She Was Already Shaving

Mehmet doesn’t like pubic hair. He’s fourteen. That’s enough for my thirteen-year-old cousin to spend an afternoon with a razor, scraping smooth everything—legs, armpits, asshole, the tiny hair between her eyebrows. They’d barely kissed, barely touched anywhere that would matter for the next decade. But she already knew the score: if he was going to want her, she had to stop being the way she naturally came.

Her friend walked her through it like a tutorial, the kind of thing older girls teach younger girls like it’s just… how bodies work. Shave here. Shave here. Shave everywhere. Let nothing survive.

When I asked why she cared what a fourteen-year-old boy thought about her body, she didn’t have a real answer. Just shrugged. That’s what you do when you like someone. Make yourself smaller. Less. Into something that won’t disgust him.

What gets me isn’t that Mehmet has dumb ideas—of course he does. It’s that she didn’t think it was strange to believe him. Didn’t think it was strange that her body was the problem and she was the one who had to fix it. It was already just… there. The way things work.