I never had much body hair and I’ve always had a pretty lackadaisical attitude towards obliterating what body hair I have. Call me a hippie, call me a feminist but I was never all that much into shaving my under arms and the hair on my legs ran to blond and invisible with any sort of sun hitting it.
So I’ve had a hard time understanding the obsession with obliterating every single follicle not atop or near the top of the head. The whole body waxing thing seems a tad obsessive compulsive.
Further, according to gay publications and a couple of ads I’ve seen men have gotten sucked into this one too.
I have tats on my lower belly and getting them hurt, but probably not as much as most people who have never been inked think. I have plucked single hairs or even a few at a time from my face and I have an idea how much pulling hair hurts.
Combine those two pieces of experience and I imagine getting my pubes yanked out would hurt like hell. Not to mention the intimate contact with some one who is neither a lover nor medical staff.
Celia Rivenbark, a humorist who writes books on the foibles of southern womankind has a book with a title that offers the perfect critique of a mother who would allow her 12 year old daughter to get a bikini wax, “Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank: A Slightly Tarnished Southern Belle’s Words of Wisdom”
From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/sex/149191/12_year_olds_getting_bikini_waxes%3A_why_do_women_do_such_terrible_things_to_their_vaginas/
Sirens Magazine / By Jennifer Armstrong
12/15/2010
When a Cosmo headline promises to help readers get a “sexy vagina,” you know we’ve gone wrong somewhere. Here, all this time, we’d thought that if we had just one inch of sexy on ourselves, it resided in our sex organs. We figured maybe, just maybe, the place where their penises go might turn men on. We thought perhaps the millions of males who paused their VHS tapes of the 1992 movie Basic Instinct at a certain moment when Sharon Stone uncrosses her legs for all the world to see a flash of her goods — and the millions more who continue to search for this screen-shot online to this day — might have been predisposed to like pussy. (Then again, that is a hot white mini-dress she wears; maybe they just appreciate the simplicity of the design.) What we’re saying is we didn’t realize it could be such a chore to sex up the part of us that performs the sex.
Oops, take that back: We did realize it. We’ve realized it since the late ’90s, when suddenly it wasn’t just porn stars who found it an every-day necessity to hire a lady to pour hot wax onto their genitals, then rip it allll off, to, you know, keep things tidy down there. Organized. Sexy. In fact, a startling number of us pledged complicity to this trend — known by the seductive term Brazilian bikini wax — for something so painful, given that, unlike porn stars and swimsuit models, we couldn’t even claim it as a tax write-off. Among women in American urban centers, this has even become the norm, as routine as a manicure-pedicure or highlights, more routine than a dentist appointment. It is no mere biannual affair, after all. Keeping your honeypot sexy takes dedication, darling.
The question: Why do we do this? And does every rip of the wax take a little bit of our feminism with it?
To figure that out, it’s worth looking back at bikini waxing’s history. There’s some evidence that women in Indian cultures as far back as 3000 B.C. removed the hair in their nether regions. Same goes for ancient Egyptians, who used a honey-based wax. The practice crept into modern America in the 1950s as bathing-suit seams advanced upwards, though in its first half-century or so of existence it involved taking just the hair that extended beyond the panty line — the procedure now known as the “traditional” or “basic” bikini wax. Models and anyone else whose living depended on their appearance in teeny scraps of clothing accepted it as an occupational hazard by the ’70s — even bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger later joked that his decision in 2003 to run for governor of California was the hardest choice he’d made since getting a bikini wax in 1978.
Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/sex/149191/12_year_olds_getting_bikini_waxes%3A_why_do_women_do_such_terrible_things_to_their_vaginas/
Women Born Transsexual 