Sex ed - shaving legs in year 5

[Candycoco]

Have posted in education but posting here for traffic.

Dd came home from school today having had sex ed at school for the past 2 days.

I've always been very open with her and have answered questions as they've come up, so no big revelations this week.

However, she told me today that the boys were taught how to shave by male teacher, and girls were taught how to shave their legs. This just doesn't sit right with me. I know 99% of women do shave their legs and it's something I've already talked to dd about as she asked me last year about it and I told her she has to wait til end of year 6 before she starts secondary to do it.

I just feel it's a bit presumptuous and suggests all girls should. Maybe I'm being bit uptight about it but I don't like the message it sends. Is this normal to teach this as park of sex ed?

Thanks

And that's what we should be focusing on, why people feel pressured to do things against their will, not what the 'thing' itself is

I don't disagree Lurked. I have said many times I have absolutely no problem with hair removal. I have a problem with the fact that young girls feel ashamed of their legs and are being taught by schools how to shave.

? I'm sorry, cailindana, but you have made it 100% clear that the source of your problem with leg shaving is your own mother and aunts. You mother and aunts specifically told you that your leg hair was unattractive. I am 100% certain that at no point did the school mentioned by this OP tell the girls that they must shave their legs because their leg hair was unattractive - you are projecting what your mother inflicted upon you onto every other situation. You didn't pick up a subliminal message floating around society, your mother, the one person who shouldn't have done, gave you a complex and made you see society in the way she perceived it.

If someone taught me how to use a condom I wouldn't think, "I must have sex with someone so that I can use a condom, because I've been taught how to use a condom, which must mean I have to use it." I would think - "Ah, if I ever need to use a condom, I now know how to do it." Likewise, if someone taught me woodwork, I wouldn't think, "Oh my God, I must become a carpenter." And if someone taught me how to use a razor, I wouldn't think, "Oh, now I must go out and use a razor." Just because I'm taught how to do something, it doesn't mean I automatically think it is useful to me, I just accept it must be useful to somebody.

Other people feel the same way rabbit, so is it not unique to me. Plus my mother didn't come up with the idea of hair removal entirely on her own.

Yes cailin but as rabbit says you're projecting your problem onto everyone else.

No I'm not because I know other people feel the same way. You and others on this thread don't and that's fine but for some reason you have a problem with me feeling differently to you.

cailin you appear to be treading a lonely path here so just thought I'd post in support of what you've been saying.

Unfortunately I can't bring myself to join in any further on a thread where there appears to be a firmly held belief that young girls and women just randomly come to the conclusion that hair on their legs and armpits needs to be removed and that they look better for it. It's got nothing at all to do with the fact that young girls are teased or see their friends being teased for having hair past a certain age and it's got absolutely nothing to do with seeing older women all having hair free legs. Nor has it got anything at all to do with seeing adverts for shaving products for women or reading the disgust which greeted Julia Robert's flash of pit hair.

Young girls just randomly come to the conclusion that body hair is disgusting or that legs look better without hair whilst accepting that hair on their head is somehow different. Of course they do.

And I'm completely with all the posters who say that they do it just because they feel their legs look better, feel better because that was obviously a conclusion they all came to themselves and coincidentally millions of other women just happened to come to the same conclusion. It has nothing at all to do with the message passed down through the ages that women require to purify themselves, a notion that has become the norm.

And of course women who want to challenge this idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with body hair should refuse to remove their own and suffer the stigma that goes along with it. No need to remove the stigma when you can remove the hair.

In case, it's not obvious, I'm entirely with the teacher referred to in the OP. Let's teach young girls the solution to a problem which doesn't exist. That's not at all fucked up. Oh no.

I think you will find that, psychologically speaking, it is not good for your mental health to think yourself into victimhood. In fact, it is seriously "fucked up," as you put it, to be determined to feel so hard done by. I fail to understand this ridiculous obsession with the idea that unshaven legs are completely taboo - it is not a criminal offence to have unshaven legs; your friends will not actually disown you if you have unshaven legs; you will not remain a spinster for life if you have unshaven legs; your mother will not cast you out and never speak to you again if you have unshaven legs; people do not wander the streets looking for women with unshaven legs to shame (do you lot really go around looking at peoples' legs all the time?!); why people did things in the past and why they think they are doing them now are two different things. If you don't bother to read all the silly magazines and newspaper articles about fashion, etc, you won't even know whether leg hair is a topic of conversation amongst the beauty and fashion-obsessed. A few hurtful remarks are as far as it goes. I promise you, people are bitching about you behind your back about all sorts of things, they don't limit themselves to leg shaving, and if leg shaving is taken off the agenda, it will just be replaced by something else. Whining about the bullies making you purify yourself, when nobody thinks that's what leg shaving is about any more, anyway, is really not going to further your cause, because you will just be looked at in bemusement by the majority who don't have a problem with it and don't think it has anything to do with purifying their bodies. So what if they like it because it's what they're used to seeing? The same applies to absolutely all fashions - it's why so many people now laugh at the clothes they wore in the 70s and 80s, because those clothes now look silly to them. So now I suppose you will say that male and female fashion is evil and harmful, too, because that many people couldn't possibly choose to dress themselves in such similar ways without having been brainwashed (or too lazy to make their own clothes so as to avoid what's in the shops...). Oh, what a terrible, downtrodden life we all lead. I'm amazed we're able to get out of bed in the morning, it's all so depressing.

When there's a fashion for hairy armpits and legs (which there might actually one day be, when someone the sheep admire makes it so), will you feel sorry for all the sad smooth-legged people who now feel pressured into growing thick leg hair, and buying fake-leg-hair products to enhance the look? Or will you tell them that they are abnormal and freakish and it's about time the tables turned?

Then there's the whole suntan thing - it used to be considered the height of beauty for an English woman to be as pale skinned as possible, because that meant she didn't work in the fields. Then it was beautiful to have a suntan (because, before package holidays, that meant you could afford to go abroad). And now, it's considered common to have too much of a tan, because it means you are going to be all wrinkly, soon. Apparently, the fashion for European women to shave their armpits and leg hair didn't start until the early 20th Century, although the ancient Egyptians and Greeks were keen on men and women shaving most of their hair off. Fashion - it's a fickle thing. Interesting that the minute women started wearing short skirts and exposing their arms, they started thinking leg hair was ugly - obviously nothing to do with purification and everything to do with perceived unattractiveness once it was on show. Women in Europe didn't shave their bodies to purify themselves, they shaved their bodies because they were vain.

The Elizabethans likes to pluck their eyebrows out. I don't think that had anything to do with hygiene, either.

Didn't the ancient Greeks rather like the look of men with shaved legs? (And covered in body oil, wrestling each other...).

Elizabethans used to rejoice in tooth decay because it proved wealth.

Well as a feminist I help my crying daughter while she BEGGED me to buy her a razor because she would only wear tights at the hight of summer as people where commenting on her leg hair

now yes I could have lectured her on patriarchal oppressive images of beauty ...or I could have stopped her crying and being hot

it's HER body and I let her choose - which is about as feminist as it fucking gets

I am well aware of the society we live in and it's social construction and oppressive elements - I grew up in it - but I am also aware of my daughters tears

I chose to make her life, in this society, easier

and I don't regret that for a moment

Wealthy people probably shaved their bodies as a sign they were rich enough to afford razors and servants to do it for them... I seriously doubt Medieval peasants wasted their time hacking at their legs with flints to remove their leg hair.

My history is sketchy but I think it was the Greeks. And it wasn't ancient times when noble women shaved their heads and wore wigs

Now, if it became fashionable to remove all your teeth and replace them with diamonds (or cubic zirconia for the less well off ), I'll bet you would refuse to do it, even if people did laugh at you about it. It's because leg shaving is not permanently disfiguring, results in a relatively appealing look and feel, and isn't bad for your health that you give in to the fashion so easily. It isn't worth the hassle of being teased to refuse to go along with it because it isn't a big enough deal.

I'm starting to sound a bit star struck now but Rabbit's post at 22.37 rings so many bells for me.

Thanks for the debate guys. I'm spent.

Me too lass we must be conforming to the societal pressure of rabbits postings

Marking place as got half way through the debate but it is now late but I still want to read it!

Ghostly, I am with you all the way.

Blistory, I doubt young girls decide leg hair looks disgusting. I rather fancy girls decide they might like the experience what shaving feels like. Men do it after all, and they see them doing it in a lot of homes. They are less likely to see women shaving actually, since women generally do it in the shower or bath, whereas a man can do it standing at the sink. Call it razor envy perhaps.

When I was about 3 I locked myself into the bathroom, pulled the bathroom chair up to the hand basin, lathered my chin and shaved it with my dad's old fashioned straightedge razor. Mum had to get a neighbour to bust the door down and they both approached me carefully in horror as I waved the razor around. Mum made dad buy safety razors after that. (And I learned to use them too.)

My DDs wouldn't have read about Julia Roberts (from 'Pretty Woman', the film that made prostitution look like a reasonable lifestyle choice?) and her armpits, or Miley Cyrus (another icon of empowerment) and whatever blow she has struck for body hair at home because they don't buy magazines and neither do I.