This is a follow-up, in part, of yesterday’s post about lolicons.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, a freely licensed media
file repository.Just a quick follow-up on the lilicons post. Lest you imagine that the caption of the image should have said “‘Lilicon,’ it has a nicer ring than ephebophile,” rather than pedophile since the children in that particular image might plausibly be post-pubescent let me direct your attention to the Wikipedia entry. Point being that yeah, sure, some of them might be older but were the “lolicons” in this image real children then hints of breast tissue notwithstanding none of them would be older than nine. Let’s rest our case there, m’kay? Also eww!

So the other day Chelsea Summers of Pretty Dumb Things wrote a post about the practicalities, the propriety, the pros, and the cons of pubic hair in popular culture. Or the removal thereof. One point that hair-removal opponents keep raising, over and over, is that the intent is to make women look pre-pubescent. Which is, I’m sorry, not just wrong but aggravating[**] unless you also believe shaving makes men’s faces look pre-pubescent. (I can accept that if you’re really, really unfamiliar with either grown women’s or grown men’s bare pelvises or faces you might mistake them with children’s, but that indicates only your lack of familiarity, not a lack of actual difference.)

That doesn’t mean I think everyone should wax their privates bald as billiard balls or polish sausages. In fact I think body hair can be dreadfully sexy and agree with Ell that while removal improves sensation, why remove more than you need? But exhortations to leave it alone is a fashion judgment on my part and… well.. it’s your part, not mine so how anyone fashions his or herself is and should be entirely up to him or her.

Having ended that little rant, Louise Livesey of The F-Word Blog brings up an obvious exception:

We’ve all seen how children’s clothing has become more and more sexualised, well the next move is apparently waxing for pubescents. Oh yes braxilians for the pre-teens….

Read about it here.

Yes, waxing pubescent genitals will indeed make them look more pre-pubescent again.

Now personally, like the old English aristocracy, I tend to think children should be allowed and expected to be children until their debuts at eighteen or twenty whereupon boys may wear long pants, girls may dress up, and all may begin calling upon one another. And yes, that makes me a very prudish libertine. But it does help explain why allowing children to wax, like allowing them to drive, smoke, wear make-up, or take gin, seems like a very bad idea to me. Not because it’s wrong to actually look pre-pubescent but because it’s a failure to allow children to be children or to develop their own senses of adulthood out of experience instead of mimicry.

So seriously. While there’s nothing objectively wrong with children waxing themselves, there is something problematic about parents failing to parent, where parenting includes giving children the room to be children in, even though they’re clambering to be “all grown up.”

[** Note: I originally, intemperately, said “stupid” instead of “aggravating” for reasons I explain in comment responses. —fl]