But what flashes into my mind as I'm lying under the facialist's care is the image of a slumber party, those light-as-a-feather, stiff-as-a-board trust games teenage girls play. How peculiar, then, to recognize that this ritualistic grooming--that potent, mutual currency of female friendship--has alchemized into an industry, reproducing that experience as an economic exchange between strangers, each hour, every 15, 30, 60, 90 minutes, on the clock.
Very interesting angle, which I think naturally wouldn't have occurred to me.
it's really sad that it sounds like so few are that I'm hoping someone would give gold stars to people actually following the law.
Yeah. I particularly hate that in industries where I feel the laws are generally good ones, and exist for a reason, and yet are violated by what seem to be a significant majority of employers. Child labor, overtime, minimum wage, safe working conditions, non-coericion...everybody talks about how the U.S. has turned into a service economy, but the flip side of the story is that the worker protections we have in this country came out of another era. For all of the faults that unions have, a lot of service workers don't even have the choice of being represented by one.
I also read an article yesterday, god knows where, about how there are less women in high positions on Wall Street than 20 years ago. Veblenesque shifting of women from independence to status symbols as a society moves conservative and the leisure class becomes dominant.
Go get another manicure.
registered waxers
call me Tyler Fucking Cowen here, but you wot?
I wish there was like an independent certification that spas could display that validated that they were following labor laws and treating their employees fairly.
Look for the union label, Becks.
Who are the people who see this stuff as necessary maintenance? I'm vain and femmey, and I go to a salon *maybe* twice a year.
For all of the faults that unions have
It's worth pointing out that the service-sector unions are a different breed. SEIU and AFSCME are generally on the side of the angels.
8: I dunno; she got a manicure, that doesn't mean she's going and getting waxing and facials and the rest of it every month.
Of course, maybe she is, and I've just done that thing I do where I make some sweeping implicitly condemning statement and put my foot in my mouth, in which case, I'm sorry Becks and I totally suck.
twisty can blame the patriatchy for sexbot behavior, I blame everybody all the time for everything. I totally suck, but am not sorry.
7 seems like a legitimate question, 8/10 notwithstanding.
B, in Bakersfield you can be cutting edge with nary a wax, but Becks lives in the real world.
When I was pg (in Seattle), I did get regular leg waxes w/ pedicures b/c shaving my own legs was difficult and inconvenient, and dammit, I was pregnant. I continued that for a while, I admit. But then I moved and got poor again and stopped.
13: Also you are so totally wrong about the grooming standards of the central valley. It's sort of sad.
B, are you calling my extensive Kern County groin studies into question? And what do you know, anyway? Your own personal groin is just anecdotal, you know, not data.
16: It might actually be statistically significant by now.
you can't just look at one groin a thousand times and call it data. You have to examine a thousand different groins.
you can't just look at one groin a thousand times and call it data.
All that time—wasted.
Methodology is a hard master, Ben.
16: I was talking about leg waxing. I have no idea what they do with pussy in Kern county.
I'm confident that back home in Bakersfield your unwaxed status will not make you uncompetitive.
Can you distinguish a waxed leg from a shaved one?
Yes, waxed legs are smoother, and the smoothness lasts a lot longer, and the hairs grow back with tapered, not squared-off, ends, so the stubble is slightly less stubbly.
I meant visually; I was assuming that you haven't been running your hands over the legs of Kern county. Maybe I am wrong about that.
Visually, no, except for the appearance of stubble a day or so after shaving vs. waxing. Duh.
Creepy, it's all creepy! Or, maybe I should try this one of these days. Or, no, creepy.
26: so you could identify which women shave infrequently, but that hardly helps you know anything about which women wax vs. shave regularly. I'm officially calling bullshit on 15/21.
And yes, I'm calling bullshit on both parts of 21.
I use scientific instruments to take the measurements, Brock, and process the data using sophisticated mathematics.
On a high-powered computer.
I've no reason to doubt you, John.
29: that should depend on what "they" means in 21.
A little-known fact about Emerson is that he works as a consultant to the beauty industry in his spare time. It was he who designed the Which Skintimate are you? survey.
Doesn't leg waxing hurt like a motherfucker? I've only had my eyebrows waxed (once) and I almost jumped out of the chair and killed the woman, it hurt so much.
Waxing--a high risk activity.
Nah, it really doesn't. I think the skin on your calves/thighs is a lot less sensitive than the skin on your face.
It hurts me like a motherfucker, and I find eyebrow waxing not a big deal at all. Ah, the wonderful variety of human experience!
ok srsly i don't want to get too hated by why is it that 8% of women don't realize thye have moustaches. my phsarmacist today had one. otherwise a generally rather well decorated girl. It seems like such a basic thing.
38: Moustaches make good company. The never come to pot-lucks emptyhanded. Some women keep them for the help with laundry that they provide. Very useful, they are.
Maybe they realize and don't care. Since after all, 81% of women have them, thus making it perfectly normal and okay and not at all freakish.
Maybe I've told this story before, but before I ever even considered the possibility of getting anything waxed, when I worked at [extremely high-end NYC spa] one of the waxers finished an eight-hour day by coming back into the break room and shouting (imagine in Russian accent) "Oh my God, if I see one more fucking pussy today, I kill myself."
On a recent visit to California we drove through small town after small town and the only obvious commercial activity appeared to be nail clinics. We began playing the 'I spy .... the first nail clinic' game.
Will archaeologists, sifting through the uppermost layers of American civilisation in a few thousand year's time, use discarded artificial nails, as the indicator of its decline?
My brief stint as a hair model for Holt Renfrew had the photographer drop his jaw at my hairy legs (It was the middle of winter for fuck's sake!). They put me in knee high stillettos to cover it up and were similarly dismayed by my lack of practice in wearing them. When they called me back, they told me to shave my legs this time, and I declined. The Canadian winter is fucking cold, and I wasn't willing to give up any insulation. There went my hair modelling career, and unfortunately, leg hair modelling hasn't yet made waves in the North American beauty market.
leg hair modelling
I am suddenly remembering a tiny plot point in a YA novel in which the teenage heroine's aunt, a model, is sent home for a few weeks on pay to grow her leg hair, so that she can properly demonstrate a new razor in a commerical.
I remember at the time thinking it sounded both a) too perfect to be true, and b) just crazy enough that the modeling industry might have actually done it.
Thanks for posting this. It's timely, too, because I finally stopped biting my nails, and hey! I have nails, and I was kind of half-thinking "maybe I should get a manicure?" (which I haven't done since I was a kid pretending to be an adult), but now I will not.
I find this fucking depressing. Both because of the conditions and also the extent to which all this shit has now become "necessary." Why is it a requirement of femininity that your nails be shiny and with white tips, and your face free of every single hair with any pigment whatsoever?
I'm not nearly cool enough to forgo legshaving and eyebrow-plucking, but I do it myself, goddamnit.
41: If I had a nickel for every time I've said that...
I find this fucking depressing. Both because of the conditions and also the extent to which all this shit has now become "necessary."
And how.
Brazilian waxes sort of scare me. I've heard that getting that area waxed is extremely painful and that one should take pain meds in advance and apply ambesol to the area.
I did a google search on it one and found aa few case reports of immuno-compromised individuals getting sick from them. Bikini waxing does not seem to be a problem, but getting one's rear orifices waxed does.
Had I the money I'd be tempted to get the light therapy treatments done. iT's expensive, but it's closer to being permanent. No maintenance and no ingrown hairs!
I just finished reading the article, and it picked up on all the stuff I was thinking about a while back about the problems of spa services--the feeling that you're paying someone to touch you, someone who won't judge you or feel weird about your body. When I was working at the spa, I learned that, actually, those people do judge you, and don't always like touching you. They are human beings and, except for a few of the hippie-crunchy people like the one woman in the article who see it as a calling, they react as any other person would to having a naked person in the room. Massage therapists would talk about clients' bodies, whether they were hot or not, their genitals, their asses and tits, whether they were saggy or gross or fake. They'd talk about wanting to fuck their clients or finding them annoying or disgusting. It all seems like a normal response that none of us want to think about anyone having to suppress while giving a massage.
This is one of the reasons why I've really gotten into going to the Russian Baths. I'm sure the people who do services there have all those feelings, too, but it's in an open environment where you're not all closed off and listening to Enya or whatever. Some of them happen in front of everyone, and the tensions about that are dispersed. You can't maintain the fantasy that the person massaging you has no feelings or thoughts about you, but they're no different from the feelings and thoughts anyone else around might be having about you.
One of my friends came in from out of town and had a soap massage there by a woman. It was in a not-completely-closed-off room (she could hear everyone else around in the Baths), and there was no pretense of keeping her covered up (in a regular massage situation they keep your breasts or ass covered as much as possible, pretending to give you some bodily privacy). She said she expected to be anxious about being naked in a tin closet with this woman under high lighting, but she wasn't. She said the frankness of it made her feel so much more comfortable than the antiseptic "It's all about YOU!" environment of a spa.
Apropo to nothing:
When I went from college, I went from spending tons of hours outdoors wearing shortsleeves in Florida, to being totally covered in Michigan. Around February or so, I looked at my forearms and was so deeply disturbed because my forearms looked like a stranger's arms. I had zero recognition of them. I thought I had very tan arms with blond hair, and now I had white-white arms with black hair. (plus, that's going the wrong direction according to beauty standards.)
rear orifices
You oughta be in pictures, kiddo.
48: I've had it done a few times and wouldn't do it again. It feels sort of neat afterwards, but it really doesn't justify the startling pain (turns out the "landing strip" is not a fashion thing, but a way to avoid the really unbearably painful part of the wax) or what I felt as the incredible humiliation of realizing you're paying someone to look right at (and touch) your genitals and asshole. I know some people have a fantasy that waxers don't mind it, are used to it, and enjoy their work, but, at the spa I was at, it was the one thing absolutely everyone agreed was the worst and most degrading part of the job. They get paid more for Brazilians, so they recommend them, but it's not as if (big surprise) they like doing it.
People pay each other to wax out their assholes. What a weird world.
And some of those people are Christopher Hitchens.
OT: People should remind me not to comment on contentious threads at Crooked Timber. I get all annoyed and pissily stupid.
55: Actually, some of those assholes are Christopher Hitchens.
Il faut souffrir pour être belle, as a woman I used to know, who was ... diligent about that sort of professional maintenance of the traditional arms and armor of femininity, was wont to remark. Agons for everybody, I suppose.
Apropos, I wish I had a copy of John Keegan's A History of Warfare here at the office to source the passage comparing the female personality that traditionally flourished on the stage to that of the male personality that has historically flourished in battle, but I thought it an interesting comparison.
51: interesting, I didn't know the sun actually had that effect on hair.
59: Yeah, that's why a lot of people have lighter hair on the top layer of their head and darker roots underneath, (and why salons tend to try to duplicate that lighting pattern.)
I have lighter hair in the front, which is what I see when I look in the mirror, so I'm always surprised at how dark the hair is that gets removed when I get a haircut.
Maybe chest and back hair would not be as offensive-looking if men like myself spent more than zero seconds per year with our torsos exposed to the sun.
I know we had a whole thread on this recently, but I like body hair on guys. You're a guy! You have hair. I like hair in general.
People pay each other to wax out their assholes. What a weird world.
In a caring, genuinely human world, asshole waxing would be free. Under socialism every asshole will be joyfully waxed by loving volunteer asshole-waxers.
From each, according to thier waxiness, to each, according to their assholes.
In related news, the social democracies of Europe are doomed.
The hair in these places has a function, does it not? To prevent chafing?
I suppose most people don't have active enough lifestyles for that to be an issue, though.
The eskimoes have over four hundred words for the functions of one's anal hair.
They also eat their toejam -- and like it!
I've never had a Brazilian, but I know someone who did and ended up with skin burns in rather delicate locations. Choose your waxer carefully!
I've never had a Brazilian, but I know someone who did and ended up with skin burns in rather delicate locations.
Or lube up.
45:
I'm not nearly cool enough to forgo legshaving and eyebrow-plucking,
What a weird reversal: I might have said that I'm not nearly cool enough to do those things. Not doing them is uncool, was my sense.
finally stopped biting my nails, and hey! I have nails, and I was kind of half-thinking "maybe I should get a manicure?"
Get yourself one of those cheap four-sided buffers, a cuticle nipper, and one of these. Your nails will look lovely if/when you bother to keep them up, and it's something to do while watching tv.
OT: So, you know how occasionally a woman might see or hear some kind of adorable kid behavior and respond with "Ow, my ovaries"? Suppose one is all man, but is having a similar reaction to an extremely cute child. What is one to say? "Ow, my balls" seems inappropriate somehow.
74: Oh, I thought by that she meant that it would be painful to have large kids sitting on one's lap.
59: In my case the effect is quite pronounced. After a long cross country drive, during which I wore my hair in a pony tail, I had such bright highlights that my roommate asked me where I'd had them done. Nope, just the light shining through the windshield.
Yeah. I don't get them at all -- two years in the South Pacific, and I was highlight-free. Sally's hair sunbleaches like yours, though; in the winter, she's medium brown, but in the summer gets streaky enough that she looks blond.
To go way back up to 7, this was my first manicure in over a year. I went more on a lark than anything, spending the afternoon with a friend.
I do get a pedicure maybe every 4-6 weeks because having pretty red toes makes me smile for some reason and I will get my eyebrows waxed every four months or so if they get out of control and I need a new baseline for when-I-feel-like-it plucking. Other than haircuts/highlights, that is the extent of my "maintenance". But, living in NYC, there are a ridiculous number of people who get weekly mani/pedis, constant facials, and wax themselves silly.
re: 73
I have nails on my right hand [for playing guitar], and while the nails themselves are in great nick the cuticles always look like I've been digging ditches with my bare hands. I'll look for one of those pens.
re: sun bleaching
When my hair is long, it's pronounced with me too. Kept short my hair is dark brown, but if it grows out a bit and gets sun it goes reddish blond [all they way through to really blond highlights if it's really sunny]. This can happen pretty quickly.