing, dirty, and, furthermore, sinful—a sign of sexual maturity. Millions of Turks have immigrated to Germany since 1960—and they were the ones who introduced waxing to German ladies who, up until the late 1990s, were still completely as Mother Nature created them, with hair everywhere. Strong feminists, they were reluctant at first. But they gave in to the ‘clean trend,’ which made them look more youthful, attractive, and feminine.”
Closer to our age, there has been a rich if checkered history of the southerly tonsured. In the 1950s and ’60s, ever-shrinking bathing attire triggered ever more aggressive shapings and shearings. Athletes, male and female, fearful of stray follicles that might impede performance or mar appearance, began to embrace the paste.
Actor George Hamilton says he admired the work of top L.A. hairdressers in the ’60s and ’70s, such as Gene Shacove, the man who inspired the 1975 movie Shampoo.10 Shacove, recalls Hamilton, would have his female clients (many of them movie stars and showgirls) stand “behind a sheet with a cut-out pattern down below for what they wanted the shape to be—waxing, snipping, and coloring—so the hairdresser didn’t see their faces.” California waxes were “more modest than those in New York [in the 1960s],” insists Tommy Baratta, the restaurateur (and Jack Nicholson confidant), who started as a shampoo boy for New York hairdresser Larry Mathews—also on 57th Street—before venturing out on his own. “I did models,” Baratta remembers, “and dancers and upscale prostitutes—they had the brothels on 72nd [Street] on the West Side—starting with the hair-coloring.” Dye jobs saved newly platinum blondes, for instance, from the indignity of appearing two-toned. Baratta claims that for a while he even handed out a business card emblazoned with the phrase “BUSH BARATTA: Double the Batch and We Do Your Snatch.” By the ’70s, he recalls, “as the costumes for performers got as skimpy as they could… we went to waxing [but] it never was a ‘total.’ The manicurists mainly did it. I liked to supervise!… I would do [the final] shaping with the razor.”
In 1974, gonzo hairstylist Paul Mitchell, creator of the shag, helped produce a story for Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione for his new spin-off magazine Viva: six pages of lower locks that were fashioned into hearts and flames and arrows. “It was for a spread in the magazine—pun intended,” according to Westchester salon owner Joey DelVecchio, who passed away in 2012. “I was twenty-one at the time. I went to a strip club with one of the hairdressers who worked with [Mitchell] and the girls who wanted to be in the article. He practiced trimming designs out of the hair.”
And then there was Nance Mitchell.11 For decades Nance had been a preeminent West Coast skincare and grooming expert. Come the ’90s, however, she became a waxer to the stars, the porn-star set, and even the high-end working girls. Glamour claimed that Mitchell, who died in 2009, had “coerced the pants off more actresses than Jack Nicholson.” And her decoiffing offerings ranged from sculpting logo-shaped thatches (Louis Vuitton, Gucci) to strafing unsightly patches from male rock stars’ chests to fuzz-busting Chippendales dancers. (By removing the mangle, you accentuate the dangle.)
So Janea Padilha, to be truthful, was not exactly inventing the wheel.
The J Sisters, truth be told, had first gained their cult following for an even more deliciously illicit reason. Anna Maria Tornaghi, the prominent Brazilian marketing consultant and socialite, points out that the Padilhas were first known in New York not for their wax strips but for their boudoir tips.
On Tornaghi’s visits to the salon in the ’80s, when it was located on 56th Street, she recalls hearing the sisters “always talking very softly, doing the nails, and almost whispering. I asked, ‘What are they doing?’ and I was told, ‘They are telling their clients all the things to do with their partners in sex.’ But it was not just this. It was what we call in Brazil, simpatia—in Portuguese, sim-pah-tee-a—‘secret advice’ is how I would classify [it], like grandmothers’ recipes passed along. They were teaching this kind of folk wisdom. The clients sit down for a manicure and they would say, ‘To keep your boyfriend, use this color—red—and tie a little piece of red material, like a ribbon, on the inside of your skirt or in the underwear.’ One client would tell another and another.”
At first, Tornaghi says, “The clients were from the neighborhood. They were really good manicurists.” Soon, however, Tornaghi—a tastemaker who helped kick-start the lambada trend stateside in the late ’80s—would be stopped at social gatherings by people who were curious to know what she, as a Brazilian, knew about the J Sisters. “They would say, ‘My friend took me to a place and there I saw five movie stars and the sex tips they tell there! [Does] it really work? Is that macumba—or cambomblé—black magic?’ It’s characteristic of that region [where the sisters grew up]. The J Sisters—they started with stories and people want stories, so they start creating stories. They were giving superstitions.… But, I tell you—it doesn’t help anything. That, I know.”
When I relay this story, Janea is initially resistant to such a characterization. But she soon becomes increasingly and engagingly animated. “Simpatia is superstition, yes. We know a lot of simpatia; Brazil is very mystical country.” Her sister Joyce quickly agrees. “It’s like tricks, tips. Sometimes we tell them, ‘Red underwear is good for passion. Pink underwear is good for love.’”
“Yellow,” says Janea, “is good for money, fortune.”
“Green underwear and bra is hopeful,” Joyce adds. “Lots of women have them in Brazil, yes.” Joyce admits that she sometimes convinces women to throw their “ridiculous, awful Hanes underwear” in the trash can, right there in the waxing room. “The boyfriend, the husband must hate it. We advise them to dress for themselves. Many times they leave here naked [under their clothes, and go] from here to the lingerie store!”
Janea’s book Brazilian Sexy is filled with such advice. Eat plenty of acacia berries to make you “horny.” Press down on your lover’s prostate ridge just before orgasm. Dip in a finger, occasionally, and sample yourself; otherwise, Janea writes, “It’s like serving soup that you haven’t tasted yet.”12
Janea admits that she feels a special burden when sexually unsatisfied clients—and there are many—seek her advice. Should they have an affair? Do they just need a sympathetic ear? “In five minutes,” she says, “we can say everything.” Janea and her coworkers also field calls from boyfriends who make appointments for their lovers—and then show up in person to pay the bill. “Their previous girlfriends came here,” she explains, “and the new one, they send them, and pay first, saying, ‘I paid already, so you gotta go.’” If the new, uninitiated girlfriend arrives with first-time butterflies, they reassure her, according to Joyce: “We say, ‘We know what your boyfriend likes. Sit back.’”
A final, nagging question naturally arises. Why does Janea harbor this almost missionary obsession with hygiene? Had she gone through some trauma back in Brazil, I ask, that somehow made her feel attuned to this issue?
She nods. She falls silent for a moment. Then she pulls over a low wooden pedicure stool. She squats on it in her snug white outfit, deliberately facing her backside to her listener. She looks over her shoulder as she speaks, and she goes back to a day in 1980.
“I was young and cute. I was on the beach in Brazil with some couples and we were all sitting on stools. And I saw this one brown, beautiful girl [walking to] another table and her back was toward me. She got in the chair with her bikini and I saw her hair in her butt and I thought, ‘My God, so ugly!’ My mind was sick for the rest of the day. This girl was so disgusting.”
Never having considered her own appearance in this way, Janea began to wonder about how she looked to others, obsessing all afternoon. “I didn’t have this kind of hair with me?! And when I got home I went to take shower right away and I put a mirror on the floor and looked up and I thought, ‘Oh, my God!’” She felt devastated.
The next day at the salon where she worked, she locked herself into one of the private rooms. She had a mirror, a supply of hot wax, and bits of cloth. Her coworkers kept passing by the door, demanding to know what she was up to. “I did myself. It took me almost two hours. And when I finish and I touch myself, it was unbelievable. So good. I didn’t want to stop. So smooth. My husband, he also didn’t want to stop to touch me.”
And that, truth be told, is how the rest of the Western world got to be so spanking clean.
The J Sisters salon has gone out of business and shut its doors. Only Jonice remains. “I closed the location two weeks ago,” she tells me in August 2016, her heart heavy. “It’s only me. I’m the last J Sister here.” For the foreseeable future, she has moved her operations to a colleague’s spa on 57th Street where she and a handful of staffers from the old salon cater to faithful clients.
She misses her sisters, including Janea, who recently moved back home to São Paulo, where she is spreading the word about the sunga—a Brazilian wax for men. Indeed, both sisters see male hair removal as the next great cosmetics frontier.
Jonice, after decades of runaway success, tries to look at the bright side. “Netflix might do a J Sisters miniseries,” she insists. “There’s two documentaries [on us] coming out—one in Brazil, one in Britain.” And despite downsizing, she keeps her appointment calendar full, scheduling more and more men. “They come here for sunga,” she says, “which means ‘Speedo.’ They come here for chest, for brows. It’s beautiful… I have here today two men waiting, like women.”