Things That Still Grow

My first real girlfriend was fourteen, blonde, and had more hair under her arms than most grown men have between their legs. Nina wasn’t making a point. She wasn’t one of those cliché feminists staging a protest against something or other. She simply hadn’t been informed yet—she had the money for razors, the knowledge just hadn’t found her.

In the almost-year we spent sharing the kind of love that only a naive teenage crush makes possible, I worked my way toward her secret territories week by week. At the public pool, in her bedroom, on the desk of her alcoholic father. I would have called the mission "Welcome to the Jungle" if those words hadn’t already been hammered into uselessness well before the millennium arrived.

I loved pressing my face into the tufts arranged in their small deltas under each arm. I named them after the Teletubbies—Dipsy lived above her upper lip; the others I reassigned freely according to my mood. We broke up on a warm spring evening because she’d slept with her cousin, which is a very specific kind of ending, right as the shaving mania was sweeping through city girls. Nina’s armpit hair died that same night.

Sitting now with a glass of red in front of some porn, watching all those smooth, hairless bodies move with varying degrees of conviction, something unexplainable settles over me. Images of hair stirring in a draft pass through the back of my mind. Nina probably never knew how much I revered that particular corner of her puberty. Calling teenage-me sick would stretch the word "understatement" past all reasonable limits.

Not everyone has surrendered, though. There’s a community called the Hairy Pits Club where women celebrate exactly what they’ve refused to remove. They measure their armpit hair, style it, dye it, mark anniversaries. Most of them seem to prefer their own sex—worth noting, but beside the point. It’s simply good to know that the consumer war waged by razor brands against the body as it naturally exists hasn’t been entirely won.