The Steve Martin Line That Makes It Impossible to Ever Look at Steve Martin the Same Way Again

When you think of Steve Martin, you probably don’t think “incel weirdo.” On top of being 79 years old and therefore simply having ample time to have encountered women, he’s been in several high-profile relationships with extremely non-desperate ones, including Bernadette Peters, Mary Tyler Moore, Karen Carpenter and Anne Heche. He’s even been married twice, and not quickie Vegas mistakes.

So you’d think, at some point, he’d have gotten familiar with women’s bodies and the things that they do to them. However, based on a passage of his 2000 novella Shopgirl — yes, the one that became a 2005 Steve Martin movie — we can only conclude that everything Steve Martin thinks he knows about women is wrong. 

The passage in question concerns a woman on a quest to lure a rich man away from her co-worker: “To Lisa, Prada is as recognizable as her own mother, and seeing Mirabelle draped in the perfect Prada shift provokes in her a deep guttural growl. Lisa calls her friend at the store to get the full scoop, and yes, Ray Porter and an unknown miss did roll through. The only thing Lisa can think to do when she hears her worst fears confirmed is trim and coif her public hair.”

So we’re already not off to a great start. Somehow even worse than the creation of this vapid hussy, however, is how she goes about performing this act: “Lisa sits on the toilet as she shaves, one leg propped up on the bathroom cabinet. She can dip the razor in the toilet when she needs to wet it while she shapes and combs the furry patch to perfection.”

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the simple truth that a woman this dedicated to beauty maintenance — she’s described as having had several plastic surgeries — would never shave when she could just get regular bikini waxes, as well as the words “shapes and combs the furry patch to perfection.” Steve Martin believes it’s completely normal for women to shave their pubic areas with toilet water. Multiple editors read this passage and saw no reason to object to a woman swishing a sharp blade in the same bowl where she regularly shits and gliding it over her most sensitive skin. 

And there’s more, too: “After the final dip of the razor in the toilet and a gentle splash of water to the now perfectly shaped lawn, Lisa stands up, stark naked, and looks at herself in the bathroom mirror.”

“A gentle splash of water to the now perfectly shaped lawn”? “A gentle splash of water”?! Mr. Martin, do you mean to tell us that this ostensibly sane woman, not previously described as any kind of germophiliac, just reached into the toilet and splashed her exposed and to some degree razor burned vulva with water from the aforementioned shit bowl? Do the words “urinary tract infection” mean anything to you, Steve Martin? How about “bacterial vaginosis”? Maybe just “ewwwwww”?

What could possibly have led an otherwise reasonable-seeming man to believe that women are out here dunking their junk in toilet water on the regular? 

There’s only a few possibilities. Maybe he just genuinely imagines, when women shave their pubic hair, they do it in the toilet to save water (the book is set in drought-ridden Los Angeles, after all) because he forgot sinks exist. Maybe Steve Martin got some terrible shaving lessons as a boy and this is how he does it, though it seems a lot less mechanically convenient for the areas men typically shave, so you can add the necessity of pondering whether Steve Martin shaves his balls to the list of terrible things about this passage.

The most likely possibility, however, and also the most disturbing, is the same thing that usually leads men to have wildly bizarre ideas about women: He actually knew a disgusting woman who did this and assumed that was how all of them did it. 

Feel free to refer back to the list of famous Steve Martin exes and take your guess! We certainly have.