Hey babes. Here is an awesome submission from Emily, and the front lines of the Free Your Pits Movement! This brings me a massive smile and then a hearty fist in the air for the progression of personal empowerment through style expression and the normalization of our natural body hair.

We bow to the women of Pensacola who are with us in spirit, and in hairy pits;)

Pensacola Feminist Society Pit-in!

My name is Emily and I live in Florida. I got my first crush on lady pit hair when I saw it on my two beautiful, artistic roommates several years ago. At the time I didn’t think I could “pull it off” because I wasn’t enough of a bohemian babe. Later I got over those feelings and grew it out for the first time while participating in a V-Day/Vagina Monologues event in 2014, spurred on by the solidarity of being surrounded with such a fun, creative, powerful group of feminist women. Since then the love affair has been off and on, depending on what effort I felt like putting into my pits, but when I discovered the Free Your Pits Movement my immediate reaction was: YES! THIS!

Around the same time I was mentally preparing to rally some friends to get in on this pit-dying party with me, a friend named Kara contacted me about a feminist organization she and some other women were working to establish. We set dates for both our first Feminist Society of Pensacola council meeting and, a couple months later, our Pit-In.

We bonded over many bottles of wine throughout those long meetings and we discussed our collective mixed bag of feelings about body hair, body acceptance and the conversations and commentary this experiment spurred from others. To me, that’s one of the most interesting parts of Free Your Pits–the way it can get people talking and reveal curiosity, camaraderie, or, of course, whether someone happens to be a body-shaming jerk! Happily, our experience and the built-in support system we had in our group garnered much more positive reactions than negative.

On Pit-In day, it was more of all that positive stuff! We sipped mimosas on my porch, chatted, took photos, laughed a lot, and dyed our pits teal. We chose teal because it’s the color representing Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and the following weekend we took our colorful pits to volunteer at a 5K event that benefitted a local resource center for victims of sexual assault.

The whole experience was a blast and a bonding moment–both between each other and our respective selves. Our Pit-In was fun and defiant and silly and communal. Though the aqua hue of my pit hair may have faded, my love for body hair freedom is just blossoming to life!

Emily, and the ladies of the Feminist Society of Pensacola, thank you for sharing your story. We salute you and we hope to share a Pit-in with you sometime, especially if it is on the porch of a southern state, where we especially need more empowerment and awareness.

If you are in the Pensacola area and want to connect with the Feminist Society of Pensacola, here is their

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#freeyourpits!

xoxoxoxoxox, HTHG

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