In Praise of the Pit

What gay men's lust for the armpit says about masculinity, desire, and identity.

According to Gay Twitter™, 2023 might just be the year of the male armpit. In photo shoots and on social media, men’s armpits seem to be everywhere, providing legions of adoring fans with something to drool and salivate over. And, unsurprisingly, gay men are leading the charge. In an extensive Twitter thread, one user drew attention to a veritable host of alluring pit pics from many of today’s biggest stars, ranging from Cheyenne Jackson to Kieran Culkin. Even in the world of social media, where thirsting after men is something like a full-time job for man, the pit seems to occupy a particularly privileged place in the desiring queer male imagination. 

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m also one of those who finds men’s armpits an incredibly alluring part of their anatomy. I’m sure that some of my attraction, at least, is biological, as there seems to be some evidence that male sweat contains pheromones. However, as with so many things having to do with human desire, it can’t be boiled down to a simple biological fact, and there is good reason to think that gay men’s fetishizing of the pit has as much to do with how gay men have come to be socialized to think about what they yearn. Just as importantly, the public worship of the pit is also part of the way that many gay men have trained themselves to express desires in the spaces of social media. 

There is, indeed, something deeply and almost viscerally (I’m tempted to say ferally) male about the pit. Unlike (American) women, who are constantly barraged with a wide variety of products designed to help them excise the dreaded hair from their pits, men are invited to not only keep theirs natural but to show them off in every way that they can. Looking closely at the way in which pits are typically photographed, it’s easy to see certain trends emerge. In almost every photo in the aforementioned tweet, for example, the models are staged in such a way that their arms are stretched above their heads, leaving the pit on glorious display. Thankfully, in most of these the men haven’t been depilated to within an inch of their lives. In some strange way, it seems to me, they’re almost calling us to bury our noses in them, to breathe deeply of the heavy musk of masculinity. 

Part of the appeal also stems from the armpit’s proximity to (and ability to show off) the bicep. This muscle is itself overladen with all sorts of connotations of lustful desires, signifying as it does the extent to which many men will go to sculpt their bodies into the perfect vehicle for others’ lustful gaze. When the bicep and the pit are captured at one and the same time, they create a powerful frisson, crackling with eros and lust. There’s just something about it that makes you want to be dominated and overpowered by this hulking male figure.   

In some cases, of course, it’s clear that the underarm hair has been styled and coiffed so as to be as appealing as possible to the camera and there are, it pains me to say, some armpits that have actually been shaved. It seems,though, from my admittedly brief perusal, that the appeal of the armpit relies in large part on the hairiness of them. While I don’t have time to get into the whole hairy vs. smooth debate, it does seem to me that when it comes to sexiness that the hairy armpit definitely comes out ahead of the shaven one.  

As is so often the case with particularly potent and powerful images, there’s also something about images of the pit that call to mind the other senses. Gross as it might seem to some people out there, many gay men I know (myself included) find armpit sweat to be strangely appealing. Some of it is no doubt due to the presence of pheromones, but I also think some of it is culturally-inflected, in that sweat has come to be associated with the brute muscularity of the laboring male body, whether such labor is on a construction site or in the gym. Seeing the image of a pit engenders a heady mélange of sight, smell, and texture, reminding us of everything that we find so appealing about the male body.  

Some, I’m sure, will find this whole fixation on the armpit more than a little distasteful. However, for me, and presumably for many others, there is something almost liberating about this embrace of the libidinal energies represented by the armpit. And while I don’t want to demystify something that is perhaps alluring precisely because it is inexplicable, I do think that it’s valuable–and, for me at least, fun–about thinking more deeply about what our desires say about us and why we collectively find some things so infinitely desirable. As The New York Times has shown so skillfully in their recent piece on the renaissance of the mustache, it’s actually kind of fun to think more deeply about our lusts and desires and what they say about us, both as individuals and as a collective.

It can sometimes seem that we live in an increasingly atomized age, one where our lusts and desires are a matter of personal preference, where we’re all capable of defining, in sometimes pathological detail, just what we are and aren’t into. Much of this, of course, is due to the proliferation of dating apps like Grindr, which have made it that much easier to wall ourselves off in our own little silos, content to never get outside of our comfort zones and are sharply-delineated “types.” It’s thus not only fun but also rewarding to think more carefully and critically about the types of desires that join queer men together, particularly during Pride Month and even more particularly when there are so many who want to force us to push our desires back into the closet and out of the public eye. 

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and celebrate the pit!