Letters to the Editor
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Stupid but...
Yeah, I do think it's stupid and I do think it's (yet another) example of the "pornification" of everything...the way images from pornography manage to get into the public consciousness so sneakily that we start seeing porn images (i.e., skinny women with huge breast implants, shaved pubic areas) as the "new normal". What is bad about this is that eventually it ends up affecting women, especially young women (i.e., your daughters)in how they feel about their own bodies.
I grew up (and so did my mom and grandmother, etc.) in a culture that insisted that adult women should not have ANY hair whatsoever on their legs, as if real adult women have naturally hairless legs, when in fact this is utterly untrue. Hairy legs are every bit as much a sign of female adulthood as public hair or underarm hair, etc. Yet I have entirely accepted this my whole life (while intellectually understanding how stupid it is), and find even the tiniest bit of leg hair to be gross and intolerable. This means that I have to spend a considerable amount of money and undergo pain and risk of bleeding when I slash at my legs every few days with a razor. I know it's stupid and yet I can't not do it, because I have been inculturated to find leg hair on women to be gross. (Ditto underarm hair.)
Isn't this bad enough? Do we want our daughters to feel this way about their public hair as well? What a terrible burden to have to have, to feel that public hair is the new "gross out", that it's somehow ugly or unfeminine (when in fact, it's the most feminine, adult, sexually mature indicator there is!). Worse than removing leg or underarm hair, because it's a more sensitive area, more painful, and not normally seen in public anyhow.
It's taking another entirely normal female characteristic and turning it into a kind of defect that must be "managed", at great cost and time and inconvenience. For that reason, I am against it.
Hopefully, it is just a fad. Hair, after all, always grows back.