The Thicket
After enough red wine—after the long conversation about her brother’s accident and her roommate’s lasagna—I put my hand between Theresa’s legs and felt something I hadn’t felt in what seemed like years. Curly, dark, dense. A full bush that clearly hadn’t seen a razor in a very long time. My first thought, genuinely, was relief.
The cultural logic behind shaving everything is simple and depressing. Somewhere between porn and cosmetics advertising, the bare pussy became the default—smooth, maintenance-intensive, vaguely infantile. If you want to be considered sexy and desirable, the assumption now goes, you remove what puberty gave you and maintain the result with the regularity of a lawn. Women who comply are just normal. Women who don’t are making a statement, which is its own kind of absurdity.
Men have their version too. The shaved balls, the trimmed everything, the logic that removing the hair makes your dick look bigger. An athletic body is hairless, the argument runs. Complications for everyone involved are minimized. Nobody mentions that the complications were never actually the hair.
What bothers me most is that twelve-year-old girls are apparently having panic attacks about the first signs of pubic hair—terrified of being mocked by classmates. That’s not a beauty standard. That’s a dysfunction that got normalized. And I’d gone along with it long enough that finding Theresa that way felt almost transgressive, which is the genuinely embarrassing part: that hair felt transgressive. That lying with an adult woman who looked like an adult woman felt like something out of the ordinary.
I couldn’t picture her any other way. The hair was just part of who she was, made her look like a woman rather than a retouched surface, and that was the actual appeal—not some niche preference or contrarian position. Just preference. I hadn’t felt like a creep sliding around on an adult’s shaved-smooth genitals pretending everything was fine in a very long time, and I realized how much I’d missed the alternative.
Morning. She got out of bed and I mentioned it, because I couldn’t not. "Your ass isn’t shaved either," she said, and jumped in the shower. I nodded. Hard to argue with. Walking her to the subway, I picked a few of her dark curls out of my teeth. She disappeared underground with a sharp little smile, and I stood there thinking: what a woman. I meant it entirely.