Photo 1:
I take a photo of myself as I am shaving my left armpit. I lean my phone against the mug, which holds our toothbrushes, to take it. We chose this mug because the handle fell off, and there is a crack that runs across it in a plummeting diagonal. Behind me the fronds of a spider plant reach off the windowsill to brush against the back of our toilet seat.
I am wearing a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled high. It is tucked into a black pair of Dickies held up by a black belt, but you can’t see these in the picture. You can see my torso, wrapped in white. You can see my neck and the three necklaces that always live around it: two silver chains and a gold one—with a medallion passed down from when my great grandfather won a local football match. His initials are inscribed into the back of the medallion.
One of my arms, the one about to have its pit shaved, is raised and bent at the elbow which leans against the tiled wall, a line of grout catching its placement. The other arm is across my chest with the razor in its hand.
I am shaving my armpit for the purpose of being able to write about it here. It is not something I do anymore, shaving my body. I have bought a new blue razor with a white head for the occasion. It was the cheapest one I could find and was still more expensive than the razors in the men’s section.
I have lathered my underarm with soap and then made the first cut.
My hair is wiry, peaks of it twirling off in different directions like a small mountain range. Through the middle of it, there is an excavation. A rectangle of hair has been removed and, here, the skin is stippled with red.
My armpits were the last thing I stopped shaving, long after the hair on my legs was wild and long, my pubic hair thick and dark. I used to hate this scruff between torso and upper arm. I thought there was something ugly about it, dark spindles hanging. I wanted them gone.
It was seeing other people with it that changed things for me, watching L dance with their arms up, hair long and glistening with sweat under the colored lights of the club, fancying that character on TV and thinking about them in their tank top with their arms behind their head.
I had stood in front of the mirror in my own tank top and put my arms behind my head and felt sad to see only smooth skin. Why not try it, I thought to myself.
Now I think it’s sexy. I like to curl it around my fingers when I am wondering what to write next. I like it best when I am fresh from the shower, when the lines form into thick strokes that sweep like dark, wet ink.
Photo 2:
The strip of space goes all the way up my lower leg. I have dragged the razor from my ankle to my knee. It has collected my hair as it has gone, so the bottom of the strip is smooth and bare, but further up, the hair is just cut short or, closest to the knee, barely removed at all.
Perhaps I should have used shorter strokes. It seems that I have forgotten the best techniques to produce a hairless leg.
I stand with one leg on the sink, my shoulder leaning against the cold tiles of our bathroom wall because I can’t be trusted to stand on one leg without falling over. I am naked, fresh from the shower with my skin still wet, the steam of a hot shower sitting around me in the room.
The photograph is taken from above, so my knee is large and round in the foreground. In the sink you can see a clump of blond hair which I have washed out of the razor. Small stray hairs that have fallen out of the clump lie at strange angles along the sink, catching the bright light from above.
My legs were the first part of my body that I started shaving. I began shaving just my ankles, the circle of skin visible between sock and trouser. My mum noticed at a rounders game we were playing with family friends. She pulled up my trouser leg and frowned.
“You shouldn’t do that yet,” she said. But the trouble is that once you start, it becomes difficult to stop. The hairs grew back spikey, darker than they were before. They needed to be executed earlier. The ritual had to become more regular.
I moved up to my knee when term started again, scraping my lower leg smooth. In PE, in our short skorts, I would sit on the gym floor as the teacher explained the day’s activities, stroking my fresh skin, noticing hairs I had missed here and there.
The hair on the top of my legs was of a different quality, downy and light and I more or less left it alone.
I stopped shaving my legs one winter. It was so cold everywhere, ice solidifying puddles, roofs silver in the morning light, breath like smoke. It was cold in the bathroom, and I didn’t want to spend any more time unclothed than necessary. I went from trousers to trousers, slept in trackies, legs unseen. By the time it was warm enough to look at my legs again, the hair was thick and soft. I ran my fingers through it and found I didn’t mind it.
Photo 3:
I sit on the toilet seat with my legs wide. I have my socks on, white and ribbed and just covering my ankle bone. I am wearing a yellow- and petrol-blue striped T-shirt that covers my stomach.
Across from me is a mirror with the phone nestled into the edge of it. I put a ten-second timer on and watch the screen as it counts down. It has been nearly a decade since I stopped shaving here, nearly a decade since a friend of mine sexually assaulted me and then told me to shave.
The blade feels unfamiliar in my hand as I pull it over fragile skin. Soap masks the scrape. Hairs are washed down the plughole. There is a small nick that bleeds only briefly but will be irritated by the seam of my boxers for days afterwards.
I move the razor to the side and press the timer button again. As I shave the hair away, angry red bumps flare along the groin line, which is bare and chicken pink underneath. The skin looks raw, stripped as it is. It is without protection. It is without warmth.
Monique Wittig refers to pubic hair as a “pubic fleece.” I remember the first time I read this. I was in the university library trying to save an essay, borrowed books spread out on the table around me.
The Lesbian Body is made up of 114 paragraphs or sections, and interrupted by 11 lists of body parts, and sensations which are written in capital letters. Wittig breaks down the borders of a body in violent descriptions of love. Tumbling through the pages of this I came across:
“You alone are silent with no ornament other than your vast rectangular pubic fleece.”
(Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, New York, 1975, p. 59)
I was amazed. I thought about my bare pubis, the hair I rid it of regularly, the hair I rid it of since he told me to. I closed my eyes and remembered how it used to look, thick and weaving. I placed the word “fleece” next to this image and felt warmth between my legs. I imagined running my fingers through it, feeling it soft to the touch. I imagined my partner burying their face in it, rubbing their cheeks against it, delighting in this new place to rest.
In the bathroom, I look at the slope of hair that I have removed from my fleece. I stroke this block of skin, never exposed like this anymore. It looks vulnerable and young.
Already tomorrow the hair will start to break through, eager to grow again. I look forward to its return.
Photo 4:
I take a photo of myself a few days after I cut my hair off for the first time. I am sitting on my bed in my parents’ house, my baldness leaning against the wooden bedframe. I am wearing a men’s leopard print jumper with the sleeves rolled up.
There is a framed painting hanging on the wall behind me, a nude of a woman drawn in pastels and watercolor. Her body curves from one side of the frame to the other, raising in the middle, arms swooping down at the edge of the image. Beneath her there is green and behind her there is terracotta, so I think, though it is not distinct, that she is likely outside. Maybe there is wind in the hair that is held down by her left arm. Maybe she will leave this place with mites of terracotta dust stuck to her.
We are in contrast to each other, this long-haired sprawling woman and my lock-less self. My hair is cut tight around my ears. Hair that is so short it is closer to a dot than a line. This texture makes its way from nape to temple. On the crown of the head, my hair grows cautiously. It is feather soft. It is the hair of a baby.
Has there been a rebirth? It thinks so.