“I need sex” are not the words I would expect to hear from my 56-year old facialist after she utters my name. “How are you?” is more inline with what I had anticipated her saying but, in that moment, I really wished she’d just said, “Can we reschedule?” The fact that I am lying half-naked on a bed and she is 10 cm from me behind a magnifying glass, her breath tickling my face, increases the intimacy. I shouldn’t be surprised. She has already divulged her age and commented on the fullness of my lips while touching them, but I’m still stunned into muteness. She takes my silence as a willingness to listen and before I can stop her, launches into the details of when she last had sex.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. I have a history of inappropriate groomers. There was the hairdresser whose home I visited for a haircut and who offered me a joint; the hairdresser who invited me to go to a meditation class with her and her boyfriend, who she’d confessed she was having major problems with; the manicurist telling me what colour polish I should choose based on her assessment of what she felt I “need”; the masseuse who asked, on a non-massage day, if I wanted to get soup with her as it was raining and a good day for it.
My history of inappropriate groomers leads me to wonder if I’m perhaps not setting the appropriate boundaries. But what boundaries can you set when your waxer has just asked you to hold your feet in Happy Baby so they can wax between your legs? It is all I can do to not snap my legs shut like the metal hinges of an old-timey mousetrap. What is an appropriate topic of discussion when someone is seven cm from my hoo-ha with tweezers, a magnifying mirror and a spotlight? This is hardly a position of power and authority from which I can dictate the topic of conversation.
The very premise of being groomed requires a physical proximity and microscopic level of attention to parts of your body that most don’t have privy to: the condition of your scalp as a hair dresser applies hair dye; the blackheads on your nose usually covered by foundation, but now exposed for your facialist; the quality of your skin as a masseuse presses her hands into your thighs. In order to make this false intimacy feel better, do we need to create real intimacy by discussing truly intimate things? I’m not sure if groomers are trying to make them or me feel more comfortable or if I’m just in the minority and most people actually want to talk about these things.
Clearly, I’ve messed up my boundaries and made groomers feel like we are friends, but here’s the thing…my friends don’t see those parts of me. A few years ago a good friend of mine, who had recently become a doctor, excitedly exclaimed that she could now perform my pap smears. While she thought this was the best news, a marker of how close we were, I thought we were in fact too close for that. I don’t want someone I know to do that. I need the emotional distance to make the physical proximity more comfortable.
In the past, I felt a little like the least I could do is talk to groomers about whatever they feel like talking about, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become reluctant. My solution has been to limit grooming to the bare necessities (i.e. areas I can not reach), engage in small talk and sit there considering myself damn lucky that I have the ability as a human adult to pay someone else to groom me.