Let It Grow

Look out the window, open a newspaper, read the room; now, gaze under your arms. Are you still diligently removing hair from one of the more sensitive places on your body? Is that really how you’re living? If so, why? It’s finally time, ladies, everyone, to quit it with the Venuses and the Schwicks, the wax strips, tweezers, lasers, depilatory ointments. It's time to say no to razor burn and folliculitis, to fattening the coffers of the 2.2 billion dollar global hair removal industry. It's time, I'm begging you, to stop shaving your pits. 

Personally, I stopped shaving years before social distancing. It’s a rare gift when one’s politics and laziness coincide, although it took me a while to see that. In my past, clean-shaven life, I’d pay the pink tax for the curve-hugging blades and the incandescent creams they kept behind plexiglass at Duane Reade. In my apartment I’d balance on the bathroom sink with my arm stretched upward like I had a question to ask, my pit close to the mirror as I attempted a steady hand, nicking my defenseless underarms all the same. I loathed this task, but felt I didn't have a choice. Smooth pits were a standard element of maintaining femaleness, I believed, as elemental as brushed hair and clean underwear. And to me, the reward of femaleness was fuckableness, which is why I kept up this charade for over a decade—triaging ingrown hairs, monitoring my twin five o’clock shadows, scraping metal against the grain.

When I finally stopped, I was in the midst of my first serious relationship. I figured we had been together long enough that he should learn that when it comes to body hair, I'm neither a Stepford Wife nor a child, but a very tired human woman. Now I won't give my future-husband too much credit lest I set the bar in the sand, but turns out he was absolutely fine with me going au natural. And if he wasn’t, then I hope I would have had the gumption to drop-kick the relationship into the sun. 

So, I gave up the ComfortGlide to test my relationship, and then, well, the obvious happened: my hair kept growing, unbothered. Back when I shaved, all I ever knew was obligation, stubble and rashes, that horrible mix of new hair and old deodorant and sweat. I didn’t know that when my hair was at its natural length the texture would be silky, delicate. And while I assumed that when I stopped shaving I’d feel brave and gruff, perhaps compelled to burn a bra in a steel barrel trashcan, what I wasn't expecting was to feel sexy. I was twenty-four years old the first time I saw my pit hair in its full glory, and reader, I was into it. Who could imagine that two tufts of underarm hair could make one feel more like a woman than any feminine product in even the grandest of Duane Reades? Then again, maybe that's the real reason they keep the shaving equipment under lock and key.

Look, I know body hair is fraught, and if you truly enjoy keeping your underarms as smooth as a baby’s bottom, then who am I to tell you what’s what. But if you’ve never experienced life with pit hair, I think our collective house arrest is the perfect place to try it out. It’s time to add shaving to the long list of things you no longer do, just to see who you might become.