Strangers to Our Teeth: What We Judge When We Judge “Bad Teeth”

The dream of losing one’s teeth unsettles most people. It is a dream that signifies great insecurity, anxiety and powerlessness, a loss of control. A friend once told me she had such a dream. She asked what I thought the teeth stood for. What did I think she was afraid of losing?

I asked her if her teeth were okay. I was being sincere, but she laughed.

Teeth never mean teeth.

*

I am thirty-four years old and I am missing fourteen teeth. My tooth loss is visible when I smile or speak. The remaining teeth are either broken or crowned. I have one titanium implant in my lower jaw, but never had it crowned.

As my existing teeth are now so few and brittle, partials or snap-in dental prosthetics are an impossibility. I was told by my regular dentist that my only hope now lies two hours away in Baltimore, where I could be a research subject for “experimental treatment” at a university—the privilege of which I would have to pay for, of course.

At this point, I know my teeth. I was born with a brittle bone condition that seems to mystify dentists. I can break a tooth eating spaghetti, and sometimes I won’t know it until I feel the irregularity with my tongue. Six years ago, my regular dentist suggested dental implants. The first oral surgeon pulled four of my bottom front teeth in anticipation of implants. But my jawbone was too thin, and bone grafts disappeared into it as if never placed. The second oral surgeon pulled another two teeth in hopes of placing implants, but my thin jaw won again: Only one screw could be placed.

Once you start losing teeth, others follow. For me, this domino effect began in earnest in 2011. Over the following two years, I dutifully tried to save them; while other people my age were saving for their future, I was paying and borrowing money for my teeth. But the happy ending was not to be.

The second oral surgeon was frightening; despite his obvious wealth and success, he struck me as a glorified salesman, a man who kept promising amazing results even while my teeth rejected his ministrations. Then I woke up during a gum-lengthening surgery (in anticipation of dental crowns, a Hail Mary effort to replace my existing teeth), and suffered the agony of being conscious but paralyzed while someone sliced into my gums. I finally soured on the whole enterprise and abandoned treatment.

*

Teeth are from my body, but not of my body; to some, they signify the mind or the soul that possesses the body. Unlike many other body parts, teeth are assigned a personality that is good or bad, and this extends to their owner.

Though I grew up with brittle bones and casts and back braces, I never thought of my body as bad. But my teeth? Yes. They are bad. And I am lucky that I have a bone condition as my noble excuse. People who have tooth loss due to drug use or economic disadvantages are perceived as being justly punished for their carelessness. Witnessing an “earned” comeuppance feels reassuring for some, like the world has order.

When I broke a leg as a kid, no one questioned my ability to handle other tasks because I did not properly care for my fibula. Yet just this past year an ENT looked in my mouth, commented that I “must be afraid of the dentist,” and proceeded to treat me like a child for the rest of the appointment. “Why, yes, Doctor,” I wanted to snarl, “I was very afraid of the dentist, but I went anyway. I tried!”

Since my teeth problems are visible, they are no longer my problems alone—my bad teeth should be fixed for the comfort of others. But we mustn’t discuss our bad teeth. Acknowledging that I am missing something so visible feels tantamount to inviting another person to acknowledge a failure of my character.

When we judge someone’s teeth, we’re judging something else.

*

As someone with bad teeth, I notice teeth a lot. If an article or thinkpiece mentions teeth, I will read it. But most of the time, these articles do not deal with living with bad teeth. That experience is largely absent from public conversation.

In horror films, teeth are easy shorthand for body horror. We’ve seen it in Oldboy, Marathon Man, American Horror Story, The Blair Witch Project, on and on. Movies also use dental problems to convey a certain level of depravity: Where ugly teeth go, ugly deeds follow. Teeth are signifiers; teeth are avatars.

In fiction, teeth are also used as agents of the bizarre, or to weave a pastiche of estrangement. Just in the past few years, this trend appears in Diego Zúñiga’s Camanchaca, Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth, and Amelia Gray’s Threats. Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story collection, Homesick for Another World, which was praised for its brave grossness and cast of misfits, mentions teeth twenty-four times. In “The Weirdos,” a woman reveals her weirdness when she smiles with “the worst set of teeth” the narrator has ever seen. In “Slumming,” the main character mentions the teeth of others to emphasize exactly how far she has flung herself from familiar society. In “An Honest Woman,” a man’s teeth mimic his creepy aura: “When he smiled he exposed the deep rot of his clawlike teeth.” Moshfegh amplifies social and spiritual alienation via the physical reality of teeth.

And is it any wonder? What body part are we more estranged from than our teeth? We pretend that teeth live independently from the rest of our bodies. They have their own rules; they have their own routines. They are our hidden skeletons made visible. They are medically treated separately from our bodies. Dentists still have a whiff of the Old West about them, a hint of unexplored territory and judicious brutality. We are conditioned to fear these time bombs in our mouths, thirty-two little opportunities for the villain to make us suffer.

Yet still we say, “It’s only a tooth” when something goes wrong. When someone complains about mouth pain, we might roll our eyes. Never mind that teeth are part of our bodies—we’d rather keep them at a distance, even as we use them as a gauge of moral fortitude. We’re loath to fully assimilate them, yet we judge everyone by them.

We are strangers to our teeth. I know mine are sitting in my mouth, biding their time. My teeth are not of my body; they haunt my body. And they are not benevolent ghosts: They reject my babying; my offerings of soft, sugar-free food, fancy toothbrushes, and prescription mouthwashes. They are angry with me. My teeth are my body’s terrorists.

*

In 2015, I made an appointment with my regular dentist to see about dentures. I figured dentures would reduce the day-to-day struggle to eat and function and be cheaper in the long run. I was told that if I pulled my remaining teeth, my jawbone would wither away and make traditional dentures unwearable, and I was referred to Baltimore. I was disappointed, but also relieved, in a way. The prospect of losing all one’s teeth is traumatic, and the trauma extends beyond the cosmetic shock of toothlessness.

More than speech or eating difficulties, most disturbing to me is the possibility of losing all physical connection to tooth-related sensory memories. It gives me a feeling of grief, of gloomy tragedy. But grief, too, is rarely acknowledged when it comes to teeth. Since we can survive their extraction, it feels overwrought to mourn their loss. They’re only teeth, after all!

For now, I live in a dental limbo. I take a lot of ibuprofen. I dislike eating in public, or being seen in public in general. I doubt I could be hired for a public-facing job. And I admit, my attitude is terrible. My judgment of others’ judgment has changed me on a foundational level. I steer clear of people. I avoid seeing old acquaintances or colleagues. Sometimes I even avoid my family, who, when I was young, tried to set me up for a bright dental future. I had the privilege of braces and headgear; I had regular checkups.

Perhaps there is something to this teeth-as-estrangement thing in fiction: My teeth are slowly shrinking my world. They keep me prisoner, acting on me in ways I can’t control.

I do not want to go to the university in Baltimore. The easy excuse is that I can’t afford it. But even if I had the money, I’m unsure that I would go. I do not want to again be made promises and endure nightmarish procedures only to have them fail. I am tired of being a medical mystery for the financial gain of others. I am afraid.

*

Is there a way to make our teeth part of our bodies? We could be less squeamish, less judgmental about them. But I know I can’t make the dental and everything-else medical communities become a more unified front. I can’t make teeth any less odd or scary. I can’t change the judgment of others.

But I can ask them to examine it. In 2011, I was at a Halloween party when one of the guests, Justin, told a story about how his coworker popped out his partial denture every day at lunch and laid it on a napkin in plain sight. The story was meant to be funny and weird and maybe a little mean, banking on the horror of removing a tooth like one removes a ring. Everyone laughed. I went tingly and hot with shame. They were laughing at me, but did not realize it.

At that time, I was wearing a temporary dental prosthetic that disguised my four missing front teeth, but they assumed I was like them—one of the naturally blessed, in on the joke. I had been drinking a little. When I get tipsy sometimes I feel brave and wicked, a self I wish would visit more often. As I listened to their laughter, my shame subsided, and rage set in. What, exactly, was so funny about Justin’s story? Was the coworker really that odd, taking a partial out to eat his lunch, doing what he needed to do to live his life? Did he deserve humiliation because his missing teeth proved, to them, that deviant character flaws burbled just beneath the surface? Or was his real sin not hiding the evidence of his missing teeth, not obeying the instinct to make others comfortable?

I watched the crowd of strangers giggle along with Justin’s story as they chomped away on off-brand Triscuits. “You mean his teeth were just laying there?” one girl said, appalled. A garden of profanities bloomed within me.

They believed they would outsmart their fallible human bodies, I realized. They think there are rules to this, rules that are fair. Be a decent person in everyday life who takes care of things, and your teeth will remain above ridicule. Be a good person, and you will not be punished by the bizarre. I looked around and thought: They have been lucky. And they assume it will always be so.

I took a breath and said, “You know, I have tooth problems.” I felt strengthened by the phantom coworker, laying out his teeth without shame. Justin gazed at me like I was an oncoming train. “I had four of my lower teeth pulled a month ago and have to wear a partial-type thingy to disguise the gap. And I take it out to eat. It’s just something that happens.”

Everyone had quieted. I felt a little foolish, a little surprised at myself. But mostly, I was pleased. I had acknowledged the fact of my teeth, and not as a joke, and not in a shy, roundabout way. I had spoken of them like they belonged to my body. Maybe it wasn’t the best thing to say out loud at a party. But I had no regrets.

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