Re bikini waxing for 9year olds?

[Preposteroushypothesis]

Trying to keep this brief so here we go!
I was having a leg and bikini wax the other day and my waxing lady told me that she gives girls as young as 9 full leg and bikini waxes!! My first reaction was to be completely appalled and saddened at how young girls are being forced to grow up so fast these days etc, however, she made an interesting point which has led me to doubt this reaction and wonder whether it is ok in certain circumstances.

Firstly, she said that some girls are swimmers and are obviously very self conscious of having hair poking out and getting teased, I thought this was very understandable if the girl in question has developed particularly early.

Secondly, she said it is apparently very big with girls who go to boarding school (which is a lot of girls in the area where the wax lady works). Apparently, her clients start as soon as they get there first hairs there and get the whole lot off, not just 'neatened up', because 'no one wants to be the first'.

Thirdly, she said that although she does have some pushy mothers who are obviously driving this most of the mothers say they resisted but the girls will just shave if they don't take them to be waxed and then end up making a complete mess of themselves.

I think my conclusions are that:
I wouldn't take my daughter to be waxed completely just so she's not the first, I would encourage her to accept the changes in her body as natural and nothing to be ashamed of.
I would however, consider letting my daughter have a basic bikini wax to stop excess hair poking out the sides if it was causing her great embarrassment.
I also think I would encourage my daughter to choose to be waxed at the time she starts to consider shaving her legs to save her from a lifetime of hardship with the evils of shaving...but I can't decide if I have an age limit for this...

So I'm putting it to the mumsnet jury: AIBU to think that a bikini wax on a 9 year old could be acceptable in certain circumstances?

What AnyFucker and Esme said.

I'm dismayed at how quickly body hair has become completely unacceptable. When I was a teenager (about three millenium ago) we shaved below our knees and under our arms, and that was all that was expected. I didn't know anybody who waxed. It honestly didn't occur to me that pubic hair would be considered unattractive, let alone disgusting.

Now - it is clear from this thread - it is taken as completely normal that body hair looks wrong, feels wrong, just is wrong. And that this is just the way it is, so 9 year olds wanting waxing has become normal and inevitable. A generation ago, it would have been considered completely bizarre. As adult women, don't we have to take some responsibility for this?

Was I a ridiculously slow developer?

Nope, I'm 46 and have never had or needed a bikini wax.

I have my legs waxed from the knee down once a year.

The only time I have waxed above the knee was because a student needed to do a full wax for her portfolio. She and her teacher had to search for a hair above the knee - they eventually found one.

So I will reserve judgement. I can imagine it is extremly embarassing to have hairs hanging out.

I can see it being necessary for gymnasts too, the competition rules state how high the sides of the leotard are.

Those of you saying it's gross and not clean.

I wonder if you have ever wandered in to a circumcision thread...and argued that as long as you wash your damned cock it was clean and no need to remove anything when you have access to a shower.

Devora I don't know if your that much older than me but when I was a teenager 25 yrs ago my friends and I definitely discussed shaving our bikini line. I didn't know about waxing til I was older but we still took steps to get rid of stray pubic hair.

There are a lot of things about modern western culture that bother me but not wanting pubic hair to stick out if a swimsuit isn't one of them.

At first I was really shocked at this, but upon reflection, I am not shocked at all.

I honestly cannot remember what age I started to get pubic hair, but I was an fairly early developer, I remember that much. And girls are reaching puberty earlier and earlier now, for all sorts of complex environmental/nutritional reasons.

It would never have occurred to me to wax off all my pubes as a pubescent girl, but then I am 46 and I was not aware that it was ever the 'thing' to do - back then it was very much a kinky minority sport! Trimming off the overhang in the bikini area is one thing, but bald fanjo as a way of life? No.

However, girls of nine and ten have grown up only knowing that bald or at least very sparse/neat fanjo hair is the 'normal' way to go. Pubic hair these days is considered unspeakable by so many women. They are just mimicking what they see in the majority of women around them. And if their mothers do it, and feel completely justified in their 'need' to do it, then I can understand why they think it's perfectly ok for their young daughters too.

I have a friend whose daughter is 12 and half Asian. She chose to have her eyebrows waxed as she had a bit of a dark monobrow thing going on. Her mother is the last person on earth to encourage early sexualisation or to pander to faddy fashion, but she was happy for that to be done as she felt her daughter had a need to feel happier about something that bothered her.

At the age of 9, they have too much for a swimming costume?? I think this is being made up by the mothers as an excuse. All the training cossies worn by the girls at our club are not high cut at all and also made of heavier material, think drag effect for resistance training. Coupled with drag shorts, nothing can be seen. Then, for competitions, the vast majority where skin suits which come right down to the knees. Expensive as these are, they are a damn sight less expensive than multiple waxing sessions.

• wear, not where

Fellatio makes a really good point about girls not knowing any different.

I don't wax (have a tidy up by other means when necessary but it's not high on my list of priorities tbh). Even so the first thing my DD has said, when told she will have pubic hair too eventually was, "Ewww - yuk! How can I get rid of it?"

So I can only imagine that when she gets a bit older and becomes properly aware of it being 'the norm' these days, it is something she will probably want to have done.

Clearly I need to work on her 'hairy feminist' principles!

surely it is a form of abuse

I too agree with Fellatio - children consider what they grow up with as 'normal', so that is what they want. Children don't want to be 'individual', they want to be like everybody else.

I grew up in a country where hair removal was not at all compulsory, and had a horrible time during a holiday to family in the States when I was aged 10 and clearly had committed some disgusting social faux-pas as I had some fuzz on my legs .

I also agree that v few 9 year olds will have enough pubic hair for it to show when wearing a swimming cossie; if that is considered an issue, it is likely their parents issue, not primarily theirs. Although they will of course feel embarrassed if that is what is modelled to them.

And yes, it IS a porn asthetic, whether we like it or not. I see more fanjo's that your average person (I am involved in Well Woman's Clinics) and, as a gross generalisation, those under 30 tend to be bare. As I am 46, I am clearly past it as I don't get the attraction at all. But hey, adults, do what you want and enjoy. Just don't live with the misconception that having a bare fanny is free choice; it is a rather recent social 'norm'.

At the end of day, I agree, if my daughter was unhappy with her appearance, I would do whatever it took to help her over that. And that might include changing what bothers her.

Some of you just need to accept that some of us like waxing, and don't have a problem with our teenage daughters doing it. If they don't find it a problem, and we don't find it a problem, then why do you?

I don't care what anyone else does with their pubes, so why do you care what I do with mine?

We were talking about 9yo's not teenagers

I agree with everything anyfucker has said so far.

I remember being desperate to grow pubes at 10 and would examine myself to see if any had sprung up over night

There were a couple of girls in our year who had boobs and pubes and we were all SO envious of them. This was early 80's.

I think I would have far less of a problem with the idea if people came out and said that they did it because they and their partners find it sexy (although I do feel a bit about men who prefer women with prepubescent looking genitals. Although again, I think this is less of an issue than it was- the prevalence of porn means that men now think women are hairless, not just girls). This would also mean that there wouldn't even be a discussion about hair removal in 9 year olds. Or 12 year olds either.

However, I worry about the "it's cleaner and more hygienic" line. Really? Another way of saying that women's bodies are basically dirty, smelly and disgusting, and need to be modified to make them acceptable. What sort of a message is that to send our daughters?

Interestingly, I was talking to my teenage dd about this last night. She said that they all remove any hair that shows when they are wearing swimming things or leotards, but she doesn't know any who've taken it all off. So maybe the trend is passing?

While being completely hairless may be a porn aesthetic I don't think you can say the same about removing visible/stray hair ...?

And by visible I mean outside a normal swimsuit - I don't think thats the same as wanting to look prepubescent. For me, having my bikini line done (and just the bikini line!) is no different than getting a hair cut. I just want things to look neat and tidy. I see nothing wrong with that.

I agree, yogagirl.

personally i'd show her how to safely shave if she was bothered by it. i'd rather that than her feeling embarrassed.

but no way would i get her waxed. you shouldn't put a child through pain. Personally i don't even agree with ear piercing until they start secondary school, never mind waxing which isn't even a one off. i think by 12/13 i would let her try if she really wasn't happy shaving, but i would never encourage her to.

As I said before when I poured my heart out over this issue I've got a 9 year old daughter. 9 year olds who have pubic hair at all may be a rarity but they do exist, and I suppose it's not beyond the realms of possibility that a very small minority of those may have "excessive" hair growth which can't, with the best will in the world, be hidden by even the most sensible of swimsuits.

I wish it didn't have to be that way but if it were a choice of supporting my young child re: hair removal, or, sending her off to school swimming knowing she'd almost certainly be bullied and upset then I know which I'd choose. It wouldn't necessarily have to be waxing and it'd upset me to think of her enduring the undeniable pain of waxing but it wouldn't be fair of me not to discuss the possibility with her - given it achieves the longest lasting smoothest effect - and were she anything like me, creams, for example would be pretty useless and cause rashes.

Doing what I've described above is NOT abuse - I'm only talking about what can't be concealed by a cossie, and NOT anything more like the whole lot off FFS. I'd say it's more abusive to send your child into a situation - which, at 9 years old, could be one that they're entirely ignorant of (i.e. other people's reaction to excess hair) - knowing there's a very strong likelihood of teasing, name calling, noises of disgust etc. It makes my stomach turn thinking of my own hair related experiences when I was older - so why would I run the risk of inflicting that on a very young child ? It really is the lesser of two evils here. FWIW, if you take the 9 year old swimming class scenario I don't expect that classmates would look at a girl from a sexually point of view, nor think it was dirty .... but they sure as hell would notice that it's different. Most 9 year olds know you start growing pubic hair (usually) as a pre-teen or teen and probably most of them wouldn't know about or understand the issue of early onset puberty ..... I expect the most common reaction from that age group would be a "simple" "yuck" or some allusion to "hairy monkey" or some such - but either way the poor child in question would almost certainly feel mortified and picked on - however much their mother has tried to instill a sense of pride and acceptance in them about their body.

BTW .... throughout this thread there have been a small but all the same noticeable number of posters who've commented along the lines that they "can't believe" girls/women have thick, pubic like hair anywhere other than the genital area. Almost as if they've never seen it so it can't be true. Having spilled my guts about a topic I find very upsetting - as society's general attitude about excess female hair makes me feel crap and ruins your self confidence - I find crass remarks like that really insulting. Why would myself, and other posters with the same "problem" say we had hair like that if we didn't ? Oh how I wish that it were true and we all had natural neat little triangles

Oh and BTW, the example I set to my daughter probably has her thinking that her mother is half-orangutan as I rarely shave or wax as it's too much faff (shaving) - and too expensive (waxing) - to do it all the time. She clearly doesn't feel disgusted by me. Which I guess is a healthy message - so far she sees hair removal isn't "compulsory" ..... but on the other hand, she also sees a mother who hardly ever goes swimming (which pisses me off that I can't be spontaneous and that were I to do so it'd be a major operation beforehand), who hardly ever wears skirts and who hardly ever wears shorts. So she's also getting an indirect message - because she knows I don't go swimming 'cos of hairy legs etc - that it is unacceptable, though I haven't said it directly IYSWIM. I feel like I can't win.

Is it possible to just bleach arm and leg hair instead? So that my DD knows that hair is OK, but she can feel less self-conscious about being different?

I think bleaching looks terrible tbh and very obvious.

Tbh out of waxing and bleaching I'd rather my kid waxed than put chemicals over their skin.

I remember taking it upon myself to ask for a bottle of peroxide at the local chemist when I was about 10 or 11 because I wanted to bleach the hair on my arms (I'd previously tried household bleach ) - and quite rightly being sent away with a flea in my ear because who on earth would sell something like that to a child ?! However, I'd done so because I felt self conscious and because I couldn't talk about it with my mum - her stock response was "don't be silly" (so why did a number of my school friends ask why I was "so hairy" then ) . At that age I had no idea that bleach mixtures existed ... it was only when I started reading teen mags a little later that I realised. I agree however that I'd be most concerned about chemicals on my daughter's skin - which includes creams. Waxing can hurt, but it's a more natural product (I think).

Seeker.

I totally agree. There is something wrong with a man or a woman wanting to look at or have prepubescent bodies. My husband thinks it looks sick, although I do keep well trimmed and neat.
The complete shave was termed a hollywood by American prostitutes working in hollywood who gained more money for doing this for the weird, disgusting men who wanted to imagine sex with a child.
I wonder what the world is coming to.