Baby's First Waxing

"There are two things we shall make you; smooth between the legs and smooth between the ears, and what we take from you will be used to feed the kings of this Earth."
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."

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59 Responses:

  1. g_na says:


    And shouldn't waxing a child be considered some form of torture (physical as well as mental)?

  2. merovingian says:

    Feed on this, fatboy.

  3. What is your hyperlink's text quoted from? Google turns up only another blog.

    • flipzagging says:

      It seems to be from a comic book, The Invisibles, but I know nothing about it (other than a lot of people recommend it).

      • pozorvlak says:

        It is indeed from The Invisibles, and said comic is indeed made of awesome. I just dropped about Â£80 on a set of TPBs, and am so, so pleased with it. Trippy, complex, funny, symbolic, thought-provoking, sexy, violent, erudite - The Invisibles has it all.

  4. muerte says:

    What's that quote from?

  5. &^#&*(#&*(*!@()#*()*()#


    [burns building down]

    [chases the survivors howling like a banshee]

    [rends human flesh from bone with pointy teeth]

    [plays kickball with skull]

    [shakes herself to pieces with feral upswelling of pure white hot hate]


    Earth: I am so over you.

    • kencf0618 says:

      Using people as accessories.

    • sparklydevil says:

      how does forcing your 8-year-old to endure a bikini wax NOT constitute child abuse???

      • How does that female genital mutilation is a human rights issue and we allow these body-dysmorphic-disorder DOUCHEBAGS to do this to their kids?!?!?!?

        I'm calling CPS.

        • cattycritic says:

          What if the mother had said, "I'd like you to help me punch my daughter in the stomach?" Would she have said, "well obviously she'd get punched in the stomach anyway and I'd rather I punched her than someone else?" I don't see a difference here. The salon employee should have asked for the woman's name and telephone number as if to accept them as customers, refused them service, and THEN called CPS.

          This is abuse, period.

    • mark242 says:

      I would hazard a guess that they sincerely believe that they are doing a good thing for their child. I cannot begin to imagine the thought process behind that, but I imagine that it must go: "It doesn't hurt me that much, and it makes me feel better about myself, and it brightens up my otherwise humdrum boring life, and I want to make my daughter feel better about herself, and brighten up her otherwise humdrum boring life, and it won't hurt her that much, therefore I will have it done to my child as well."

      What's "wrong" with them is that they're behaving exactly like they're being told to behave, thinking exactly like they're being told to think, and projecting that upon their daughters as well (which is not that big of a step for people who don't act like adults).

      Go into a Target, or Wal-Mart, or other big-box department store sometime, then walk to the girls clothing section. A large majority of items are basically the exact same branding as the adults section (eg "isn't it cute? they have juicy sweatpants for our little peanut!"). This is completely wrong on so many levels, but they're still being bought, because they're being put on shelves. Whose fault is this, ultimately? Yeah, the parents, for buying that crap, but some blame needs to rest on the vendor. Too many merchants these days are justifying their actions by saying "yeah, well, if I didn't do it, she would have gotten waxed at Bob's Wax Emporium down the street". Well, guess what, that doesn't make it right, Mr. Proprietor.

      I contend that if Engle had told the mother "I refuse to do this to your child on the grounds that this is extremely wrong for a child to go through", and if the next vendor had said the same thing, and the next and the next, at some point the mother will realize that what she's doing is wrong. It isn't like the mother hates her child; on the contrary, I honestly believe that the mother loves her daughter very much. The mother is just, at the very core, a very dumb and impressionable person who does what she's told to do without questioning.

    • pdx6 says:

      We'll here's the thing: Having your child "waxed" is taken out of discretionary funds. Does a parent really need to have their child waxed? Do they really need to have themselves waxed? No, it isn't necessary for survival.

      Sooner or later people are going to run out of money driving around their SUVs with $5/gal gas to take their kids to the waxing booth. The problem will simply go away, though unfortunately society's neurosis will rear it's ugly head in another way.

  6. kencf0618 says:

    Now this is just sick...

  7. omni_ferret says:

    I'm about due to re-read all of that series.

    Music|Underworld -- Cowgirl

  8. baconmonkey says:

    smooth creepy child robot with eyebrows

  9. ultranurd says:

    I wonder how much of this behavior is related to upper class women having children later in life (after a generally longer education and career period)? By the time they have an 8 year old daughter, they could already be in the dreaded 40s and in the prime demo for "age defying" products. I suppose it's also just something to spend disposable income on.

    A quick poke through Google Scholar indicates that estrogens in some hair products may trigger even earlier development.

  10. mark242 says:

    Shit like this is part (a very, very, very small part, but still a part) of the reason why my wife and I decided to have kids, and also why we encourage our friends who are weighing the option to go ahead and have kids.

    No, no, hear me out.

    The friends that we keep are all pretty smart people in whatever they choose to do, whether it be computer science, psychology, fashion, law, whatever. They're pretty damned smart people. They're also the ones who are not having kids. This is a serious problem. We may laugh it off, but the world is well and truly screwed if the best and brightest people aren't perpetuating their genes.

    That 8 year old has a hard, hard life ahead of her, because not only does she have marketing and branding constantly being shoved down her throat no matter what she does, but she also has incredibly irresponsible parents who are so goddamned dumb that they don't realize the stupidity of their actions, and they're basically ignorant, so the kids grow up not knowing any better, and it becomes a sort of feedback loop of stupidity. Even if these parents get their kids taken away from them, there are literally millions of people out there just like them. And they're the ones who are breeding.

    Society as a whole needs intelligent and reasonable people in order to keep functioning. I make no projections on what our (as in, my wife and my) kid (and, in the future, kids) will be, or do with their lives, but I can guarantee that they won't be getting neglected like this-- and yes, this story is about parental neglect. So please, for the benefit of the human race, smart and reasonable people, you will be better parents than you realize. Please have kids.

    (And I should add this caveat again: this was only one very very very very small part of the decision to have kids. If you treat this as anything more than the smallest reason to have kids, you shouldn't have kids.)

    • cattycritic says:

      Yep, too many smart people make the "smart" choice and don't have kids. Meanwhile we're drowning in reckless people who have irresponsible sex with no idea how they're going to take care of any child that may come to be. From a genetic propagation point of view, those who have kids are the ones who should, but that doesn't mean it makes a great world to live in.

      Another option is adoption. Prevent someone's poor kid from being punished for his or her parents' stupidity. Imagine what the world would be like if every child were wanted and properly cared for.

    • taiganaut says:

      Nurture has more to do with it than nature, which doesn't invalidate your argument. However, it's already too late, so fuck it. Bringing another consciousness into this fail planet at this point is unethical. :|

  11. strspn says:

    An article for which my new Loli Wikipe-tan avatar is apropo, awesome!

  12. perligata says:

    What in the motherfuck?

    I know some people like this -- not child waxing people, but moms of way-too-young-girls who shave -- and the reason they allow and encourage it is because they've gotten it into their heads that body hair is disgusting and should be banished from sight, irrespective of age or sex. Which, you know, if you decide that as an adult? Fair enough. But it is so creepy to think about a whole generation (or two) of humans growing up with porncrotches.

  13. lordshell says:

    Yet another reason that being able to reproduce is no indicator of adulthood.

    Am I a freak in that I actually like pubic hair on women? Hell, I don't even mind armpit hair.

    I remember this one smoking hot Australian chick who posted nudes of herself on a lj community (don't recal which one,) and was flamed by people because she had armpit hair! It was like bitching about the color of a free Porsche! What the hell?

    • nidea says:

      I remember that pic! Very hot.

      I like my fur! I trim my pubes when they get annoyingly long, and shave my armpits a couple times a year. My leg and arm hair has naturally thinned with age.

      • lordshell says:

        I don't mind women who shave just to keep things tidy, but I prefer knowing I'm with a woman instead of a child or blow-up doll.

        And the armpit hair? I'm relatively indifferent. It's like some of these people think women come pre-shaved or something. Did they never consider that the hair grows because it's natural?

        *shakes head*

        Maybe I'm just too old.

  14. moonracer says:

    If you're planning on going that long term for your kid, why not go all the way and go for laser hair removal?

  15. jmtd says:

    Is this up there with cutting a young boy's foreskin off? Or is that still considered acceptable over there?