Interesting issue arose in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania.
Jennifer Finley had been hired for a new job and was being trained for it. And she was told that part of the training would be getting a bikini wax. She refused and was fired.
Now normally, this would have been an obviously unreasonable demand. But Finley had been hired by a spa to give bikini waxes and she was at bikini wax training.
So what would otherwise seem crazy, now sort of seems reasonable. Can training for bikini waxing reasonably require its trainees to undergo the treatment? Can somebody who refuses to receive a bikini wax be reasonably considered qualified to perform one?
Absolutely not a reasonable demand. It was not a bad suggestion, but it was not a reasonable demand. I can’t imagine one would be able to see a whole lot or gain a lot of understanding by having it done. I don’t get bikini waxes, but I get my eyebrows done. It certainly hasn’t helped me understand how to do it.
It may provide some sense of what it feels like to the client, and perhaps increase empathy and make her a better waxer, but those are things that each individual has to want and decide to do herself. When I started doing accuchecks, I asked to do one on myself because the thought of causing someone pain made me very anxious and not good at doing them. When I found out it didn’t hurt that badly, I got much more confident and did it much better…but that was my choice, for my own professional development. It would not have been appropriate for my teacher to demand I take a medical test without medical or public interest need.
Add the sexual area component, and this is far into “hell, no” territory. They don’t even make med students give each other PAP’s anymore.
I agree - I avoid stuff like waxing and mani/pedicures because as a diabetic I heal funky, and I seem to remember a report a few years back about there being an increased risk of infection from pedicure soaks and badly sterilized tools. Not to mention with waxing the bikini area you an get microtears in the skin and infected hair folicles which I would consider also to be a bad thing for me …
And I am not into pain:smack:
Hm, didn’t the male students find it hard to be on the recieving end of the PAP? :dubious:
It strikes me as a bit of an odd request, and I can see why someone might not want to do it. But a wrongful termination lawsuit? No way should she win. It’s their company and they should be able to require their employees to do whatever they like, as long as their not breaking the law.
Did they sexually harass her or something? Was it a sleazy guy who insisted on doing the waxing? Unless there is more to the story this sounds like a frivolous lawsuit.
I believe the rationalle for that is that if an officer loses control of the tazer or pepper spray, or if it misfires and they get hit with their own spray, they’d like him to have some prior experience with what it feels like so that he’s able to recover more quickly and not become totally incapacitated.
But even if I’m wrong about that, I think a police officer training for his line of duty falls under the “public interest” loophole I made up. Waxing is not part of the public interest (although it is of interest to many of the public. )
Why, specifically? I’d rather have a person who’s done it successfully to dozens of *other *people do it to me. Add haircuts, IV placement and sewing a wedding dress - by and large, expertise comes from experience *doing *something, not having something done *to *you. And I suspect this is the root of the matter from the employers point of view: who gets to be the first person the new hire rips hair from? It’s hard to get volunteers to knowingly be someone’s first wax job. It’s probably easier to tell them they have to work on each other and hope no one refuses.
If everyone refused then the company would need to hire people to practice on, so I see it as a reasonable request. The odd part is that the men were not required to do it. That is discriminatory.
Most police departments that use Tasers include using it on police during training, but only a small percentage make it mandatory. The remainder allow officers to avoid exposure.
Only if the spa actually offers male happy-area waxing. Otherwise it would be pointless. I really don’t see a legal basis for this lawsuit. Pennsylvania is an at-will employment state.
One issue I see is that somebody who’s going to work as a bikini waxer is obviously going to be working with a lot of crotches (groins? genital areas? bikini zones? happy places? what’s a good term here?). So you’d have to develop a certain detached attitude towards people’s junk (okay, that probably isn’t it) and be able to treat it as just another body part, like a knee or a hand or an ear. If you have issues with letting people see and touch you between the legs, how are you not going to have issues with doing it to other people?
One of my great aunts went to medical school in the 1930s; the school hired prostitutes for the students to practice female exams on. There were extremely few female students, and many classes were all male. IIRC there was also some kind of free clinic “for Coloreds” attached to the school that the students had to work in.
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