San Diego Author Explains Why She's Embraced Her 'Gross Anatomy'

It's impossible to have a human body live in it for a while and not find something or other about it. That's well gross and even if whatever that is is OK with you someone else will probably find it gross. Finding out why we have the smells bumps leaky bits and stray hairs that plague us and coming to terms with them is the message of a new book called gross anatomy. Dispatches from the front and the back. Joining me is gross anatomy author Maura Altman who's one of the San Diego authors taking part this week in the San Diego Union Tribune Festival of Books. Mara welcome to the program. Great to be here. How do you introduce readers to the gross anatomy you describe in the book is it broken down into various locations of body parts. Yes I have two parts of the book. The upper half and the lower half and I talk about everything from body hair like chin hair to vaginal scent to sex sounds even warts and hemorrhoids. I go pretty deep and you only talk about the female body right. It's geared towards the female body but there are shared things like bellybuttons warts or shared sweat. So there are shared things but yeah a lot of it's about the female body. And why is that because you have one or if you have one. It is based off of my experience in a way because I have certain shameful feelings towards certain body parts so it definitely personal experience plays into it. But I think it's a very shared experience for women today that we hide certain things that we have shame about our bodies certain parts. So for me I was very excited to look at the female body now in writing this book. You interviewed a range of different people and experienced a range of new experiences. Tell us about that process. So many experiences. I went to anal bleaching expert and she checked out my anus and she told me that I was Ashie which I was totally cool with the Ashie lineage. I did a topless bike ride in New York. I had a pelvic massage which was actually really interesting. A woman put her finger up my vaginal canal and kind of massaged the area. It's not sexual at all. It was to just she says like deal with the trauma and you could even have trauma just by living in this world. That's kind of not so kind to women all the time. And it's also very interview based with a lot of people they're like experts in their field. So like the guy who knows a lot about sphincters identification expert or really cool rectal surgeon I talk to a lot of evolutionary theorists to paleoanthropologist to sociologists to women's studies professors I probably talked to like 150 people. Now I see the female mustache plays a big role in gross anatomy. Why is that. I guess you could say it's kind of what sparked the whole thing. There's this moment that sparks the book where I'm at a restaurant and I'm kind of making flirtatious looks at the waiter and then instead of him asking me out which I was expecting. He's like I like your blond mustache which was not expected because I thought bleaching it meant that it was invisible. Turns out no bleaching is not visible. It's actually very bright blond. And so I kind of was traumatized by the event and I came to realize that to be a complete woman were kind of expected to get rid of a part of ourselves. So it sparked a journey to figuring out why why there was all this shame around body hair. And of course I got hairier as I got older and I had chin hair that was a whole other fiasco. So it just kept rolling out. You know I think that the female body is inferior to er actually grosser than the male body goes way back in civilization. How do you think those sort of ancient prejudices affect us today. I think it really somehow gets infused like just down down the years like there was this very interesting fact when I was researching sweat that in like 15 to 8000 hundreds. They thought this was toxic. And the people were very scared of touching other people's sweat. And people were also very scared of not sweating because they felt like it took all their toxins out. So it was like this kind of catch 22. But today we still think this sweat releases toxins from our body. And I was really surprised when I found out that it doesn't. And I kept asking more and more experts I kept talking to like dermatologists I'm like But doesn't it. No I mean your liver releases all the toxins not your sweat. So that I think is a thought that exists from three or four hundred years ago. No writing this book help you personally. It's definitely helped me. I think not having to do something you know if I was plucking or doing laser on my face I was really doing it out of fear and anxiety that I would be found out. Now that it's out in the open and everyone knows I have a goatee and that I've researched other reasons around the feelings and the context of the shame how it was created. I don't feel bad about it I don't feel like I'm in hiding. I still do the things I do because that's how I want to present myself to the world. But it's out of just desire. You know that's how I want to look now. You link this sort of increasing acceptance that is sort of growing among a lot of women to the mid to movement. Tell us about that. I think that the ME2 movement you know shows a lot of women kind of coming out of the woodwork and no longer wanting to be shamed no longer wanting to stand for the harassment that they've experienced no longer being in silence. And it's kind of a similar thing with the body is we're in hiding. We're not talking about these things we're apologetic about the things about our body that are completely natural. You know we're in fear of our biological side. You just have there's no way around it. Like we grow hair vaginas have a smell. We sweat when we're hot you know. And so that's that's how I think it relates. Now your previous book was about female orgasms. This one is mostly about female bodies. What's next. I know that you recently had twins that must have provided you a lot of inspiration. So a lot of things happening with the twins and you got 13 pounds of baby in your belly. But right now I'm just sticking with this book it took me so long to write it. And so I really want to spend time with it trying to you know talk to people about it and I have a tour next week where I'm going all across the country so I'm excited about that. I've been speaking with San Diego author Mara Altman about her book gross anatomy dispatches from the front and the back. She'll be taking part in the San Diego Union Tribune Festival of Books at Liberty Station this Saturday. She'll also be on an event on Friday at the book catapult in South Park. Mara thank you so much. Thank you.