Nobody Asked Mehmet

My thirteen-year-old cousin recently got a crash course in hair removal from her best friend. Legs, armpits, crotch, asshole, the small strip of hair between her eyebrows—all of it, apparently, needs to go before the first boy who gets his hand down her pants registers anything other than smooth blankness, or he might freak out. This was presented to her as basic maintenance, obvious as brushing your teeth.

She has a boyfriend now. They’ve done approximately nothing—some kissing, hand-holding at school, a bit of over-the-shirt fumbling—but she is already preemptively managing his hypothetical disgust at her body’s existence. Because Mehmet, the boyfriend, finds pubic hair on girls gross. He’s thirteen, has presumably never seen an adult body outside of a phone screen, and his aesthetic preferences are already dictating how someone else maintains hers.

I don’t know exactly where boys learn this. I have some guesses. What I know is that by the time it reaches a thirteen-year-old girl, it arrives not as one person’s stated preference but as settled fact—what bodies are supposed to look like, not one option among many. Not even a conversation. Just a tutorial between friends.

The performance-feminist response—grow everything, make it a statement, refuse all of it loudly—is its own kind of performance and doesn’t really help a thirteen-year-old trying to navigate her first relationship. What might actually help is someone telling her that Mehmet doesn’t get a vote here. That shaving is fine if she wants to shave and completely unnecessary if she’s doing it because someone else is disgusted by her body being a body. That disgust, in this context, is his problem to work out—not hers to solve.

She’ll figure it out. Most people do, eventually. I just keep thinking about how young the conditioning starts, and how gently it arrives—not as pressure, just as a tutorial, as obvious and unremarkable as that.