![]() If my mother did coerce me to shave it was to control the stench. Shaving was violent and painful. My blood made pink rivulets through the soap suds. I detested the stiff, shiny stubble springing up in the white skin, visible as a blue shadow even before the adamantine tip emerged. Deodorant stung like citric acid in my cringing pits. But armpit hair was grotesque, I thought. Then one day a fascinatingly bad girl made one of her rare appearances in Trigonometry with a bush of black underarm hair sticking out of her pale, fleshy armpit, in the gap between her green tube top and the shirt she wore open on top. I stared at the hair, trying to parse it. Bad girls had sex. She flaunted her underarm hair. Maybe people who had sex liked hair. I kept looking at it, to check whether I was disgusted or not. It made me feel like I was looking up her skirt. I disapproved of the hair, but was it possibly also kind of sexy? This idea hung on tenaciously. A few years later I grew my own underarm hair. It is profuse and sexy, and I feel strangely tender toward it, as if it were a small animal I carry under each arm. |
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