Me & Amy Pascal's Pubes

Why finding my first gray hair down there took me back to the Sony hack

Writer and podcaster Courtney Kocack ponders gray pubes, aging, and beauty standards.

The older I get, the more I think about the Sony hack.

On November 24, 2014, the Monday morning before Thanksgiving, Amy Pascal—then fifty-six, the co-chairman of Sony Studios—went to log in to her computer and discovered it had been hijacked by a sinister red franchise-worthy skeleton twisting its fingers and snarling its fangs on the screen, as reported by Vanity Fair. The headline was: “Hacked By #GOP.” The hacker group responsible called themselves “Guardians of Peace” and they delivered an ominous warning, which read in part:

We’ve obtained all your internal data including your secrets and top secrets.

If you don’t obey us, we’ll release data shown below to the world.

The hackers had given Sony a deadline of about eight hours out to meet their unclear demands. The deadline came and went without incident—Amy and the rest of the top brass at Sony Pictures breathed a collective sigh of relief.

But by the end of the week, the hackers began to release thousands of confidential documents, terabytes of stolen data. Private emails, Sony executive salaries, and performance details were sent to journalists, tipping them off. Julian Assange published the entire archived Sony leak on WikiLeaks. Nothing was spared, no matter how mundane. There was something perversely delicious about all this behind-the-scenes information coming to light.

There was a very on-brand email from Channing Tatum dunking on Seth MacFarlane’s Ted in a gleeful celebration of 22 Jump Street’s success as it became the second highest-grossing R-rated comedy movie of all time.

"F YOU TED !!!! SECOND OF ALLLL TIMMMMME BEEEOTCH!!!! COME ON JUMPSTREETERS WE GOT CATE BLANCHETT WIT DIS BOX OFFICE BITCHES!!!!!!!!”

Of course, Tatum was a victim too, but in a winning sort of way. Not everyone was so lucky.

Everything down to Amy Pascal’s orders from Amazon was exposed. Journalists churned out roundups of Pascal’s order history. Even my favorite feminist news source, Jezebel, got in on the fun, offering breathless commentary on her ‘Hair Down There’ Pubic Hair Dye: $14.99, Color: Brown Betty.

More than anything related to the Sony hack, I remember Amy Pascal’s pubic hair dye. Pascal went from the creative head of Sony, one of the most influential people in entertainment, to Twitter laughingstock overnight. Nobody was dwelling on the Amazon orders of Amy’s work partner, Sony Pictures’ CEO and chairman Michael Lynton. I remember how sexist that seemed.

A few months post-hack, Pascal was dethroned from her co-chairman position. She stepped down or was dismissed, or as she said, “I think I should have gotten fired much sooner.”

Even after she was fired, I thought about Amy Pascal a lot. In the shower, I looked down at my brown pubes and wondered when they would turn gray and what would happen then.

To me, the media about Amy Pascal proved not only that you must remain youthful at all costs, but also that you must never reveal the mad science happening behind the curtain to achieve it.

******

A few years before the hack, I’d started writing essays, scripts, making a web series, a podcast—all sorts of comedy. I’d found what I truly loved to do. After the success of Bridesmaids, it seemed like maybe female-fronted comedy could be on the precipice of a moment… Hopefully, a moment here to stay. In my late twenties, it felt like I was finally figuring some shit out. Still, I was a million miles, probably years, maybe a solid decade or two, from the career that I wanted, yet the power of brown pubes felt fleeting.

Even then, I knew that the equation of desirability and time didn’t add up. I was getting better—smarter, cooler, more empathetic as a person—more of a force. Yet, I was constantly reminded that the sands of my desirability hourglass were slipping away, down, and out of my favor.

In the back of Cosmopolitan magazine, there was a recurring classified that always caught my eye. It was a graph of collagen depletion. On the X-axis was age, and on the Y-axis was collagen, a much-touted requisite for beauty. As the X-axis moved through its thirties, the Y-axis took a precipitous fall from which one could never recover (especially not without needles and intense medical intervention). The ad wanted to inform you in no uncertain terms that the supple fat that keeps you looking young and fresh will quickly yet imperceptibly evaporate from your cheeks until one day it’s as obvious as falling off a cliff—you are destined to look like a crepey witch by forty, probably sooner. “But we’ve got a product that can help with that!”

Since I was eighteen-ish, I’ve typically waxed my whole bush. It’s called “a Brazilian” and it’s quite painful, involving tearing the hair follicles out at the roots on one of the most sensitive regions of the body. Yeah, ouch. I can’t tell you exactly why I do it. I like to think it’s because I don’t have much pubic hair, and it looks less pathetic/more intentional to wax it all off. It’s hard to argue the sexiness angle due to the pubescent implications of the whole thing, though I still think it’s sexier on me. Perhaps also out of habit? I don’t know. I like how it looks, but part of me knows (yet likes to forget) that it’s patriarchal oppression that I’ve inflicted on myself and helped to uphold for the better part of two decades.

Sexism is bad, but the self-inflicted kind is especially insidious. I do it. Cosmo does it. Jezebel does it. We all do it, even if we’re trying very hard not to.

******

Today when I think of rich, powerful women in entertainment, instead of Amy Pascal, my mind goes first to the Kardashian-Jenner dynasty. Led by a matriarch so shrewd she “works harder than the devil,” according to the popular meme. But how many hours of surgery, facials, and makeup were amassed on their way to the top? I don't ask as a criticism—I’m a fan, I watch every episode of their Hulu show—I ask because I want to know what it takes to win as a woman. Are we going to let them get old? Will they let themselves get old? Kim's ex-husband Kanye's mom died on the operating table during an elective plastic surgery procedure. Grasping at beauty and youth is not without its risks.

Recently I got busy with work and could barely keep up with the Kardashians, much less my Brazilians; instead, I let my bush grow for several months until I’d sprouted a pubescent goatee on the front of my pussy. After a shower, I was toweling off and something caught my eye. I hunched over, squinting, and twirled my pubes under the harsh bathroom light to inspect the color. For a moment, I was fear-stricken. Was this half-inch strand of coarse hair blonde… or gray?! Was it just bad lighting? I couldn’t tell.

I twirled for another minute as I tried to solve the riddle of the blonde-gray pube—it was my own personal version of the blue-gold dress viral meme and it was driving me crazy—and then it struck me how silly it was to care even if the whole bush was gray.

What I’m certain of is that I feel like the most powerful version of myself now, at forty. My agency and abilities have never been stronger. I’m so proud of all the lessons I’ve learned every year on this planet, and I imagine that feeling will only continue to grow. Frankly, I don’t care what society thinks about my age or my pubic hair; I shed a little more of my give-a-fuck every day. It’s ecstatic—I feel like one of those orgasmic women in a shampoo commercial after a really good wash, without the need for the magical shampoo.

Beauty and feminism have a complicated relationship, and aging makes it even more so. I just turned forty, and I already have a laundry list of maintenance—microblading, Botox, occasionally filler, facials, hair dye for my head hair, et cetera, et cetera. Aside from my Brazilians, which are becoming more and more infrequent, I'm going to leave my bush alone. I only have one maybe-gray now, but I look forward to the future. When my bush is fully gray, I will probably be the wisest and most amazing version of myself to date.

I wonder if Amy Pascal dyes her pubes these days. Maybe she still does because she likes how it looks—it allows her to write her own story, see herself in the mirror as she wants to be seen—or maybe she could never muster putting it into her online shopping cart again because it was such an absurd, misogynistic part of her kryptonite. Or perhaps she's just over it because she’s realized it's all a big sham. Either way, I hope Amy Pascal is very happy doing whatever she wants with her pubes these days.

Courtney Kocak is a writer and podcaster based in Los Angeles. She wrote for Amazon’s Emmy-winning animated series Danger & Eggs and Netflix’s Know It All. Her bylines include The New York Times and a viral essay for Cosmopolitan. She’s the host of the Private Parts Unknown podcast, and she’s currently working on a coming-of-age memoir.