== The great pubic hair conundrum = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

See! 8-year-old girls getting bikini waxes! Hear! Tales of spoiled tweens and their pricey dye jobs! Oh the horror!

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/04/11/notes041108.DTL&nl=fix

And then there's the one about how some brain-dead super-rich moms in some upscale hoods in Philly are dragging their brutally primped 8-, 9-, 10-year-old daughters to the salon and getting their eyebrows plucked and their stray hairs yanked their cuticles scraped and their skin peeled and making sure everything is frighteningly picture-perfect because the girls simply must be made flawless and creepy and preternaturally vacuous — you know, just like mom.

But then comes the kicker, the horrifying thing that makes you cringe and recoil and want to move to Europe or maybe the moon, and it's the reason you are reading this ridiculous trend piece in the first place, against your better judgment but you do it anyway because, well, you're just that kind of masochist.

Because then you read about how this mom, this unspeakably sad and narcissistic creature of ignorance and silliness and savage karmic pain, actually demands that the waxer give her daughter — her prepubescent, pre-hormonal, nearly hairless 8-year-old daughter — a full bikini wax.

You read that right. And you don't even have to scream at the sky right now and throw up your hands and say, but, but, but ... girls that age don't even have pubic hair, do they? ...

[Berry Cool]

1. I have to admit, this is a pretty funny piece of meta-journalism

and he hits the stupidity of the "micro-trend" news article right on the head. Not just the ones on dumb stuff that supposedly all parents are allowing their teens and tweeners to do, but also the one where some idiot at the NYT interviews three of her girlfriends, discovers they're all doing something, and then writes an article that goes right on the bottom of page one saying "Latest Trend: Twentysomething Women Are ______ing in Huge Numbers."

The "money line" of this one?

Is waxing somehow worse or more damaging, psychologically speaking, than parents who smack their kids and scream at them in the middle of Wal-Mart, or those who drag their 5-year-olds into a screening of "Saw IV" or force them to listen to George W. Bush speak? Really, how do we weigh psychological torment?

Too funny.

And yeah, he's probably right, sadly enough. The Britneys and Lindsays and Parises we will always have with us, because who will make more Britneys and Lindsays and Parises if not for them?