I am a teacher. I have a year 8 form class. This morning we happened to be chatting and one of the girls talked about shaving her eyebrows. I mentioned that I had never done anything to my eyebrows and it was perfectly ok to leave them natural. That bit was fine, they were all satisfied that it is personal choice whether to pluck/shave/wax eyebrows.
The next part of the conversation caused quite a sensation though. Somebody moved us on to shaving legs and i shared the fact that I don't shave my legs either and that's personal choice as well. Every single child in the room looked at me as if I had admitted picking my nose and eating it, or some other equally disgusting habit. The comments of disgust about "but what if you're wearing shorts?", "but ALL women shave their legs" and "you must have shaved them when you were younger though, it's alright for older people" (I'm 33 here, not 80!).
Why are our young people so disgusted by the thought of a woman's body in it's natural state? It doesn't really surprise me, but it does sadden me that every girl in that class thinks they absolutely must shave their legs/armpits (we didn't talk about private parts but I got the impression that they thought they should shave those too) and they will be considered disgusting if they don't.