I Never Thought Much About My Armpits—Until Men Started Asking to Smell Them

My hookup and I were in bed when the question came: “Can you smell my armpit?” We were half-naked, rolling around, faces smashed together in the middle of a typical hot and humid New York City summer. I already knew our bodies had worked up a layer of sticky sweat and my first thought was how to approach the sniffing situation. Do I go in nostrils first?I’m a people pleaser by trade, so I leaned in and did it. I wasn’t nervous it would smell bad, exactly. In my head, a pit was either my own Old Spice situation or the guy next to me at the gym whose lack of hygiene is actively trying to make me drop a weight on my face. My hookup Kevin’s was neither. The first whiff was just… him. Not cologne or pure BO, but a specific mix that made me think that this is what he smells like. He made this low, growl-adjacent sound, and that’s when I understood the point wasn’t just the smell. It was me wanting to smell him—or at least being willing to get that close.There was no sudden urge to update my dating profile with “armpit curious” after we finished. But once I’d done it, the armpit stopped feeling like it was relegated to background body territory. It was part of sex, part of what other people might find hot, and part of my body I had only ever thought about controlling.You see, when I first came out at 24 and started hooking up with men about a decade ago, gay sex felt like an open-enrollment class I’d joined late. I knew the basics, at least in theory. Top, bottom, vers. The usual menu of things people asked about with the casual confidence of someone ordering coffee. You learn quickly that “What are you into?” isn’t a small question. It can mean positions, sure, but it can also mean light choking, spit, leather, feet, dom or sub, or some very specific other thing you have to pretend you’ve heard of before.But for years, one category somehow slipped past me: smell. More specifically, musk. Even more specifically, armpits. Which is odd, because I’m not exactly unfamiliar with sweating. I sweat walking around the corner to CVS. Before going to the gym, I sniff my own armpits approximately 19 times to make sure my deodorant actually took. Even after a run once, I stood in the Starbucks line, waiting for my venti iced coffee while quietly fearing I was ruining everyone’s morning. So when I think about armpits, my brain goes to risk management before eroticism.I do understand personal scent in the broader romantic sense. When my friend Maddie returned from a six-week work trip she told me she missed the smell of her fiancé. She wanted a sweatshirt, or something that smelled like him, and I understood exactly what she meant. We pick up on how people smell all the time, sometimes without realizing it, and that alone can make us want to get close or keep our distance. A bed, a hoodie, a pillowcase after someone stays over—those things can feel intimate because they carry proof of a person. But wanting someone’s sweater and wanting to bury your face directly into an armpit are not, to me, the same emotional journey.Until the moment where I was asked to nosedive into a pit, my relationship with my pits had been simple enough: swipe on deodorant, keep the smell contained and the hair from doing too much, and never ever become the reason someone in a packed subway car starts sniffing the air with concern. But if someone else could find that same area sexy, had I been thinking about it all wrong? Or had I just been properly socialized into believing any trace of sweat, musk, or body odor was a personal failure?“Armpit hair and natural musk can function as shorthand for masculinity, maturity and sexual potency,” Joe Kort, Ph.D., LMSW, an AASECT-certified sex therapist and supervisor of sex therapy says. While noting those traits aren’t inherently masculine so much as culturally assigned, hairy pits and their natural smell can carry a specific erotic charge in the corners of gay male culture that are drawn to signs of manliness.None of that was running through my head in Kevin’s bed. I felt curiosity mixed with mild panic. But Kort’s explanation did make the request feel less random, and once I stopped thinking about his armpit, I started thinking about mine: Why I was so quick to treat sweat and smell as things to minimize or even apologize for?Men are told to trim, scrub, deodorize, and generally eliminate any evidence that an armpit is doing what an armpit naturally does. At the same time, body hair, musk, and natural scent can be huge parts of attraction. So somewhere between smelling clean and smelling like a Yankee Candle display, there has to be a middle ground.Alex Gimenez, founder of skincare and fragrance brand Studio Ready, thinks there is. He created the brand with gay men in mind, developing products that complement their natural scent rather than completely covering it up. “At a gay bar, I don’t want to get close to a guy and smell nothing but cologne,” he says. “I want to smell him.”Just to clarify, this is in no way an argument against showering. Gimenez distinguishes between bad body odor and a person’s actual scent. One needs handling. The other doesn’t have to be buried under six sprays of something called Ocean Rush. As he puts it, “The goal is a little fragrance, a little you, and no onion.”The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’ve always understood scent as part of presentation, just like clothes or hair, but I never extended that logic to my armpits, quite possibly because the entire deodorant aisle has been screaming at me since puberty to keep them quiet.Gimenez thinks scent deserves the same consideration as the rest of how we show up. “There’s clothing style, and there’s scent style,” he says. “Your fragrance and how much you wear contribute to how people think of you, just like your clothes or haircut.” That includes sex, he adds: “When you smell right, he wants to get closer, and stay there longer.”And because armpits are usually out of sight, there’s something mysterious and a little alluring about them. Kort says armpits bring together “body hair, sweat, scent, vulnerability and physical closeness,” and because they’re usually concealed, seeing, touching, or smelling them can feel especially intimate.He also points out that eroticism often engages with the parts of our bodies or minds we are taught to hide. We’re told to sanitize and control our smells, so in a consensual sexual context, abandoning those rules can feel freeing. “Sweat may stop meaning ‘unclean’ and start meaning exertion, desire, and surrender,” he says. “Context changes the meaning of the sensation.”Gay male culture has never had one grooming script anyway. There are smooth guys, those who present more polished, like they’re ready for a circuit party, and burly men who look like they just wandered out of a cabin with an axe. Kort says gay men may experience masculinity from both sides: what they desire in other men and how they want to be perceived themselves. A man who eroticizes body hair or musk in partners may preserve or display those same traits because they make him feel masculine and desirable.Hi observation left me with a confounding grooming question: If the thing I’m trying to remove is something another man might like, what am I grooming for? Chris Salgardo, grooming expert and founder of ATWATER, recommends letting the body do its thing. “A well-groomed armpit is one you leave alone,” he says. “Sometimes the most confident choice is knowing when to leave something alone.”But if the idea of an unruly hairy pit makes you anxious, Salgardo says a very light trim is enough. Use clippers carefully, take down excess length, and stop before it looks like you gave your armpits a shape-up. “The goal is simply to tidy it up without making it look like you groomed it at all,” he says. Adding that removing hair doesn’t automatically make you cleaner. “You can have completely natural armpit hair and still have excellent hygiene,” he says.Philips NorelcoPhilips Norelco Bodygroom Series 5000Which is where a lot of men’s grooming advice starts to feel a little suspect. So much of it is built around subtraction. Remove the hair. Kill the odor. Dry the sweat. Become smoother, fresher, and less offensive. Useful, sure, especially if you’re sharing public transportation, but also a little bleak. At a certain point, it starts to sound like the goal is to smell less like yourself and more like a freshly wiped countertop.Even with my newfound understanding of the armpit’s allure, I knew that it didn’t mean I was personally on board. Dr. Justin Lehmiller, scientific advisor and sex educator at adult toy company Arcwave, says scent can trigger emotion and memory in a powerful way, but the same smell can be pleasurable to one person and disgusting to another. And Kort makes a similar point, noting that someone’s natural odor may be neutral or unpleasant to a stranger, but deeply sexy to a partner because it signals familiarity and arousal.Scent can be proof of closeness, but in terms of my moment with Kevin, I clearly wasn’t close enough yet for that kind of intimacy for it to feel natural.In other words, I’m not a pit guy yet. But I’m much less dismissive than I was before. The next time a man asks me to smell his armpit, I may need a beat, but I’ll at least understand why he’s asking. Clean is good. But washed so aggressively that you smell like a bottle of Purell? I’ve heard plenty of answers to “What are you into?” and hand sanitizer has yet to be one of them.