The Indigestible

Tara Smith, a ScienceBlogger, posted a story about a girl in her early 20s who went in for a Brazilian bikini wax. This is the one that pours hot wax on your Most Sensitive Areas, then uses strips of cotton to — with a great deal of pain — strip away all hair, leaving you with a mons pubis resembling that of a Girl Scout.

As a result this young woman suffered severe secondary infections and put her life at risk.

This is the part of sexuality that I least understand. It’s bad enough that women are frankly rated by their looks alone in the US — a shameful practice unworthy of a species that considers itself intelligent — it’s bad enough that many men in the US seem to believe women should put out on demand or they’re automatically Lesbians. It’s bad enough that a woman who chooses not to be pregnant is either a slut or — in the case of abortion — possibly even a murderer.

But when a girl this young is torturing herself and endangering her life in order to fulfill some mythical fantasy of attractiveness, my bewilderment rises to the point of incomprehension.

To make matters worse, after she recovered, she went in for a second bikini wax* — and ended up ill all over again. This is behavior bordering on anorexia for pathology, and all in the name of making herself look “good” according to one very narrow idea of what a woman is supposed to be.

And what does it say about the society of sex in the US that a woman is attractive when her genitals resemble that of an eight-year-old girl?

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* UPDATE: Actually, the second incident was caused by an attempt at shaving the area, not a followup wax.