"I want to be feminist about armpit hair... but I just think it's gross."

I couldn’t look away.

I was at a super-cool cafe, half-listening to my book club discuss yet another book I hadn’t read.

I was smiling, nodding, making the appropriate intellectual hope-they-don’t-realise-i’m-bluffing noises. But my attention was elsewhere.

I was deep in the armpits of a woman.

She was walking idly past, when she stopped to fix her hair. Upon lifting her arms, she flashed a patch of hair from her pits so long and dark that I considered offering her my tangle-teaser.

It was like a Kardashian had nestled up in there. My eyes trailed it like a dog would follow a schmacko.

And just as she disappeared from sight, I spotted another.  A magnificent hairy pit-stop on a woman to my right.

The armpit beard has arrived. No longer does the hipster beard dominate in my part of Melbourne - it's women who are shunning the razors too.

And I know that I should be celebrating it.  I know that it's a statement in defiance of beauty conventions. It's FRENCH for God's sake, and everything French is luscious and covert and sexy and dangerous and feminine.

So why, then, do I think 'sacre bleu'?

When I see it on the red carpet, I say "HOORAY! GIRL POWER!"

But when I see it in real life I think 'What died under there?'

Listen to the full hairy confession here: 

I'm sorry, you brave, hairy-warriors who eschew convention and display the body in it's natural state.  It's not you, it's me.

It's the social conditioning of a life raised with smoothly pitted women around me and now, seeing hairy pits makes me uncomfortable.

I should know better. I'm hairier than a shower drain in a house full of women.  But I played sport my whole life and lived in fear of sending a sweaty, spiky pit in the direction of a teammate.  So as soon as I was making a wage, I booked into a laser hair-removal clinic and asked for the session "like a frickin shark with a laser beam attached to it's head".

via GIPHY

And so when I see hairy armpits I just ....... I just can't.....I just.......can't decide if I want to touch it or run away.

According to my feminist colleagues, the only answer is immersion therapy. Mass exposure. The same way that people with spider phobias overcome them by being covered in fat hairy tarantula's the size of bread plates.

I must now look at all the pits.

A photo posted by Hairy & Stubble Armpits. (@ahairyarmpits) on Jan 14, 2017 at 7:11am PST

Well, not quite all of the pits....

A photo posted by Shiloh Jolie Pitt (@shiloh.jolie.pitt) on Dec 31, 2016 at 8:40am PST

(Shiloh Jolie-Pitt doesn't count).

So, if it's exposure I need, what's the one place your eyes go to 1700 times a day?

Your phone, of course.  And thus, I have replaced my wedding photo - yes, the smuggest of the smuggest screen saverS ever - with a beautiful, voluminous, hairy armpit.

And now I'm going to see it, touch it, and put my ear to it, a hundred times a day. And I'm hoping it will grow on me.

Listen to Monz with Mia Freedman and Jessie Stephens on the Mamamia Out Loud podcast. It's what women are talking about. And sometimes, what they are thinking but not saying. Subscribe in iTunes, in the Mamamia podcast app, or listen here: