Hairy Pits Club

My first real girlfriend was fourteen, blonde, and had enough dark hair under her arms that it made you understand people had to work to keep it off. She didn’t shave. Not as a statement—she just hadn’t started. Had the money for razors, had soap, had no reason yet to think her body needed editing.

For about a year we were together in the way you are at that age, whenever we could find a place that wouldn’t get us caught. Her room. The public pool. Her drunk father’s desk. I spent a lot of time exploring those territories, tasting the soft dark hair she had arranged in this neat trapezoid. I named them after things—TV characters, whatever came to mind—stupid teenager stuff she never knew about. I was worshipping something in her body without knowing what it was or that I was doing it.

Then we broke up because she slept with her cousin. Around that same time the razor thing started spreading through the girls at school, like something you could catch. By the next time I saw her she was smooth like everyone else was becoming.

Now I sit with a glass of wine watching pornography and see all these hairless bodies and something sits heavy in my chest. I think about what disappeared, about all those girls making a choice or making a choice without knowing it was a choice. About being a fucked-up kid who loved something he couldn’t name and couldn’t keep.

The Hairy Pits Club exists—women growing it out deliberately, measuring it, dyeing it, treating every inch like a small victory. Most of them aren’t doing it for men anyway. But there’s something that matters about refusing the machine, about saying no to what Gillette and Wilkinson decided your body should look like. The war isn’t over. It’s not settled.