(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Creepy.

After sweating through the kid's eyebrow wax, Engle was directed to give her pint-size [8 year old] client a bikini wax. [...] As Engle talks, my head floods with images of breaking this poor young munchkin out of the clutches of her surely nipped-and-tucked mother, to let her grow old and hairy under my prudish wing. "But... there's nothing there, right?" I ask Engle. "I mean, at eight? Am I forgetting something?"

"Nope," she says. "There's not. Doesn't matter. That's when the mothers are starting them these days."

[...] "I've actually been joking that I'm going to write a book called Where Has All the Pubic Hair Gone?" Janice Hillman, a doctor in the Penn Health System at Radnor who specializes in adolescent medicine, tells me. "It's such a rarity to find it these days in 10- and 12-year-old girls, and older girls. I need to check for it at that age -- it's an indicator of puberty and development, how much there is, where it's growing. And now, I need to ask girls, if it's not there, `Do you wax? Do you shave?' Because so many of them do."

via jwz

Comments

[tyoko.livejournal.com]

Thank you, this successfully Creeped-Me-Out.

Values change, cultures too, is it right to be freaked about this? It's not as if you can point to any actual definable harm being done...

I mean, when I was a kid, no-one would be seen dead in the changing room with any under-arm hair. Is this just a continuation of a trend?

[dreamshade.livejournal.com]

Well, Shirley Temple was a hot young starlet long before I was born...

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Shirley Temple being a young starlet doesn't bug me. Shirley Temple being a hot young starlet (in the hubba-hubba sense, not the madly popular sense, yes I said hubba-hubba please forgive me) kinda bugs me. It's the sexualization of kids, you know?

[torrain.livejournal.com]

When you were a kid, anyone who had underarm hair to get rid of was kinda by definition at a point where they actually had underarm hair.

It's not the depilation that bugs me. It's the teaching the kids to focus on sexual characteristics before they actually *have* them.

[tyoko.livejournal.com]

I think that's what's bothering me about this, though I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It reeks of the sexualisation of children, even though the parents involved probably don't see it that way.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

OKAY THIS TIME I AM DESTROYING THE UNIVERSE FOR REAL

[torrain.livejournal.com]

May I hold your coat? Get you a glass of water while you warm up, or anything like that?

Because-- yeah. Holy *shit*.

[unknownpoltroon.livejournal.com]

Destroy the universe if you want, but you better stay the fuck away from the beer.

[flemco.livejournal.com]

Look at it this way: At least some good is coming from this pubeless society?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm all for losing pubic hair. In fact, most of the hair on my body could go and I really wouldn't miss it - I shave my head every few months because having hair down to my waist was awesome, but a real pain to take care of.

My complaint is the brazilian waxes of *8-year-olds*.

[flemco.livejournal.com]

Uh... n... never too, uh... early to m..... make.... su....

Gah. Can't do it. My kid turns 7 next week.

[dallylamma.livejournal.com]

How will you know when there is 'grass on the field' in order to 'play ball'?

[flemco.livejournal.com]

Personally? I demand ID due to past experience, and I scrutinize that shit.

[dallylamma.livejournal.com]

make sure the id doesn't read 'McLovin'

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I'd link the article if I could find it, but a year or two back a man was charged and convicted of statutory rape after an 11 year old with a fake ID came on to him in a bar, had a couple drinks, then left to have sex. This took place in Canada, I believe it was Vancouver. The judge essentially ruled that "he should have known better".

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

#1: UK, not Canada.
#2: She was 10 and met him outside the bar, not inside, but she told him that she'd just some from inside.
#3: The judge ruled that while he was technically guilty of a crime for which motive and intent are irrelevant, and so the judge couldn't just overturn the conviction and send him home, he did get no jail time and only a 16-month suspended sentence.

I covered it here. (http://theweaselking.livejournal.com/2315849.html)

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

D'oh, yep, that's the one. No wonder I couldn't find the article, I was looking in the wrong person's journal (and on the wrong continent in Google).

[siouxsyn.livejournal.com]

Do these said 8 yr olds get a say? Waxing hurts for a start. And you really hope that no-one is going to be seeing the effects....

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Waxing doesn't hurt if there's no hair. It's like putting a piece of sticky scotch tape on the inside of your forearm and yanking; it'd be dramatizing to even say it stings.

[being-here.livejournal.com]

It was your choice to do so though, and you had hair to shave. For a mother to decide that pubic hair should be removed, thus denying the child that choice is wrong. For a mother to bring a child for waxing before the age when there is pubic hair, thus ensuring that the child will never know what it's like to grow pubic hair, never have the chance to decide they don't like their hair and want to remove it, that's evil.

This whole article makes me feel ill, mostly because it shreiks of the enforced sexualisation of children, but also because it seems like such a small step from actions like this to the sort of culture that condones female genital mutilation.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

No-one ever caught me and told me how to do anything about it. And no, doing to your own hair what you like is totally fine.

Which is why it'd be kind of off is someone had started telling me what to do about it and putting me through the paces before I even had hair.

[crazy-alexy.livejournal.com]

That article really makes me want to cry. Seriously break down and bawl for all of those little kids (and a little bit my sister, who's only 15 and has already had her nails/hair/eyebrows done more than I can count).

It's disturbing to see this going on, and my heart breaks for the little girls who are having to experience this - whether they are enjoying it (for now) or not.

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

I dunno - on the one hand, bikini waxes for eight-year-olds = Gross, on pretty much every level.

But on the other hand, I sometimes really wish my mother had thrown me a "makeup seminar" party when I was fourteen or so, with someone to teach me about proper skin care, and how to put on eye shadow in a way that won't make me look like I was punched in both eyes.

Giving boob jobs and Botox to a sixteen-year-old is clearly madness, but there's an art to making the most of what you do have that I didn't really grasp until college or even later, and might have made my high school years a lot less torturous if I'd known at least some of the basic rules of it then.

So. There's that.