Some spas have a very sensible age-limit beyond which kids are considered too young for "treatments."

Sounds to me as if this should be one of the areas.

Which is why, if I ever find out that a spa I go to offers this sort of child abuse masquerading as vanity or consumerism, it will be the last time I ever go to that spa.

If a kid that age MUST accompany Mummy to the spa, she's too young for the saunas and hot tubs and wraps. I haven't a problem with rainbow manicures and pedicures as a treat or an incentive to stop nailbiting. I could see getting a haircut or -- as the kid reaches the older tweens or early teens -- a makeup lesson. Those are all painless and temporary, if expensive.

But if I had my druthers, I'd rather see her reading a book or riding a bike than sitting with the other trophies in a bathrobe in a place where the very air is expensive.

What are these people THINKING of?

I think Potomacker's misreading is deliberate. He has an agenda, and by God, whether or not the subject is His Agenda, he's going to drag his agenda into it because He and His Agenda are the measure of all things. (I wonder if his parents ever taught him that there's a time and a place for everything, and sometimes it isn't His Turn.) Talk about the patriarchy.

And then there's Doppelganger, who willfully misreads the disgust and revulsion and threats to boycott spas as indulgence. I would hope that if you -were- crazy enough, or sick enough, to take an eight-year-old child to a spa for a bikini wax, the receptionist -would- hit the panic button. Do you think that men tend to take their children to spas? The spas I've been in do also cater to adult males, but they're overpoweringly female and adult. Another case of hobby horse here.

Either that, or our public and private schools have -really- not been teaching reading comprehension for a long, LONG while.

Gentlemen, buy a clue.

It seems to me that all-day spa treatments are a waste of time and money for kids in the age bracket you mention.

Anecdotal evidence tends not to be valid, but I've observed cases where teens and tweens have benefited from some of the treatments that so appall you.

One is silly: the thirteen-year-old who was promised a weekly manicure if she stopped biting her nails. She stopped biting her nails.

I knew a boy in his mid-teens who got Botox because he had had such gruelling migraines that, by the time they figured out how to eliminate them, he was prematurely wrinkled. He is a handsome and age-appropriate young man now.

I knew a girl in her mid-teens who seriously needed breast-reduction surgery. She had to sleep in a bra; classmates made fun of her; she hunched; and her shoulders were abraded from the weight of bra and breasts. And then there are the kids with serious deviated-septum problems that interfere with their breathing.

Granted, this isn't the sort of Baby Barbie you're talking about there, but even with Baby Barbie, daughter of Yummy Mummy, we can always pray for adolescent rebellion against conspicuous consuption. Send that child to a tough, liberal college, to programs like Habitat for Humanity or Outward Bound, where the peer pressure is hostile to over-grooming) and see what happens.

I'm REALLY showing my age now, but I do remember an episode of DR. KILDARE (please, someone, admit you watched it and wore the doctor-neck blouses, PLEASE!) in which a girl had a scarred lip even after surgery. The doctor borrowed the girl's mother's lipstick. Problem solved.

I do see abuse here. I didn't call it that because I was trying to figure out whether the abuse was the actual, superfluous procedure or whether it's the mindset.

I'm inclined to believe that it's the mindset that hypersexualizes a child and turns her into an article of conspicuous consumption. But then I feel the same way about trophy wives, whether or not they're complicit in their own self-prostitution.

Now, you get to say it. OMG, Greeneyedkzin called marriage prostitution!!! OMG OMG The Feminists, they are AWFUL, they don't do waxing...

I'm trying to control my urge to scream and leap and grab those kids away from idiots. But not very well. Besides, Lobelia said it for me.

For what it's worth, I agree with you completely.

I bet you go 'round eating ice cream in front of starving people, too.

Smug, much?

Now, shouldn't you be wiping someone's butt and contemplating your felicity?

BS, when you say that men should get interested in themselves, are you discussing the development of axolotl tanks (you do read Herbert as well as Rand, I should think), or something else?

Laurel, you strike me as so level-headed that this blind spot startles me. I'm happy with the chromosomal hand I was dealt at conception. I can't imagine the level of misery that it takes a transgendered person to undergo the surgical and hormonal procedures that make them the people they are convinced they were meant to be. I don't see this as a cold-blooded ploy to get free diapers and a home add-on: I see this as surrogacy at considerable physical and psychological risk. Do I get it? Probably not. But I'm flabbergasted rather than appalled.

..."the reticence of women to give up this precious power position..."

I'm sure you mean "reluctance."

You know, it isn't as if we ordered our ovaries and uteruses from Williams-Sonoma and are withholding them even though you're demanding access.

That is REALLY paranoid.

I think it's the axolotl tanks for you.