First, let me apologize if anybody already commented and mentioned this earlier. The post seems to be rather old, but still I feel the need to reply to it.
The answer to the ladies question is very interesting and I was happy to find this kind of information until I came to the end of the article. Why is it that americans (and maybe the British, too) are so convinced, that women in the rest of Europe don’t shave? This is the biggest nonsense I have ever heard, but it seems to be almost impossible to eradicate this myth.
Do you seriously believe that the wish to remove the hair on ones legs originated in from a group of people who have mostly very faint hair? Doesn’t it make much more sense that this came from areas where the women tend to have much darker hair and stronger hairgrowth?
I am half German and half Spanish and can tell you for a fact, that in both countries the women are very much concerned with the removal of bodyhair. In Germany there was a period in d the 70es, when women stopped doing this to enhance that they had the right to control their own body, but that trend ended a long time ago. In fact, I have been taught how to make, use and apply wax by my mother, who in turn learned it from her mother. So this is not in any way a thing of the younger generations that might be influenced by the US. Take as an example the brazilian wax or the sugaring. Using wax is nothing that some aboroginal culture used to do in Brazil. It was rather brought in by the European women moving there (and then probably further developed, as their wax is indeed different from what I have seen in Europe). Or the sugaring: This is a method that has a very long tradition among women in all of the arab countries and Turkey.
So I was a bit disappointed to find this prejudice again, in particular on a website that prides itself on “fighting ignorance since 1973”.
Don’t get me wrong, the article was very interesting and I like your page in general, but you will understand my frustration.
So I figured, if I told you, maybe you can start and help to minimize the number of people in the US still believing in nonsense.
This isn’t automatically obvious, but your comment here doesn’t come with a link to the article you’re commenting on, and that’s both extremely helpful and expected. You don’t get that link-back for free just because you clicked on the (somewhat misleading) “COMMENT ON THIS ANSWER” link.
Now, for weightier matters: your post is very interesting but not very enlightening.
Frankly, individual testimonial doesn’t suffice. Certainly, it doesn’t suffice to declare the Cece (Cecil Adams, our Englightened Leader and Font of All Knowledge Worth Knowing) “wrong”.
Citations. Expert testimony. (And first hand “I was there and know what I’m talking about” doesnt count.)
Cece has lots of researched media citations. We’ll consider believing you (and especially the heretical notion that Cecil was… wrong…) if you can provide citations that the Unshaved European Woman is some kind of pervasive myth.
The porn industry seems to have decided that all female hair needs to come off except on top of the head. Maybe they were the forerunners of leg & underarm shaving, but no one wants to admit it.