The Brazilian.

Speaking as an educated, privileged, self-important young member of the American upper-middle class, there was absolutely nothing in my upbringing that prepared me for the moment when a Bangladeshi professional politely instructed me to flip over onto my stomach and "spread my butt cheeks."

Let me explain.

I've recently become a member of that special class of ladies who make a monthly trek to Brazil.

Let me...explain again.

Brazil is a large country full of adult women with the hairless vajines of wee childbabies. These women strut around the beaches and streets with bare, shimmering, hairless clams, laughing and tossing their (head) hair. Men are attracted to these creatures because the hairlessness of their undercarriages matches the peerlessness of their beauty.

FURTHERMORE. You may have heard that Brazil is in South America. This is only partly true. In actuality, when the first baby laughed for the first time, Brazil broke into thousands of pieces, which drifted slowly back down to earth to become waxing salons scattered all over the world. These tiny Brazil-shards, as they are known, are run by Indian, Asian, and Eastern European women who excel in the arts of...well, let's call it gardening...in which the garden is my vagina and the gardener has a job that I don't care to do myself.

Oh and also yes, hello, I'm ending my thirteen month hiatus with a blog entry about the care and tending of human ladyparts. Welcome back to the conversation.

So what happens is this. You wake up in the morning knowing that the time has come and that today is a day you must go to Brazil. Well actually. Let me back-track for a moment. You wake up in the morning and you turn on your television and you open your magazines and you accidentally catch several moments of porn and you notice that all of a sudden all of the other ladies are living in a Brave New Ladyland. And you can try to go back to sleep or un-see it, but now that you know that you are ugly and terrible and a menace to your sex, only a coward would ignore the fact that there's really only one path available to you.

Fast-forward back to the present. You wake up in the morning. Today is the day. In fact, you've actually left it too long. You leave the house knowing that you are traveling to an establishment that will rip hair out of your skin. You get off the subway at 79th Street knowing that this is the stop nearest to the establishment that will rip hair out of your skin. You walk into City Brows knowing that this is the establishment that will rip hair out of your skin. YOU ARE COMPLICIT IN THIS.

You then make eye contact with several other patrons of this establishment (it is of course Rush Hour) who have already managed their situations on other days and are now here for less humiliating procedures like eyebrow or upper-lip threading. Make sure to maintain eye contact with as many of these people as possible as the employees of this establishment shout-ask you from the opposite side of the room what procedure you need today.

If you're like me, you'll then make a vague, magical-spell gesture over your basic genital region, and mouth the word, "Um?" You must know going into this that this won't work, however, you must do it anyway, as it will buy you enough time to get over to the front desk to discretely mumble, "Um, so, Brazilian?" while nodding and blushing furiously at a small Indian woman. This woman will then announce your intentions to her colleagues in her native language so as to spare you embarrassment while she determines who's available to perform said procedure. Luckily, though, the word "Brazilian" is the same in both languages -- it sounds a lot like BRAZILIAN -- so the rest of the room will be able to follow along.

Once she's found a taker, you get to go into a particle board cubicle, take off your shoes, then your pants, then your underoos. ("And my socks? Should I take off my socks? There's no reason to, I guess, but I feel silly with them on and no pants or shoes. Well I don't know. But then what if she comes back while I'm taking them off and I'm embarrassed? Oh fuck it I'm taking them off. Okay good. And my shirt? I hate wearing a shirt while I'm wearing no pants. What should I? I don't know...maybe I'll just take off everything -- wait WHAT am I doing. Be reasonable, woman, you've been in this room for thirty-seconds alone, you need to pull it together and not be naked when she comes back.)

So you sit on the tissue paper until she comes back, and this middle part is exactly how you think it would be. It's horrible and you hate it, and you wish you'd thought to take a couple shots before you came in here, but it's hair being ripped out of your body; that's a sensation you can predict. What you can't predict is when the focus turns to the bum-bum region. The ol' backdoor. The reacharound. The...well, the asshole. The hole in your butt. There comes a time during every woman's trip to Brazil where it's all eyes on you, chocolate starfish, and I don't know how I was expecting this to go down, but I'm being asked to flip on my stomach and literally spread 'em.

All I will say about that is:
You've been to the dentist, right?
Right.
So you remember how difficult it is to keep your mouth open while a dentist tries to hurt you in it, right?
Right. That's what I thought.

Bottom line (yup), I spend five minutes a month nose-to-tissue paper with my hands on my own butt cheeks, paying a lady to know me really well. (The same lady every time, I might point out -- because when someone gets really good at doing a thankless job like that, you want to reward them by allowing them to do it every month.)

And then after it's all done I go home and spend a long time looking at my diploma and burning my bras and wondering about my life.

What a lady.