Summer 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 3

My mother is a surgeon. Over a decade ago, in a dimly lit hotel bathroom, she pulled my skin taut, wielding a disposable razor like a scalpel. I was dressed not in the traditional surgical gown but a still-wet bathing suit that reeked of chlorine. My armpits were generously lathered with shaving cream and prepped for surgery. Once you are told by a medical professional that a procedure is necessary, you resign all control to them, sign whatever forms and waivers, do anything you need to just get the thing done. So, I let my mother shave my armpits for the first time.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it. I had begun to notice that my armpits were unlike everyone else’s. My hair, coarse, black, and a little bit too pube-like, was something I knew to be ashamed of, even if I did not actually feel ashamed. I sweat-stained every shirt I owned, tie-dying the pits a yellow-brown. In shirts without sleeves, the hair glistened with moisture, spilling haphazardly outwards. My younger sister, still pre-pubescent, told me it was gross. I was gross. She needed me to be rid of the hair. At some point, my mother needed this too. I wanted to be normal, to fit in, but being hairless would have to be enough.

I remember being nervous. My mom trimmed my bangs when I was younger and, despite her steady surgeon hands, cut my face on at least two occasions. Once, she snipped the skin just above my right eyebrow, miraculously taking no eyebrow hairs with it. Later, growing bolder as she grew more experienced cutting her children’s hair, she cut the top of my ear, right through the helix. Both injuries were remedied with the full medical care one would expect from a woman who has stashes of sterile scalpels and gauze under her bathroom sink, but I had reason to be afraid that shaving, an activity that regularly causes practiced users to bleed a little, might result in some garish wound.

It didn’t. There weren’t even any minor nicks. I was fine. But something changes when the one person who is supposed to love you unconditionally, who tells you ‘you are beautiful no matter what’, pulls you aside to alter the parts of your body that repulse her. The secrecy with which the whole endeavour occurred said it all. We whispered in the bathroom, running the tap water loud and hoping that my father and sister were too distracted watching some Seinfeld re-run to hear what we were doing. My hair was a secret to be flushed down the sink drain with lukewarm water and barely dissolved shaving cream. The whole affair went beyond doctor-patient confidentiality; we never talked about it again.

The hair started to grow back in immediately after. It itched all the time. When I first noticed the dark follicles re-emerging, I thought they were blackheads and squeezed them till my skin bled.

I didn’t know how to ask my mom for a razor of my own. She had shown me how to shave but left me without implements. I waited impatiently, torn between hiding the stubble that both pained and shamed me and brazenly displaying it to re-attract some of the attention my forests had initially received. Asking for a razor would confirm to everyone that I wanted to shave, that shaving wasn’t just something that happened to me. I could not do it. Asking would mean a razor on the shelf in the shower sitting next to the shampoo screaming YOU ARE A NORMAL WOMAN! YOU DO NORMAL WOMAN THINGS! YOU WANT TO DO NORMAL WOMAN THINGS!

In the end, I went to Shopper’s Drug Mart. I told my parents I was going for a walk in the woods and then turned left towards the alcove of shops instead of right towards the forest. I stood in awe of the assortment of options, all locked up inexplicably behind a glass case. I probably spent ten minutes just staring at the things, trying to figure out which one I wanted and how exactly I was going to get it to the checkout, before lurking behind the underpaid twenty-something who was restocking shelves the next aisle over. I was not going to ask for help picking a brand. I had to project the image of knowledge, even if I was completely clueless. So I asked her to unlock the case and assertively grabbed the product that was both in my price range and of a brand I had heard of. In my attempt to leave the store as quickly as possible and seem like I had done this before, I did not manage to buy anything containing a handle. I had merely purchased a pack of refill blades. Anything more than that would have suggested that I didn’t have a razor at home (true) and that I didn’t know what I was doing (also true). I shaved for months with just the blade heads, unwilling to return and admit my mistake.

I’d heard women talk about the joy they get from feeling the smoothness of their skin after shaving. I have never felt this. It’s obviously difficult to get a perfectly smooth surface when shaving someone else’s pits, but even in the years following, as I slowly succumbed to the allure of the razor, I was only ever able to achieve smoothness by comparison. If I had let the hair grow out several weeks, I know now it would have been soft and almost luscious. But the prickly, itchy stubble that arose in the interim nagged at my conscience, begging me to do something. At my worst, I couldn’t go more than a day without a quick pit touch-up. Maybe it was that I never learned how to shave properly, maybe having a razor without a handle truly does impact one’s ability to get a good, close shave, but if I showered and shaved in the evening, I would lay awake that night with the hairs, maybe only a millimetre long, rubbing up against me.

I never started shaving my legs. I have a rare birth defect in my left leg that causes me immense pain and, to relieve this pain, I wear a medical-grade compression stocking on just the one leg. In practice, this looks like I am consistently wearing half a pair of tights and means no one can really see the leg hairs on one of my limbs. I have even been accused on shaving only my left leg. But no, I don’t. I didn’t. I never have. Because my leg issues arose in middle school, I was busy trying to figure out the precise grade of compression and length of stocking that worked best for me while the other girls were figuring out how to de-hair their legs with the least amount of injury. I was on an all-expenses-paid flight to Boston to see the only doctors in the world who had actually heard of my condition while they were making the lengthy bus ride to a waxing salon that was both in budget and well-reviewed. Even once I got my compression garment situation stable, I didn’t feel the same pressure to shave my legs. People were looking at them anyway. I would never pass for normal.

I stopped shaving my armpits gradually. I realized I didn’t like doing it and had never really wanted to. I’ve heard it said that lesbians have an easier time escaping patriarchal expectations of beauty and femininity because we’re not trying to attract men, but I’d never had many men in my life — just relatives and a handful of teachers — let alone men I was hoping to attract. Even if I’d had, I doubt it would have mattered. The pressure from the perpetually hairless beauties on TV and the cool girls in gym class lamenting their near-invisible blond stubble was enough. We kept each other in check until our bodies betrayed themselves. Stubble grows fast and sharp and eager to be gone.

The first few times I tried quitting cold turkey, but I could only put up with the itching and scratching for a few days before I broke down, returning with the guilt and shame only an addict knows. The razor sat sharp and glistening in the shower, easy and painless. How could I resist? I suppose if I was really committed to stopping, I would have thrown it out by now. Though the razor sits in my drawer unused and likely unsanitary, I have brought it with me through three moves. I cannot throw it out. I can still hear my sister, still feel the gaze of my mother, even now with glimpses of a future where I won’t one day need to change my mind.