So my boss admits to being turned off by an armpit-sniffing dating ritual.
Well, who can argue with other people’s tastes? But I do want to add a few words about armpit fixation.
I don’t know at what age youngsters today become concerned with maxillary hypertrichosis (some pedantry for ya). I think I was 12-ish when the girls all started inspecting each other covertly in the gym locker room. Within a few years we all had pink princessy razors. An exchange student who hadn’t de-furred was buzzed about and chastised.
Then I got to college, read Great Literature, and got a shock.
In Mikhail Sholoknov’s “And Quiet Flows the Don,” a man is entranced by the “pungent, sweetish scent” of a woman’s armpits. He is in lust.
Sholokhov won the Nobel Prize, so I assumed he knew what he was doing. When I took Russian for a year, I learned the word for armpit: “podmyshka.”
And then there’s John Waters’ film “Multiple Maniacs,” in which the Cavalcade of Perversions includes two hairy dudes licking away.
Yes. They’re really the pits.
