Talk:Bikini waxing/Archive 4

None of my posts on this page are POV. Objectivity is on my side. $500.00 if you can prove me wrong.

None of what I've posted above is my personal point of view. It's based on hard evidence. (The pun is absolutely intended, because it's related to what we're talking about.)

The geometry of the 1946 (NOT 1945!!!) bikini is an objective fact. It was different from the scantier two-piecers worn today that necessitate waxing. The bikinis popularized in the beach-blanket movies of the 1960s covered almost every follicle. Only those at the extreme edges of the region would need to have a length of zero. Obviously if an individual hair were 1 inch away from the nearest fabric edge, and it were 1.5 inches long, its furthest 0.5" could in theory be exposed. So that hair would be trimmed to less than 1 inch. But wholesale removal of a great portion of the hair down to the follicle? That just wasn't happening in the 1960s, 70s, or early 80s. That's an objective fact.

If you have ONE of the following, amend this talk-page, and let's make arrangements (one thing you might do is set up a throwaway gmail account and have me write to it) for you to produce the evidence I've requested and for me to hand over $500 in cash to you:

Two objects from the set described in this paragraph: USA editions of Playboy or Penthouse from 1970 to 1985 (inclusive) in which the Playmate of the Month or Pet of the Month, respectively, is photographed with her pubic region showing and with aforesaid pubic region substantially denuded of hair. (CUTTING hair to keep it inside a bathing-suit doesn't count. I speak of hair REMOVAL.) I can't vouchsafe that NO person who ever posed in those magazines during that time had a waxed pubic region, but if so they were not depicted as mainstream, but, rather, on the edge of radical underground sex-culture. The centerfold model of each issue represented what gave mainstream American males erections, and the centerfold model never had a waxed pubic region in that era. There might be, anomalously, ONE such centerfold, but one centerfold out of 384 doesn't indicate that female pubic depilation was a norm. But if you can find TWO, my $500.00 is yours.

Mainstream USA women simply did NOT remove substantial portions of their pubic-hair prior to 1985. If you can't find me the proof listed above, you're just lying, and lying with a determination worthy of Stalin and those people who refer to the "Nobel Prize In Economics" as if history were their property to rewrite as their whims direct. You may be a shill for the waxing-salon industry. Or the bathing-suit industry. Or you might be a pedophile who doesn't want to admit that your erections caused by seeing hairless pubic-regions ARE a pedophilic response. I don't know WHAT bad motive you have for lying. I only know that you HAVE a bad motive and that you ARE lying, because the evidence (listed above) that non-fetishistic non-lice-related non-medically-necessitated pubic-depilating in the mainstream of USA culture predates the 1980s just doesn't exist. You simply can't argue with the facts. Go through those issues of those magazines. EVERY SINGLE ONE shows that you're lying. Sixteen years, 12 issues per year, that's 192 issues per magazine, two magazines, that's 384 magazine copies. Put all 384 on the table and go through them, and at least 383 out of a possible 384 will show that you're re-writing history and have no business editing an encyclopedia of factual and objective knowledge.

Another proof I'd accept would be a catalog of Sears, Montgomery Ward, or JCPenney, issued before 1975, in which is offered for sale a bathing-suit whose cut was of such a high angle that it would leave uncovered substantial areas of skin upon which, absent intervention, a dense concentration of pubic hair would otherwise lie. You just won't find it. If you do, $500.00 is yours.

I haven't scrutinized the following movies to an extent necessary to offer a reward on them, but I'd be curious as to which Wikipedia poster is going to name a female character in any one of the following films whose pubic region is substantially denuded of hair. These are not films that come from some fetish-niche of the porn-industry in which natural pubic-hair is a "kinky" segment of the market. These are mainstream porn films designed to induce erections in a majority of American heterosexual males at the time of their production:

"Last Tango In Paris"

The first "Emmanuelle" film

Any Russ Meyer film before 1985

"The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, And Her Lover"

"Deep Throat"

"Behind The Green Door"

"The Story of O"

"Caligula" (might have some slave-women with bare pubic regions BUT they will be depicted as serving a kinky desire, not the norm. None of the major female characters will be found to have shorn pubic regions.)

Where are the women skinny-dipping at Woodstock who have hairless pubic regions? Which one of the models, chosen for their beauty and erotic appeal, in the footage of Yves Klein's performance art of the 1960s (more than a decade after the bikini debut) has removed her pubic hair? NOT ONE OF THEM!

On the site below there are two box-covers of "The Story Of O", 1975, that should make my detractors give up and admit they're lying: http://silverferox.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-story-of-o-just-jaeckin-1975.html

Also, whether it's crude language or not, explain the etymology of "pussy" and "beaver" if men have never found female pubic hair to be erotic. These words most definitely, truly, objectively, factually acquired the meanings that they acquired. This would not have been possible without any conscious reference to the tactile appeal of fur. This is not a rhetorical question. It's a demand that you actually DO produce the etymologies of "beaver" and "pussy" (as references to the female pubic region) that show how they derive without reference to fur.69.86.65.186 (talk) 20:25, 6 March 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Where is your proof? You make a lot of noise, but haven't actually offered up any kind of reliable source to back up your claims. Some of your comments are also close to personal attacks. I'd advise you reign in your rage while you save up to pay the bounty. Chaheel Riens (talk) 12:49, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

It's ME making the personal attacks? What is "[y]ou make a lot of noise,"? (A) No "reliable source", you say? Playboy and Penthouse, USA editions, for the date-range in question ARE reliable sources. What is it that I would have to "identify" beyond them? (B) So you think I'm going to pay the bounty? Okay, then, what is the issue of Penthouse or Playboy in the relevant date-range whose centerfold DOES have a hairless pubic-region? I may as well pay the bounty to you as anyone else. You loudly proclaim that such a magazine-issue as will cost me $500.00 exists. And yet you are suspiciously silent on which magazine-issue it IS. If it exists, produce it.69.86.65.186 (talk) 22:49, 13 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

NOBODY will substantiate your "facts", not on Wikipedia, not even for $500. Because, "The burden of identifying a reliable source lies with the editor who adds or restores material, and is satisfied by providing any reliable source that directly supports the material." (see: WP:BURDEN) No one will prove you wrong. They will challenge you to prove yourself to be right. And, if you fail to that, they will remove your "facts".

Then why isn't there a reciprocal obligation for those who assert that healthy mainstream USA women DID remove their pubic hair as soon as the 1960s to supply any sources or proof. Why is it that only person saying "NO! That's not true!" has to get evidence? It's easy to prove the PRESENCE of an an advertisement for mainstream waxing-salon in the 1970s: just produce ONE. But how would I meet a burden of proof that there is NOT EVEN ONE such advert? Proving the NON-existence of something that, within the laws of common sense and logic, MIGHT well exist? That's an unfairly high standard. And I think that in pointing readers at the USA editions of Playboy and Penthouse in the identifiable date-range, I have well met "the burden of identifying [many] reliable source[s]".69.86.65.186 (talk) 22:49, 13 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Your entire presentation of "facts" is all about taking one fact from here and another from there in an attempt to make inferences that come up with third fact. You can't do that. Not on Wikipedia. (see: WP:SYN)

I am not taking one "fact" from here and another from there and making a third fact. Reply to this and put my language, where I do that, in quotes, and add "Chris, this is where you are doing that". Your failure to do so will be regarded by the more perceptive members of the public as your concession that that's just a personal attack.69.86.65.186 (talk) 22:49, 13 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Some of the "facts" are presented on the basis that you know them to be true. That is not enough for Wikipedia. (see: WP:IKNOWIT)

That's true of any citation. "I know that the source I've cited contains the sentences that I've quoted." Do I need a published SOURCE that says that published sources contain what I say they contain? Then why don't YOU need such a source to verify that YOUR sources DO say what you SAY they say? The catalogs from Sears and Montgomery Ward and the like, with their wide-cut all-covering bikini bathing-suits, do exist, and I remember seeing in them what I saw in them, as I remember what I saw in the skin-mags and mainstream R-rated movies from the time. I'm not using my MEMORY of these published materials as sources. I'm using the materials THEMSELVES as sources because I remember what they contain, and they are PUBLISHED (so anyone can check). I can use them as sources as well as you can use, as a source, the words you REMEMBER from a writer (probably someone who never SAW a female pubic region in the 1970s) asserting female pubic-regions in the 1970s to be waxed hairless. It's true that "I know my facts to be true", but it's because there is evidence (all the magazines and movies, plus the non-existence of waxing-salons in my childhood and youth, plus a lot of personal experience of women's pubic regions) behind them. As is always the case, I am being told that my posts are not good enough for Wikipedia but nobody is offering me guidance as to what is the acceptable and effective way to, without OFFENDING anyone, demonstrate, to a standard sufficient for Wikipedia, that it is factually erroneous to assert that mainstream USA women started removing all or almost all of their pubic-hair as soon as the bikini became popular. What do you WANT from me? WHAT MUST I SUPPLY TO OVERCOME YOUR OBJECTIONS? State that without guile and when I have time I will comply.69.86.65.186 (talk) 22:49, 13 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

So far you have quoted the lamest source possible on Wikipedia to substantiate your "facts" - a blog. Sorry, you can't use blogs to substantiate anything. Definitely not on Wikipedia. (see: WP:BLOGS)

Right of the bat one will ask "Why was the citation of the blog attacked?" and it's because it was the weakest link. All that other stuff in that list, all those movies and magazines, your apparently deemed to be unassailable, so you took a shot at the citation from the blog. You're reading with an attitude of hostility, trying only to attack what you can find, and so you found that, and all of the stronger material in the list is conveniently omitted from your gaze. Furthermore, I'm not using THE BLOG as evidence. The verbal assertions in a blog are lame evidence. A reproduction of a photograph in a blog is, within the probability that the blogmaster edited the photo (which probability is as small as possible in this case), as good as the photo. If I were arguing that at one point in the 1950s Tony The Tiger had a white neckerchief and a photo of a cereal-box shows as much, would you argue that the blog-author was just doing me the favor of photoshoping the cereal-box photo in their blog just so I could say that Tony had the white neckerchief? You really think I had some blogger edit the box-cover of a porno-movie just so I could make this point about women keeping their pubic hair at dates much later than this article says?69.86.65.186 (talk) 22:49, 13 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

And, finally, please read WP:TRUTH, an explanation of a core piece of policy, that says Wikipedia is NOT about truth, it is about "verifiable facts". If you want to know what a "verifiable fact" is, please, read WP:V. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 13:18, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

After allowing time for prize-winning magazines to be accumulated, I'm back. Nobody has posted the names of the Playboy Playmates or the Penthouse Pets who in the date-range I asked for would indicate that in the 1970s and early 1980s women removed all or substantially all of their pubic hair. My reading of the postings since then suggests that you do not regard Playboy and Penthouse magazines from the date-range being discussed as "reliable sources" as to what was going on at the time? I believe that authors who WRITE that women started removing their pubic-hair soon after the bikini became popular are weak evidence. An actual woman who (without a medical reason such as lice and without being part of the S&M fringe culture or an odd religion) DID remove all or substantially all of her pubic hair before the 1980s (or photograph of same) is STRONGER evidence. I cite as my sources all the USA issues of Playboy and Penthouse, and all mainstream porno-flicks, and a good many R-rated movies, made between the popularity of the bikini and the 1980s. That's a lot of sources. Are you saying you want me to LIST them? And to actually go and check microfilmed copies at libraries and write issue-dates down one by one? And rent even R-rated mainstream-theater movies like "In Praise Of Older Women?" and take notes? How many magazine-issues and how many movies would you need before you abandon the ridiculous pretense that mainstream USA women removed all, or substantially all, of their pubic hair before the 1980s?69.86.65.186 (talk)Christopher L. Simpson

It's a QUESTION. And it is a question that, for purposes of Wikipedia-Truth or real-truth or whatever, has (if one is honest) at least two possible answers. The question is: "Did mainstream USA women after the widespread adoption of bikinis, but BEFORE the 1980s, remove all, or substantially all, of their pubic-hair?" Now, do you have your mind made up about that question BEFORE you look at any SOURCES? I think my detractors do. I think they have a PROPAGANDISTIC insistence (see below) on a "yes" answer regardless of evidence. If it is a question of evidence, not ideology, then there has to be at least a hypothetical threshhold of evidence under which an honest person will say "Yes. It's obvious that mainstream USA women began to remove all, or almost all, of their pubic hair as soon as the bikini became popular, long before the 1980s" and there also has to be at least a hypothetical threshhold of evidence under which an honest person will say "No. It's obvious that mainstream USA women did not begin to remove all or almost all of their pubic-hair until much LATER than the bikini becoming widespread." I am honest on this question. If I could see issues of Playboy and Penthouse LATER than the date they began showing pubic areas, but BEFORE some point in time well into the 1980s, or mainstream movies from the relevant date-range, in which the pubic areas so shown were hairless, and if that were also true of women I knew personally all my life, and if I could remember waxing-salons being in business during my childhood and youth, I would say "Yes. Obviously mainstream USA women intending to appeal erotically to mainstream USA males were removing their pubic-hair as soon as, or earlier than, these magazines started showing pubic regions".

But do my detractors on this talk-page acknowledge any threshhold of evidence under which THEY would feel compelled to say "It's absolutely false to assert that mainstream healthy USA women started removing their pubic-hair as soon as the bikini became popular, i.e. before the 1970s, and LONG before the 1980s. People who SAY that are just ignoring the EVIDENCE." No. There is not even a HYPOTHETICAL standard of evidence that will lead you to state that the answer to the question is "No", because you will not HONESTLY evaluate the question.

You say you want sources. Okay. I ask YOU to, in good faith, TELL me what would you accept as a reliable source for proving that your position is WRONG? If you challenge me to find x and y and z to show that you and this article are WRONG, I might DO it if I have the time, but you should tell me in good faith at the start what you would ACCEPT as "reliable" sources. I've offered to list the Playboys and the Penthouses, and I see where I put the names of several movies, and AFTER THE FACT of me listng them you DENY that they are reliable sources. So YOU tell ME, up FRONT, what would constitute a body of citation that DEMOLISHES your assertion that mainstream USA women in the 1970s were removing all their pubic hair? Tell me up front what would constitute such a post, and if the standard you set is not in and of itself ridiculous I will compile it. But you're not going to DO that. You're going to move the goalpost. You're going to tell me to go find this unspecified evidence, and then, after I've found it (the issues of Playboy and Penthouse, what's going to be more unimpeachable than that?) you're going to say that the evidence I have found is "not reliable" or is "not verifiable". Am I right or am I not? When I check back here next time I am NOT going to find a response that says "Chris, here is what you need [list of evidence] to make the case that we're absolutely wrong and that women didn't remove all their pubic hair in the 1970's. Find that and we'll concede defeat." Or am I? Are you going to argue fairly or not?

Finally, notice how much of the defensiveness against me is technical, having nothing to do with the underlying question: were the female pubic-areas hairless since the bikini or was it not until the 1980s? NOT ONE THING said against me on this Talk-Page has ANY bearing on that question. It's all about THE WAY I am arguing, not WHAT I am arguing. You have not supplied ONE IOTA of support that mainstream USA women removed all or almost all of their pubic-hair in the 1970s, while beating me in the face with the double-standard that it is ME who has the burden (which I've met, though you won't admit it) of proving that 1970s women did NOT do so. Where is YOUR proof that they DID? Where's an advertisement or licensing-document from a middle-America newspaper for a waxing-salon in the 1970s on the town's main commercial drag?69.86.65.186 (talk) 22:49, 13 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

With regard to your question about "...what you would ACCEPT as "reliable" sources..." I suggest you read WP:OR and Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources which will tell you what I (and everybdoy else) would accept. If, after reading those, you still don't understand what is required - then Wikipedia is not the place for you. You might also want to look up TLDR while you're at it. Chaheel Riens (talk) 06:48, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

I looked at WP:OR. First, it says that the policy doesn't apply to talk-pages. Second, I've done no original research. "Paris is the capital of France" doesn't need to be attributed because (says the OR page you told me to read) it COULD be attributed. "No Penthouse or Playboy centerfold in the 1970s or the 1980s up to a certain point waxed off their pubic hair" is not original research, just as "Paris is the capital of France" is not original research. And OR doesn't apply to talk-pages anyway. (Just to be clear about what we're talking about: when I said that having sex with women lacking pubic hair was pedophilia, that was personal opinion. When I said that removing pubic hair was part of some other cultural shift, that was OR. But when I said that mainsteam USA women just didn't DO that before the 1980s, that's neither editorializing nor OR, but simply objective truth. You can attack the other stuff as unsubstantiated editorializing all you want, and that's fine with me, but the cold truth of the absence of bare pubic regions in porn of the 1970s and earlier 1980s is not a matter of OPINION but FACT. Have you LOOKED at a Playboy or Penthouse from the relevant decades to see if I'm wrong?69.86.65.186 (talk) 01:09, 19 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Well, Riens, you were right. This is tiring and hopeless. Okay Christopher L. Simpson, I want you to check out WP:NOTESSAY, WP:NOTFORUM, WP:NOTADVOCATE, and WP:NOTSOAPBOX first. Then you must, absolutely must ponder upon the ways you stand against Wikipedia policies. And then, I want to decide that this is not the place for your deep wisdom and knowledge. This is only an encyclopedia. If you are still not convinced, then you can try raising your voice of knowledge and justice at WP:PUMP. Also learn that if you continue to disrupt (in violation of "Do not use the talk page as a forum") it is entirely possible for the community to block you from posting anything here. We love you and we shall always miss you. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 02:24, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

I am not using this as a forum to debate the underlying issue, ANYMORE. I'm debating about what you consider fair debate. There is a question I have asked in good faith and you have NOT answered it. It can be rephrased in various ways: "Why is it that USA editions of Playboy and Penthouse from the date they first started showing the pubic region (at all) to roughly 1985, why are those magazines NOT a reliable published checkable source for WHAT IS IN those magazines?"

In another phrasing: "Suppose someone at Wikipedia asserts that the bikinis common in the 1940s were cut the same as bikinis today and exposed enough of the pubic region to require removing the pubic hair. Further suppose someone at Wikipedia asserts that because of the alleged popularity of such alleged bikinis in the 1960s, mainstram USA women started removing all or substantially all of their pubic hair long before the mid-1980s. What is the thing to write that will, within rules acceptable to Wikipedia, demolish these assertions and force the person who made such assertions concede that they've been served a well-deserved and unimpeachable bludgeoning at the hands of someone upholding the truth with VERIFIABLE SOURCES?"

Why can't you civilly present such a hypothetically acceptable and persuasive argument, set me on the chase to find the evidence you demand, and then win your cause when I fail to find such evidence? And to this question about why you refuse to answer my questions, I will call your attention to a POSSIBLE answer: it's because you know that I will not fail to find any evidence that you SINCERELY call for. Alternatively, you will ask for unfindable evidence that everyone will see has nothing to do with the underlying question of when women started removing their pubic hair. Now, this MIGHT NOT be the reason you are refusing to argue in good faith. But if this is NOT the reason, then, please answer, what IS? And don't say that Wikipedia has a page that defines what constitutes evidence IN GENERAL. Tell me what YOU would accept as evidence on this SPECIFIC question of when mainstream USA women started removing most or all of their pubic-hair. If you just give me Wikipedia's GENERAL definition of what evidence is, I can meet that, only to have you say that what I've supplied "just is not evidence" or "is original research". I don't see why I should play that game with you. I really don't see what I need beyond the complete absence of hairless pubic-regions in USA-editions of Playboy and Penthouse until well into the 1980s, and the similar complete absence of them in main-stream porn-movies throughout the 1970s. Now, if you'd like to TELL me what I need beyond that, please feel free to do so. But if you don't, know that disinterested third parties reading this Talk-Page can take note of your silence and interpret it as refusal to argue in good faith, or as a capitulation on the underlying issue: you won't spell out why 1970s and 80s Playboys and Penthouses fail to make MY case, because you know full well that they DO make my case. Your threat to censor my further posts will also be taken as vindication of my position: since you can't refute me convincingly, you simply shut me up.69.86.65.186 (talk) 01:09, 19 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

You may have looked up WP:OR, but you certainly haven't looked up TLDR. You are doing one of two things: You are suggesting changes (I presume - TLDR) to the article page, therefore WP:OR does apply. If you are not discussing changes you would like to implement, then you are instead using this talk page as either a forum or soapbox, both of which are not permitted. You will notice (if you actually follow the links,) that they are right next to each other on the "What Wikipedia is not" article. Chaheel Riens (talk) 10:48, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

We don't give a fuck about what retarded morons think or know. YOU, yes, bloody YOU have to prove everything you say. With sources and citations. Do you understand? Do you bloody UNDERSTAND? Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 15:03, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Take two

Aditya - chill.

69.86 - an acceptable reliable source is one source which asserts explicitly what it is you're trying to add to the article. Explicit means that the source says so unambiguously and without question - it couldn't possibly be misunderstood to mean something else. If you are doing any additional work to "connect the dots" from possibly related sources, that is original research and not allowed here. It is important to understand that at Wikipedia we are interested in verifiability, not truth.

I have only skimmed this (tl;dr) but I gather you're trying to use these magazines as evidence to support your assertion that "[m]ainstream USA women simply did NOT remove substantial portions of their pubic-hair prior to 1985." No, a stack of pornographic magazines is not reliable evidence for this, because you're doing your own research. A reliable source would be a published work (let's say a book, a newspaper article, even a column in one of those magazines) which specifically discusses the pubic hair removal habits of American women over the time period you're interested in.

Also, ignoring for a minute what is considered a reliable source for an encyclopedia, making generalizations about the habits of women based on what happens in pornographic works is plainly absurd. You can see that, right? Ivanvector (talk) 16:52, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Ivanvector, you seem to be speaking to me in good faith. Aditya, or whoever is using that name to post "We don't give a fuck about what retarded morons think or know", not so much. (For one thing, if I'D posted such a thing about YOU, you'd have my IP address banned. The Wikipedia dictatorship double standard.)

Now, Ivanvector, drawing conclusions from porn-magazines is NOT plainly absurd. The women in porn sources of the 1970s (but after the date before which pubic regions were not shown at ALL) and into the 1980s would have removed their pubic-hair if men at the time had considered furless pubic regions to be erotic. Men did not so consider it, and women in porn did not do it. Women in general wouldn't have been doing it if men didn't consider it to be erotic. Women DID start removing their pubic-hair at some point in the 1980s because men began to think it erotic and NARROWER bathing-suits (NOT original bikinis) necessitated it. But not before then. And porn is how you document that. Not just porn, but R-rated movies or ANY source where a woman's pubic-hair is showing. Porn is where most, but not all, of that is. Non-porn sources include women skinny-dipping at Woodstock or appearing nude in performance art. To say that the women in porn are not representative is what's absurd: You'd be saying that in the 1970s and early 1980s, most women NOT in porn are removing pubic-hair but women IN porn engage in some kind of "fetish" of keeping it? THAT is absurd. The "porn is not general" argument in fact swings MY way: women in porn started removing pubic hair EARLIER than, not LATER than, women in the general mainstream USA. It was hair-REMOVAL, not hair-RETENTION, that was the "porn fetish" for a time. Another source for this is actresses of the present day who are unable to re-grow their pubic hair to meet a film-schedule (or sadly, owing to too-permanent methods of removal, can NEVER regrow it) and using merkins to portray naked women of settings prior to the mid-1980s.

I have ignored TooLong whatever. I DID open the page, but found the sheer VOLUME of text on it to be too intimidating. I thought I'd NEVER be able to wade through so much. So I closed it without a second glance. What is this, Twitterpedia? I remember a time (ending about the time women started removing their pubic hair, i.e. later than the early 1980s, depriving society of collective intelligence the way Samson being shaved deprived him of strength) when people were allowed to use full paragraphs to say what they had to say. I don't do sound-bites or 30-second E!-TV updates on celebrities. Sorry. Here's WHY I don't do that. If I shorten things, it won't matter. Some people think that two words disagreeing with them is too much, while 10,000 words agreeing with them is not enough. I believe that most people I deal with at Wikipedia are in the former category. And anyone forced to concede that a post of mine is NOT "too long" will still find something ELSE "wrong" with it to beat me over the head with. WikiP's rules are so complicated they're like law or Biblical exegesis: whatever the referee wants to decide on purely personal arbitrary whim and caprice, there will be SOMETHING in the "rules" that they can cite justifying shooting me down or muzzling me. So there's no point in me making the EFFORT at concision, and there's no point in me accepting any "ruling" of what's Wikipedia-passable or not. No matter what I do or say or post, no matter what I cite, you're ALWAYS going to spout the propaganda that mainstream USA women started waxing off their pubic-hair in 1946 or the 1960s.

I reiterate that I should not have to prove absence of bikini-waxing salons in mainstream American life prior to the 1980s. Someone else should have to prove PRESENCE of bikini-waxing salons in mainstream American life prior to that time. Can you not simply REMEMBER from YOUR OWN LIFE that you NEVER saw a waxing-salon in the 1970s? (And I'll reiterate this with every post until someone stops IGNORING this point in their counter-posts.)

I have noted that the article's alleged dating of pubic waxing to the bikini (or to the POPULARITY of the bikini, which was two decades later give or take) is footnoted. You are at risk of that book being available to me for a free perusal. I'm going to read the page-range you've cited. It either says what this article says it says (in which case it's just wrong, and I suspect this book has an axe to grind about the beauty-industry and patriarchally-imposed body-image and is therefore not a reliable source anyway, but do not tremble in fear that I will fail to inform you, for I promise I shall); or it does NOT say what this article says it says, in which case you can prepare yourself for more of this.69.86.65.186 (talk) 00:35, 20 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Irony: "I DID open the page, but found the sheer VOLUME of text on it to be too intimidating. I thought I'd NEVER be able to wade through so much. So I closed it without a second glance" That's what we call TLDR. Too Long, Didn't Read.

I think you've shown yourself to be a zealot with this sentence: "I'm going to read the page-range you've cited. It either says what this article says it says (in which case it's just wrong, and I suspect this book has an axe to grind about the beauty-industry and patriarchally-imposed body-image and is therefore not a reliable source anyway, but do not tremble in fear that I will fail to inform you, for I promise I shall); or it does NOT say what this article says it says, in which case you can prepare yourself for more of this" Anybody who makes a statement like that is clearly either blinded by their own opinion or just plain out to disrupt.

Amusingly I started this commentary assuming you to be a troll, whereas Aditya took the good faith route. During the course of this discussion you have (understandably) alienated him, and swayed me to view you as a source of tolerable amusement. You clearly will not change your viewpoint regardless of source, and unfortunately your tirades are too long for me to enjoy really - I hope Ivanvector has better luck/patience with you. Chaheel Riens (talk) 08:09, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

69.86 - this source says that bikini waxing originated in the USA around the 1950s. I didn't make that up or base it on my own personal knowledge, I reproduced it from a published source, and you or anyone else can go read the source and pull that same information from it. That is verifiable. Asking me to remember my personal experiences from the 1970s is not verifiable, and not just because I happen to not have any experiences from that time period as I wasn't born yet. Do you have a verifiable source that contradicts my verifiable information? Ivanvector (talk) 14:58, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

This particular porn lover has no regards for sources or citations. This is what he says - "Why should we even RESORT to books about pubic-shaving in pornography or in daily life? You're citing authority on how many teeth the horse has (I assume you are familiar with that parable.) I say we go find a horse and count the teeth. Forget books about porn and show me mainstream non-fetish non-S&M porn predating 1985 wherein a substantial portion of the female pubic regions depicted are substantially hairless. That's the way to settle arguments. You get the PORN. You don't cite BOOKS about porn."

This person believes in his porn collection and not academic research published by mainstream publishers. This person thinks his porn collection is objective, and reliable sources are not.

On 13 June 2014, right in this talk page, this person said another very curious thing - "Obviously you are not an attorney because attorneys hate second-hand evidence." He believes in nothing but original research, and that OR is all about watching a lot of porn, looking long and hard at women's genitals. Obviously watching porn is better than reading serious books and journals. May be we should bow down to this person's amazing porn collection, and agree to whatever this person says. Anyone who has that big a porn collection has to be more important than Wikipedia policies.

And then we change the name of Wikipedia to Jerkopedia. We all can stop citing sources and start jerking off to pron. Because porn is fact, books are not.

Ahahahahhahaahhhahhaaa... Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 02:38, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Nope. Anybody who makes a statement like that is NOT out to disrupt, but is merely going to judge what you wrote in light of the source you attributed it to, which is a form of responsiblity you agree to accept when you cite a source. Part of what I get from this dispute (and all of them on Wikipedia) is that you don't feel that you should be held to account on issues such as this. No public rebuke and exposure for it when your articles don't square up with what's true.69.86.65.186 (talk) 04:31, 24 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

That bit ("will not change your viewpoint regardless of source") is an outright lie told by a lying liar who tells lies and commits libel. I HAVE named sources which, if you produce them, will convince me that mainstream USA women did remove all of their pubic-hair prior to the 1980s (and that, therefore, every single one of my sexual partners before the mid-1990s was some kind of anomaly, that EVERY TIME I had sex I drew from a tiny statistical pool, like cutting the deck on an Ace of Spades every time. Sooner or later those odds just aren't credible). NOBODY can truthfully say that I "will not change" my "viewpoint regardless of source". Nobody arguing against me has named sources which will convince THEM that mainstream USA women did NOT remove all of their pubic-hair prior to the 1980s. And really, nobody's even ARGUING about the underlying issue anymore (except Ivanvector and me). People are simply denouncing me because I won't agree to be savagely beaten to a pulp as punishment for having blasphemously contradicted a falsehood in the article.69.86.65.186 (talk) 04:31, 24 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Okay, Ivanvector. Let's see if I have a source that contradicts your verifiable information. (By the way, it's not your information itself that is verifiable. What you can verify is that the information has been published. That doesn't make it true. It doesn't make it "not misinformation". I have assumed that everyone knows the parable of the horse's teeth. Maybe I was wrong and you don't know it. I'll come back to it before I leave tonight. Basically it's just a parable that illustrates that if you want to know the number of teeth genetically programmed to form in horses, find a horse too young to have lost any teath, open the horse's mouth, and count them. (This MIGHT be the original of the common phrase "Straight from the horse's mouth", meaning "a good source".)) That is better than reading books about the number of teeth in horses.) Okay, I have the following text to refute the "verifiable" information:

QUOTE:

...

Oops, take that back: We did realize it. We’ve realized it since the late ’90s, when suddenly it wasn’t just porn stars who found it an every-day necessity to hire a lady to pour hot wax onto their genitals, then rip it allll off, to, you know, keep things tidy down there. Organized. Sexy. In fact, a startling number of us pledged complicity to this trend—known by the seductive term Brazilian bikini wax—for something so painful, given that, unlike porn stars and swimsuit models, we couldn’t even claim it as a tax write-off. Among women in American urban centers, this has even become the norm, as routine as a manicure-pedicure or highlights, more routine than a dentist appointment. ...

...

It was in 1994 that Brazilians hit U.S. shores. They washed up, as so many things do, in Manhattan. (Give it to New York gals; they’ll try anything!) The J. Sisters, an ingenious group of seven immigrant sisters, introduced trend-starved fashionistas to what they said was all the rage in their native country. “In Brazil, waxing is part of our culture because bikinis are so small," Jonice Padilha explains on their website. "We thought it was an important service to add because personal care is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity."

Such words—personal care, luxury, necessity, small—sound like a dare to appearance-obsessed celebrities weighed down by too much money. By 1999, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kirstie Alley, and Jennifer Grey were singing the J. Sisters' praises. "You’ve changed my life!" Paltrow signed a photo to the J. Sisters that hangs on their salon wall.

But laying out $60 to $100 a month still may have seemed a little steep to the non-celebrities among us, even for a life-changing experience. It was the porn that got to us, which is what made Brazilian waxes such a post-Millennial phenomenon—women weren't so prone to hitting the back room of the local Video King just to check out other ladies' equipment, but it’s possible we might sometimes wander over to the porn department at Google. Meanwhile, "lad mags" like Maxim and Gear became all the rage, mainstreaming a porn aesthetic even on grocery-store magazine racks. Adult-film stars like Jenna Jameson became household names: Her 2004 memoir became a mega-bestseller with the self-helpy title How to Make Love Like a Porn Star—clearly the public wanted to know exactly that. And what we found, the more we looked at porn, was that there was not a female pubic hair in sight. And then many of us thought: If guys like porn and I want to have sex with men, it just seems logical that I should not have pubic hair. ...

...

UNQUOTE

I consider that to be the ACCURATE story (with ACCURATE dates from the 1990's) about how pubic-waxing jumped over from PORN into mainstream USA life at a much-later date than the popularity of the bikini (cited falsely and inaccurately in this article as the onset of comprehensive pubic-waxing).

Now, Ivanvector, what is the SOURCE that contains this text: It is

http://sexyfeminist.com/2010/10/19/our-poor-vaginas/

, which is the source YOU handed to me as "proof" that bikini-waxing was a norm in the 1950's. You found THESE TWO SENTENCES:

'The practice crept into modern America in the 1950s as bathing-suit seams advanced upwards, though in its first half-century or so of existence it involved taking just the hair that extended beyond the panty line—the procedure now known as the "traditional" or "basic" bikini wax. Models and anyone else whose living depended on their appearance in teeny scraps of clothing accepted it as an occupational hazard by the ’70s—even bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger later joked that his decision in 2003 to run for governor of California was the hardest choice he’d made since getting a bikini wax in 1978.'

and then you omitted the entire rest of the page (which resoundingly shatters your case) to make it seem like this source would SUPPORT your dating of BRAZILIAN-style (i.e. TOTAL) pubic-waxing. Notice the qualifying language

"... , though in its first half-century or so of existence it involved taking just the hair that extended beyond the panty line—..."

which guts your position. As does the qualifying language that restricts the practice of policing AT THE EDGE to "models and anyone else whose living ...", i.e. NOT the general public. Yes, even bodybuilders, a LONG time ago, wanted to be hairless everywhere below their chin, because hair fuzzes a view of the sharply-delineated lines of muscle which, more than SIZE of muscle, is the focus of bodybuilding competition under some rules. And yes, the male pubic hair will be denser even outside the line of coverage provided by the jockeys they pose in, and the muscles on the inside of the leg should look sharp-lined, so that removal is deemed competitive. (Even so, I think it marginally (but only marginally) more likely that Schwarzenegger was joking than that he got a totally wax in 1978.) And yes, no woman has ever WANTED pubic hair to be visible outside the edge of her bikini. But that's a far cry from today's practice of wanting no visible pubic hair when wearing NOTHING. Apples to oranges.

So, okay. Thanks for the source, Ivanvector. Now I don't have to find one on my own. It's so much easier when you just GIVE me the ammo that takes you down. Got any more sources I can turn around on you? And yes, I eagerly await everyone piling on top of me, flinging their rage, with their bogus arguments about how it's okay when Ivanvector uses that source to argue for the 1960s (or 1946, or 1950s) date, but the SAME SOURCE is out of bounds for me to use arguing for the 1990s date. (Surely there is some arcane Wikipedia rule you can use for that. The "A source is reliable if it indicates that Chris Simpson is wrong, but unreliable if it indicates that he's right" rule.) One thing that's NOT going to happen is everyone saying "Well, okay, then. That settles it. It's the 1990s. Chris, you were right." That would only happen if you were arguing in good faith. And you're not.69.86.65.186 (talk) 04:31, 24 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Yes, it's totally correct that porn (and even non-porn where you can look at actual furry pubic-areas) is better evidence about what's in porn (or on pubic-areas) than books about porn (or books about pubic-areas). Again, count the horse's teeth rather than look it up in a book. Speaking of Wikipedia policies, since I don't hide behind an editor-name but sign my posts with my real name, you should check Wikipedia policy on libel before stating that I have a big porn collection. I don't. Or that I love porn. I don't. (Certainly not TODAY's porn, which is all directed at pedophiles, which is why the women's pubic-regions are totally hairless.) That's what so amazing about your attitude. ANYONE ought to know, from personal experience, that comprehensive pubic-waxing didn't start until about the time the SOURCE I QUOTED ABOVE (thanks again, Ivanvector, for supplying it) says it did. My brother once suggested I accompany him to see "A Clockwork Orange". Stanley Kubrick. 1971. Is that porn? I rather tend to think it is, but it didn't have an "X" rating at the time that we saw it, and most people wouldn't think of it as porn although I sorta do. And it's dripping with female pubic-fur. At one time "Last Tango In Paris" carried an "R" rating although it was "X" when released, and I think most mainstream non-porn film-experts know about it. It starred Marlon Brando. Was he a "porn" actor or mainstream? And there was monumentally luscious (and gorgeously erotic) female pubic-hair, PROUDLY DISPLAYED AS SUCH for the delectation of Brando's character. Did he turn his back and vomit because she wasn't clean-shaven? (In fact she was downright shaggy. Thank God.) NO! He got MASSIVELY AROUSED!!! So SOMEBODY in the waxing-business is telling lies larger than the solar-system!! How many cases of normal women having normal pubic-hair in the 1970s would you need before you'd stop insisting that ALL OF THEM are atypical or non-representative? Any normal person who's not pursuing porn at all will inevitably learn, by accidentally seeing porn-related things that they didn't intend to see, because they come up in Image-Googles when you seek a picture of something else, that women didn't remove all of their pubic hair prior to what I will now say, based on the article above so graciously served to me by Ivanvector, is the 1990s. If you just have your eyes open to normal everyday life, you will see this. Anyone insisting that total pubic-hair removal goes back before the 1970s must be actively trying to block out all evidence to the contrary from impinging on their senses. They must be a fanatical adherent of an ideological point of view that they know to be ideological. Anyone insisting that all evidence to the contrary will be found only by porn-hunters is equally fanatical and ideological. They can't possibly be open to EVIDENCE because, if they were open to EVIDENCE, they would never have opined in the first place that Brazilian waxing goes all the way back to the 1960s. There's no way that any person devoid of the militantly pro-waxing ideology can believe that in good faith.

(One of the things that the source sent to me by Ivanvector shows me is that whoever wrote this article didn't mention the seven immigrant "J. Sisters" AT ALL. Apparently the source Ivanvector and I are citing believes the J. Sisters to be some kind of massive landmark in the history of bikini-waxing. How could an encyclopedia-article have omitted them unless it's because of they can't be worked into the ideological slant being taken?)

But yeah, accuse me of believing that truth is more important than the Wikipedia policies that protect such ideological falsehoods as this "norm" of pubic-waxing, or that President Buchannan didn't like to have sex with (and DID have sex with) men, or that mDNA is the same as, and works just like, DNA, then I'll plead guilty.69.86.65.186 (talk) 04:31, 24 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

"Jerkopedia" would be a good name for a site where all the articles are written by big Jerks who won't EVER retract ANYTHING in an article no matter how WRONG it is.69.86.65.186 (talk) 04:31, 24 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Who applied strike-out font to the text above that says "We don't give a fuck about what retarded morons think or know. YOU, yes, bloody YOU have to prove everything you say. With sources and citations. Do you understand? Do you bloody UNDERSTAND?"? That person said that. That person should be stuck with it. If they want to type a retraction or apology, let them. But to just mark it with strikeout font gives the impression that it was ME who so marked it, vandalizing another person's post. I didn't do that, and I invite anyone who thinks I DID do that to review the Histories of this page and see who has changed it how and at what time-date.69.86.65.186 (talk) 04:31, 24 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

As for this text: "Asking me to remember my personal experiences from the 1970s is not verifiable, and not just because I happen to not 'have' any experiences from that time period as I wasn't born yet." Please, stop being angry for a moment and consider what you're doing. You've done the equivalent of posting "there was no rationing in the USA in World War Two" when you weren't ALIVE then. Now, millions of people are going to know that what you wrote was wrong, and that it's only remotely likely that you wrote it in good faith. Even if you seek out material about World War Two as little as I seek out material related to porn, a normal person open to everyday experience is going to know, as background knowledge, that there was rationing in the USA during World War Two. Just like you know the RED light means "stop your car" and the green light means "okay to go". It's part of the background facts of life. Now let's suppose one Wikipedia reader who was an adolescent during World War Two administers to you a well-justified pasting on the Talk Page of that article. The appropriate response from you should be "Okay. You were there, I wasn't. I don't know what I'm talking about. I've only READ BOOKS about it. I didn't LIVE through it. What you know is better than what I know. The PROBLEM is, my good sir, that in order to change the gist of the article, we just have some rules about how to introduce the statements that show that there most assuredly WAS rationing in World War Two. We can't just attribute it to your personal memory. Now, it's rather unfair of Wikipedia to ask YOU to do ITS job, so someone at Wikipedia will respond to your complaints by chasing down the evidence that shows that rationing did exist during World War Two, and will then rewrite the article using this evidence that meets Wikipedia's rules, which only we understand, rather than throwing that burden in your face and making you spend a year learning the rules that apply to Wikipedia. You've pointed out that we were spreading untruth, and we will correct it. Thanks. It's like when you hear Marvin say something and you know Marvin wouldn't lie, you STILL can't testify to the truth of what Marvin said (only that it's true that he said it) because the Court and the Jury don't know Marvin and have no business believing Marvin to be incapable of lying, even though YOU might be justified in so believing. Now Marvin said this, and we know it's true, but we have to find ANOTHER way of introducing the truth of the fact other than that Marvin said it. Okay? I'm not accusing you of saying something that's not true. I'm just saying we have to find another, more acceptable way to introduce it as true, other than your say-so on Marvin's say-so."

That would be the APPROPRIATE way to respond. Not disagreeing with the peron's assertions but, rather, pointing out that they've not satisfied some formal procedural barrier. But you've not DONE that. What you've done is the equivalent of telling someone (who lived during World War Two and who knows full well from personal experience that there WAS rationing) that they should believe YOUR SOURCE instead of believing THEIR OWN MEMORIES, and that they should acced to your source AND CHANGE THEIR MIND about whether there was rationing or not (when you can't KNOW that it's them, not your source, who is lying BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO PERSONAL MEMORIES OF YOUR OWN FROM THAT TIME!!!!). What an arrogant and insolent position to take to your elders, saying the second-hand testimony from BOOKS read by YOU outweighs their FIRST-hand memory of LIVING DURING TIMES when YOU were not alive. You've got NO first-hand contradictions to their first-hand experience, you've got ONLY second-hand info from books, so you should show some DEFERENCE! If there is a disagreement between widespread personal memory and your sources, then YOU SHOULD CHECK YOUR SOURCES AGAINST OTHER SOURCES rather than castigate some old person for "lying" when they KNOW there was rationing! That's just SO RUDE to assume that the bad faith must lie with the person who lived through the times rather than with the SOURCE that YOU read (when you very carefully avoided reading sources that had the contradictory story)!

What you should NOT do, and which is BAD of you to do, is to get ANGRY at the person for simply pointing out the obvious: that what the article states as written is false. And that is what your position is with respect to me. I lived through the 1970s and the 1980s and the early 1990s, and I will NEVER LIE DOWN and let you run over me with the steam-roller of "whatever the waxing-industry says is, because THEY SAY it, true, and if it behooves them to present Brazilian waxing as a LONG-STANDING cultural norm analogous to armpit-shaving, you should be denounced for bad character if you interfere with our effort to spread this propaganda". That is what I don't understand, is why you are so ANGRY at me? (My only way of understanding it is to speculate that you are paid by the waxing-industry.) You're NOT angry that I won't do WIKIPEDIA'S job and get the sources (and I even HAVE one, now, thanks to Ivanvector, and it gives dates and names that nail y'all but good). You're angry with me ONLY because I AM SHOUTING OUT LOUD something that contradicts the sacred unimpeachable Biblical truth (the contradiction of which you believe to be Felony Blasphemy) in this article: that sphinx-waxes came in with the bikini. ANYONE who under ANY circumstances says "Sphinx-waxes just didn't happen, in the mainstream USA, that early" is going to be met with ad-hominem denouncements from you.69.86.65.186 (talk) 04:31, 24 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

What you should NOT do, and which is BAD of you to do, is to get ANGRY at the person for simply pointing out the obvious. And the obvious here is that you have no comprehension of what Wikipedia consdiers reliable sources. It doesn't matter what you consider a reliable source.

Once again, incidentally you are casting aspersions on the integrity of edits - now having veered away from accusing us all of being pedophiles you believe us to be in the pay of the waxing industry. Such accusations generally say more about the accuser than the accused, and can be taken in a very dim view by those with blocking power here.

Oh, and - TLDR. Chaheel Riens (talk) 07:05, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Your position is that it's alright for you to cast aspersions on me, but not for me to cast aspersions on you. WHY? Can you not type ONE THING that refers to the facts and is not simply a disparagement of ME PERSONALLY? I said that my only way to make sense out of those who defend the notion that full pubic waxing goes back before the 1990s is to speculate that you are paid by the waxing-industry. I didn't say that you are paid by the waxing-industry. I said that I just can't think of any other reason why someone would be so resistant to the revelations at

http://sexyfeminist.com/2010/10/19/our-poor-vaginas/

as y'all seem to be. But you can TELL me why you're so resistant, if you don't like the GUESSES I make. It is, in some way, NECESSARY for you to believe that full pubic depilation goes back to the 1960s. Feel free to tell me why it is ESSENTIAL that that belief of yours not be disturbed, why your world is shattered if all of a sudden it's proven to you that Joe Namath, Marlon Brando, and John F. Kennedy all had sex with women who had substantive pubic hair. Or why someone would write THIS article without any mention of the seven J.-Sisters whom that page believes were instrumental in popularizing, ca. 1994, the full Brazilian wax. That page makes it absolutely clear that the total removal of pubic hair by mainstream USA women didn't happen until much later than I was insisting on: 1994 (even though Ivanvector, by omitting most of the text on the page in his reference, was trying to make it seem like that site was insisting on a date in the 1950s). I notice that you will not go to that page, read it, and respond to what's on that page. Instead you keep up the ad-hominem attacks on me. I notice that, AS I PREDICTED YOU WOULD, you insist that that page (now that I've cited it), is not reliable (although nobody said it was "not reliable" when Ivanvector cited it), but you don't say why. I doubt you've even read it. It's probably TLDR for you.69.86.65.186 (talk) 13:05, 24 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

You've got another problem. While I've just been coming back to this Talk page to see if anyone was ready to capitulate on the text "In relation to pubic hair, with the reduction in the size of swimsuits, especially since the coming into fashion and popularity of the bikini after 1946, the practice of bikini waxing also came into vogue", someone actually DID capitulate on that text. During January of this year, I now find out, someone named Ewawer changed the last clause of that text to "the styling of pubic hair also came into vogue". So your own ranks are crumbling. Obviously Ewawer isn't agreeing with my detractors as thoroughly as you'd like. I WOULD have preferred it if Ewawer had ALSO paused on this talk-page and typed "You're right, Chris. Bikinis may have necessitated some STYLING of pubic hair (which obviously could not be STYLED if it was GONE, as you can't style something that doesn't exist), but (as I can't deny if I'm going to remove the assertion of "bikini-waxing" coming into vogue) such 'styling' is not 'total removal'." And while it may be true that I have no idea what Wikipedia considers "reliable" sources (although it's also true that whatever sources I can get you would disparage as unreliable ex-post-facto since you're not arguing in good faith with an open mind but have only one acceptable conclusion (that any woman JFK, Brando, or Namath had had sex with must've been bare-pubed unless the men were slumming) in mind a-priori any facts), THE PERSON WHO WROTE THIS ARTICLE knows how to satisfy Wikipedia's requirements in that respect, and it was THEIR job not to suppress all of the sources that are reliable by Wikipedia's standards that substantiate the fact that total waxing was not normal in the USA until the 1990s and that repudiate the notion that total waxing was normal as early as the 1960s. It was THEIR job not to slant the article towards that ideology by ignoring sources that don't support that ideology. It was not MY job (because, as you say, I don't know how to do it). THEIR job. THEY know the Wikipedia rules for sourcing. I don't.69.86.65.186 (talk) 13:05, 24 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Chris, (I hope you don't mind if I call you Chris instead of referring to you by your IP address), let me assure you that I'm not angry. I don't give a fuck - don't take that as an attack, that is a philosophy I have adopted towards working on this project and has nothing to do with you. My only goal is to improve the encyclopedia, and I'll work with you to that end if you're willing to work with us. But it seems that you're not. You're treating this discussion like your own personal battle with everyone else here, and it's not constructive. When you insist that everyone must be your enemy, that's a very good way of ensuring that everyone becomes your enemy. But that's not how we do things here. Editors are required to work together to achieve consensus on article content, to behave with civility and assume good faith, and to work towards improving the encyclopedia. Otherwise you may be asked to leave.

Now I see that you did reply when I offered a source above, although you buried it in the middle of the discussion so I missed it, and you buried it in an edit of nearly 20,000 characters. But I did read it, because I'm interested in helping reach consensus here. Regarding the source's applicability to this article, the article is about bikini waxing, which I have interpreted to mean all forms of bikini waxing, including in ancient Egypt as well as its origin in American culture, rather than being about Brazilian waxing or full depilation specifically. The source I provided says, [t]he practice crept into modern America in the 1950s as bathing-suit seams advanced upwards, though in its first half-century or so of existence it involved taking just the hair that extended beyond the panty line—the procedure now known as the “traditional” or “basic” bikini wax. It also says that Brazilian waxing became prominent in the 1990s. These are two separate bits of information; they don't contradict each other and as far as I can tell they don't contradict what's in the article. However, it does seem to contradict your assertion that the practice of bikini waxing was not prominent among American women at all prior to the mid-1980s. If I've misinterpreted you then I apologize. I don't see where anyone challenged the reliability of that source, but in fact we do have a community process for deciding what's reliable or not, called the Reliable Sources Noticeboard. Anyone can take a source there for a wider community review if they so choose. Ivanvector (talk) 15:04, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

A note to everybody editing in this discussion: keep it civil. Civility is a requirement, not something we do when it's convenient. If you can't be civil, take a break and come back later. Ivanvector (talk) 15:07, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Another section break

Sorry, Ivanvector. It was difficult not to laugh at the tirades of Christopher. I am not striking out the snickering remarks I made on June 22 (because the laughter has not died down yet), though I did retract my angry comments made on June 19 (because the anger is no more). FYI, it was I who engaged with him quite calmly, even appreciatively on January 13 and March 9. I believe both posts were done in genuine Wikipedia manner - researched, cited and linked to policies and guideline.

User conduct

I would like to quote a few comments made by Cristopher before I lost my cool (thanks for the advice to chill):

• "Are you DEMENTED? I think that many Wikipedians ARE." (June 13)
• "If you can't find me the proof listed above, you're just lying, and lying with a determination worthy of Stalin and those people who refer to the "Nobel Prize In Economics" as if history were their property to rewrite as their whims direct." (March 6)
• "You may be a shill for the waxing-salon industry. Or the bathing-suit industry." (March 6)
• "Or you might be a pedophile who doesn't want to admit that your erections caused by seeing hairless pubic-regions ARE a pedophilic response. (March 6)
• "I don't know WHAT bad motive you have for lying. I only know that you HAVE a bad motive and that you ARE lying." (March 6)

Very pretty, if I may say so. That and the tendency to insert 20,000 words between two lines of comment that completely messes up the discussion thread was not very nice, especially given the fact he refused to accept any Wikipedia policy or guideline. The the policies and guidelines he expressly ignored or contradicted are: WP:BURDEN, WP:SYN, WP:IKNOWIT, WP:BLOGS, WP:TRUTH, WP:V, WP:NOTESSAY, WP:NOTFORUM, WP:NOTADVOCATE, WP:NOTSOAPBOX, WP:RS, WP:OR, and WP:TLDR. He was guided to them by multiple editors and multiple times. On top of that all he admitted his own mistreatment of Wikipedia when he said - "I am not using this as a forum to debate the underlying issue, ANYMORE." (June 19)

I am not adding WP:CIVIL and WP:TALKNO to the list. While he explicitly kept breaching those behavioral guidelines, I am guilty of breaching them as well. No sense in becoming the pot that critiqued the kettle. BTW, his name calling is not limited to one editor only, as he counters Chaheel's patient explanation of policies by saying - "That bit ("will not change your viewpoint regardless of source") is an outright lie told by a lying liar who tells lies and commits libel." (June 24)

Compliance to fundamental principles of Wikipedia

I perfectly appreciate any attempt to achieve/facilitate consensus. But any hope of a consensus looks quite hopeless because of Christopher's blatant disregard for everything Wikipedia stands for. Let's examine the stand he takes:

• "Why should we even RESORT to books about pubic-shaving in pornography or in daily life?" (March 6)
• "You're citing authority on how many teeth the horse has (I assume you are familiar with that parable.) I say we go find a horse and count the teeth." (June 13)
• "Forget books about porn and show me mainstream non-fetish non-S&M porn predating 1985 wherein a substantial portion of the female pubic regions depicted are substantially hairless. That's the way to settle arguments." (June 13)
• "You get the PORN. You don't cite BOOKS about porn." (June 13)
• "WHY would you seek out SCHOLARLY STUDIES on the subject of whether women in the USA editions of Playboy or Penthouse, between the advent of the bikini and the 1980s, increased their erotic appeal to men by removing all or almost all of their pubic-hair?" (June 13)
• ""Obviously you are not an attorney because attorneys hate second-hand evidence." (June 13)
• "WHY would you read a STUDY of the magaines when you could just LOOK AT the magazines?!?!?!?" (June 13)
• "Why not USE YOUR OWN EYES!" (June 13)
• "If you just give me Wikipedia's GENERAL definition of what evidence is, I can meet that, only to have you say that what I've supplied "just is not evidence" or "is original research". I don't see why I should play that game with you." (June 19)
• "Yes, it's totally correct that porn (and even non-porn where you can look at actual furry pubic-areas) is better evidence about what's in porn (or on pubic-areas) than books about porn (or books about pubic-areas)." (June 24)
• "Again, count the horse's teeth rather than look it up in a book." (June 24)
• "The PROBLEM is, my good sir, that in order to change the gist of the article, we just have some rules about how to introduce the statements that show that there most assuredly WAS rationing in World War Two. We can't just attribute it to your personal memory." (June 24)
• "What you've done is the equivalent of telling someone (who lived during World War Two and who knows full well from personal experience that there WAS rationing) that they should believe YOUR SOURCE instead of believing THEIR OWN MEMORIES." (June 24)
• "That's just SO RUDE to assume that the bad faith must lie with the person who lived through the times rather than with the SOURCE that YOU read (when you very carefully avoided reading sources that had the contradictory story)!" (June 24)

More on that coming up. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 18:20, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

No more is necessary. That's a pretty good summary, and continuing to drag out discussions about Christopher's conduct doesn't serve to improve the article if he continues to show an unwillingness to listen. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt regarding conduct, we do have a lot of rules after all, and it seems that drowning this user in tag soup is of little benefit to anyone. If he doesn't want to make an honest effort to even try to work with the community, we just simply ignore him and move on without him. His disruptive attitude is only really a problem if we let him drag us down with him. Ivanvector (talk) 19:34, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Just one more post. Otherwise we get to miss the fun part. The entire argument of Christopher seems to stand on just three premises -

• An unwaxed/unshaven female genital "induce erections in a majority of American heterosexual males" and gets people like Marlon Brando "MASSIVELY AROUSED".
• "Mainstream USA women simply did NOT remove substantial portions of their pubic-hair prior to 1985", they rather "PROUDLY DISPLAYED" their "monumentally luscious (and gorgeously erotic) female pubic-hair".
• Wikipedia has an agenda. I have an agenda. Chaheel has an agenda. Anyone who can't see his truth has an agenda.

The most interesting part is the source of his information - "all the magazines and movies (miles of porn-footage and reams of porn-magazines from the 1970s and 1980s), plus the non-existence of waxing-salons in my childhood and youth, plus a lot of personal experience of women's pubic regions (every single one of my sexual partners before the mid-1990s was some kind of anomaly, that EVERY TIME I had sex I drew from a tiny statistical pool)." Seriously? (I am not laughing, I swear) Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 19:44, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Neutral discussion on article content

My fellow editors, the section above is quite obviously a mess. Here I'm taking a stab at pulling out the useful discussion in the interest of improving the article.

An anonymous editor asserted that the statement in the lede, [...] the total removal of pubic hair, such as in a full Brazilian or the Sphinx style — became considered by many to be erotic and glamorous, should be flagged with a {{by who}} flag. It appears to me that the statement is backed up by the source given (I don't have access to it at the moment) therefore the change is not necessary.

The entire remainder of the nearly 100,000 bytes in that discussion is summed up thusly: the same editor further asserts that the article is incorrect regarding the origin of bikini waxing in American culture, and despite being asked to provide a reliable source which contradicts the article and supports their assertion, and having been encouraged to read Wikipedia's relevant policies and guidelines, has failed to do so.

Thus, no changes to the article are necessary at this time.

Can we agree on this? Ivanvector (talk) 19:52, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Yup. Chaheel Riens (talk) 20:44, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Yes. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 00:59, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Yes.     And dear Christopher Simpson, we are not ganging up on you, although it may appear this way. Please study carefully the feedback provided to you by Ivanvector, Chaheel Riens and Aditya - all of us, including you, are members of the same community of WP users, and we all have only the best interests of the encyclopedia at heart. Their comments are intended to help you improve your editing and talk-page consensus-building skills to help you, and thus Wikipedia. Best regards, IjonTichy (talk) 19:22, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Extensive commentary only marginally related to this discussion moved to the user's talk page. Ivanvector (talk) 15:17, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Please be in mind that as I type this I have NO IDEA why http://sexyfeminist.com/2010/10/19/our-poor-vaginas is NOT a reliable source. It doesn't have footnotes on the dates of the arrival of the seven J.-sisters from Brazil, but it's written as if the author COULD have footnoted it. Do you think I just phoned someone at http://sexyfeminist.com/ and asked them to do me a favor and put up a dummy article dating Brazilian-waxing as beginning at 1994? (Not a rhetorical question. I think some of you DO think that.) Okay, lay aside for a minute that I DO NOT UNDERSTAND why that is not a reliable source, and don't understand why PUBLISHED MATERIALS like porn and reams of PUBLISHED non-porn material (just the other day I saw a poster for a 1970s James Bond flick on which the women were wearing bathing-suits cut wide enough to not require depilation) are not reliable sources. MOST PEOPLE objecting to the content of Wikipedia articles will NOT understand your rules. Given that, there needs to be SOME AVENUE OF APPEAL whereby if a blatant falsehood appears in Wikipedia a member of the LAY public can get it corrected without having all the training required to WRITE a Wikipedia article. (Another route would be to do what a judge will do when refusing to go easy on a pro-se defendant for lack of procedural knowledge: appoint them a Legal Aid attorney on the spot. Wikipedia could appoint a scholar (versed in all your arcane rules) to work on behalf of my assertion about the dating of Brazilian-waxing. That would be fair.) That's why I resorted to a hypothetical article on rationing in WWTwo divided into sections describing it in GBritain, Canada, and, for the USA, stating "There was no rationing in the USA during World War Two" and footnoting that to ONE book. You are NOT going to get someone writing in citing things the way YOU need them to be cited saying "Here are 500 books and newspaper articles which either state USA rationing to have existed or which imply it with other assertions that make sense only IF USA rationing existed." You're not going to GET that response. (And if you did you'd find some way to be dismissive of the accumulation of 500 sources of refutation, so if it were ME I would CERTAINLY discourage someone from wasting the time on GETTING the 500 sources. The time and effort they've wasted simply won't accomplish ANYTHING with respect to Wikipedia's ears.) What you're going to GET is "Poppycock! I was a teenager at the time and I know different! If you say your article is 'sourced' to the contrary, then it's because you suppressed the sources' that document rationing's existence, so that you could deny the existence of rationing." Now, when that happens (and it should be totally permissible on a Talk Page), Wikipedia's response is to bludgeon the person for their lack of PROCEDURAL acumen, and to say that the very fact that the assertion of the existence of rationing having originated FROM such a person lacking in procedural acumen is, OF ITSELF, proof positive that rationing didn't exist, and brand the person as someone who is agitating on behalf a lie. After that point, the person is a pariah. And if they say so much as "Peep", the very fact of them having said "Peep" is used as further proof of their own bad character, since they are saying "Peep" to try to change the article's take on USA rationing in World War Two, and since there WAS no rationing in World War Two (as evidenced by the fact that only the pariah is saying that there WAS rationing in World War Two), they're trying to lie. The logic is a two-step circle: the purported fact that they are alleging is false because it is being alleged by an evil person; and the person doing the alleging is evil because they're acting on behalf of a purported fact that is false. I have found that it is ALWAYS impossible to get Wikipedia to escape this circular reasoning. What Wikipedia SHOULD do in the example of someone complaining about an article asserting the absence of rationing in the USA during World War Two is to say "We'll look into it, and WE will find the sources that refute the article as it stands now, and WE will rewrite the article. We will NOT put that burden on you because you can't possibly know that any effort you apply to it will be deemed satisfactory here. And we will have some disciplinary review for the person who slanted the article away from truth by having selectively filtered their sources to do so. That is, PROVIDED THAT your allegations are borne out by further research that we do." That Wikipedia does not comport itself in this manner when people dispute its articles makes it possible for me to assert IN GOOD FAITH that Wikipedia is not behaving in good faith. If it doesn't walk like a duck it's not a duck. If it doesn't respond the way an outfit operating in good faith would respond when untrained readers rebuke the writers, it's not an outfit operating in good faith, and you can't impute BAD faith to me for saying so. (Or, more precisely, you CAN impute bad faith to me when I in good faith point out your bad faith, but that is itself a further act by you in bad faith.) Why is the "massive arousal" of any male in fiction or in real life at the sight of very full female pubic hair NOT a refutation to the assertion (supported by this article's statement about what is "considered ... erotic") that only bare smooth pubic areas can prevent a man from losing his erection if not his cookies? What WOULD a contradiction of that statement consist of if NOT pointing out that before 1994 men were siring children in many cases without artificial help (or else all the babies in human history prior to 1994 were conceived by other means), and therefore must have been capable of achieving arousal in the presence of normal pubic hair? What IS it that makes the offer of such a fact, for purposes of contradicting a falsehood in the article, UNacceptable? Is it taboo to talk about what heterosexual men find to be "massively arousing"? I'll bet there are other Wikipedia articles in which that is discussed (perhaps using a word other than "massively", such as "strongly", "intensely", or "profoundly", just because they "sound better" in scholarly writing than "massively", but surely the word "arousing" wouldn't be changed). I think someone is trying to twist my words to make it appear that I believe the women I was naked with prior to 1994 are NOT a small statistical pool. When you do that, when I type ONE thing and then YOU type an assertion that I typed SOMETHING ELSE that is at odds with what I REALLY typed, that is bad faith, and I can in good faith state it to be in bad faith. The women I was naked with WERE, of course, the tiniest statistical pool. Let's conservatively peg it at 10, in what was probably, 20 years ago, maybe only 50 million (assuming maybe ??1/4?? of a US population of ??200 million?? to be of-age women). My assertion is NOT (as anyone can see reading what I actually WROTE, as opposed to what been STATED that I wrote) that 10 women out of 50 million is a large sample. For the mathematically challenged present, I'll explain in greater detail (which will of course cause a comment about the LENGTH of this post, a length that has been made necessary by someone's bad faith in misrepresenting my math, with the intent that someone else can then in bad faith object to this defense's length that is made necessary by the previous bad faith). If 90% of the of-age female population prior to 1994 had totally hairless pubic regions, then the likelihood of me having been naked with 10 women selected at random prior to that date ALL OF WHOM had total full natural pubic hair would be 1 in 10 billion. If 99% of of-age women were in lockstep with this article, the odds of my having that track record would be 1 in 100 quintillion. It's just not credible to assert that it was only by LUCK that I NEVER received a nauseating serving of pedophilic fantasy during that time. Nope, I avoided the servings of pedophilic fantasy because THEY DID NOT EXIST back then, and the sexyfeminist.com article cited above bears me out. I don't think total depilation can be asserted as a "norm" for the time unless at least 50% of women were doing it, and even at that percentage the odds of me drawing 10 women who were NOT doing it are 1 in 1,024. That's STILL small enough for me to say "the original fraction being asserted is massively overstated for that time". And I'm NOT suggesting that ANY of this personal experience go into the article. People who debunk books about Kennedy's assassination in newspaper columns don't have to agree to re-research the book and re-write it to earn the privilege. It's perfectly acceptable for them to point out what is not true and what can't be true, even if only from personal experience. I REALLY RESENT it that you can't just take my personal knowledge NOT as grounds for re-writing the article, but, rather, as grounds for hunting down more, better, and more-accurate sources, and then those SOURCES would be grounds for re-writing the article ABSENT any personal knowledge of mine. Or retract the assertion that no USA rationing existed in World War Two NOT because a surviving eyewitness told you so, but, rather, because his telling you so caused you to SEEK (and find) sources corroborating his assertion, which would enable you to put the truth in the article by attributing it to those sources that he caused you to find, not his personal recollections. Authors of real books do this. In the 2nd edition there's an acknowledgment page thanking the people who found fault with the 1st edition; or there's a preface indicating the basis for other revisions. The author (whose JOB it is to update the book) doesn't just sit on their hands and say "YOU do the re-write, you jerk!" to a fault-finder who isn't getting the royalties from the book and who probably has another full-time job. I also re-iterate that nobody here is really AMENABLE to what the www.sexyfeminist.com article says: that totally bare pubic-regions date (as the norm for the USA) only to 1994. I don't think it IS really all objection to my lack of procedural acumen. I think there is innate hostility amongst those present to the idea that the goal of pubic-hair management prior to 1994 was to prevent stray hairs escaping past bathing-suit boundaries (for which shortening length at the margins sufficed, leaving the pubic region substantially furry), NOT presentation, when nude, of a hairless pubic-region to a lover. I think there is inherent rejection of that idea (amongst those present here) regardless of how much evidence anyone might gather to support it. I think there has been a failure on your part to look at state regulations (again, this is not something I should do, YOU should do it) for beauticians/cosmetologists to see when hair-waxing became part of the testing that they had to pass to get licensed. As far as the upper lip goes, similar waxing may date back a long time, but I'll bet at least some state licensing-tests changed ca. 1994 to reflect the treatment of the pubic area. Finally, yes, if I were a Wikipedia author I could not let my personal conviction that a hairless pubic region on a grown-up woman is the same thing as a tattoo right there that says "THIS BELONGS TO A LITTLE SECOND-GRADE GIRL, NOW DON'T YOU WANT TO VIOLATE IT REAL BAD?" (and that the answer from any HEALTHY grown-up man is "No" followed by vomiting) steer the article. But I COULD let it would make me look for sources that discuss the connection between the bare pubic region and pedophilia. I don't remember pedophilia as being as common before the 1990s as afterwards. Is this just because the REPORTING went up? Because some social structures that prevented victims from speaking out got kicked in, increasing the REPORTS while the actual base of what was OCCURRING had not changed? Or, alternatively, was there just more pedophilia after the 1980s? Was there some growth fueled by the Internet? I wouldn't, if writing an article about bikini-waxing, just be totally OBLIVIOUS to a possible connection between a rise in pederastic preferences and the rise in the grooming to gratify (or exacerbate) those preferences. And surely I would FIND what it would be obvious for me to SEEK: articles discussing what it IS about pedophilic appearance that excites the pedophilic person, and how this Brazilian-waxing trend relates to all that. When one does read something about bikini-waxing that doesn't even MENTION this issue, I think it's only normal to have a sense that the article has been deliberately sanitized of such associations (because it's so OBVIOUS that the link is there). Like an extensive article abuot Nixon's Presidency, and it's got Agnew, and it's got Vietnam, and inflation, and it doesn't mention Watergate. How is the reader supposed to NOT NOTICE, and not comment upon, that which is missing? How can you NOT explore these questions on pedophilia in doing your research? If comments were still alive at the years-old www.sexyfeminist.com article cited above, you can be sure that THAT author would be hearing from me too, for she ALMOST overlooked the question herself (apart from the text "And does every rip of the wax take a little bit of our feminism with it?" -- her ONLY reference, and it was a VERY oblique one, to the loss of hair achieving the loss of adulthood). Yes, you should object to putting my editorial stance about pedophilia in the article. But you've gone beyond that and ignored the entire pedophilia-angle entirely, and, in consequence, the article reads like a whitewash, a spin-job.69.86.65.186 (talk) 11:42, 26 June 2014 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Dear Christopher Simpson, please stop posting lengthy comments on article talk pages. In many cases, repeated posting of lengthy comments has been viewed by the community as disruptive, and has result in the community imposing sanctions against the offenders. Please take actions to prevent the community imposing sanctions (such as a topic ban or even a block) against your participation in editing the encyclopedia. For that reason alone, you should immediately begin to restrict yourself to posting short, concise, relevant, on-topic comments. This is a friendly, polite but firm reminder. If you continue to exhaust our patience, it is likely we will seek sanctions against you.

Furthermore, please note that the vast majority of experienced editors on Wikipedia do not read lengthy comments (except perhaps reading the first, and only the first, lengthy comment in full, because we are nice and we would like to give every user, especially newbies, the benefit of the doubt). After reading the very first lengthy comment from a user, all subsequent lengthy comments from the same user are basically ignored by most experienced users (at best, walls of text are extremely quickly skimmed over without reading the text). Experience has amply demonstrated that spending time on reading overly-lengthy blocks of text is not an effective use of editors' time. Please remember we are all volunteers, the time we have available to us to edit the project is limited, and we would rather spend the time making meaningful contributions to articles and consensus-building on talk pages than spend our time getting increasingly frustrated or angry at the refusal of editors to listen to valuable advice on improving your editing skills.

Thanks and regards, IjonTichy (talk) 17:53, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Proposed change of article name

I think the name of the article should be changed to something like "Pubic hair styling". The material in the article has gone much further than pubic hair removal associated with the bikini and also beyond waxing. Enthusiast (talk) 12:02, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

I oppose renaming. I don't see how it has gone "gone much further than pubic hair removal associated with the bikini and also beyond waxing". It doesn't describe shaving techniques, nor does it cover hair removal from male genitalia. To all intents and purposes the main scope of the topic is still bikini waxing. Betty Logan (talk) 12:19, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose - I think the current title is OK. The choice of hair removal is (as stated) waxing, shaving, sugaring or using chemical depilatory creams. Waxing and sugaring are effectively the same (and must be the majority of users), shaving must be a poor option - coarse hair tend to show as stubble far too easily, and I cannot expect many will want powerful chemicals spread over their neither regions... Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 00:14, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

Male Vs Female waxing.

If we agree now that male waxing is also an accepted practice - why is an image of said waxing not acceptable?

If male waxing has enough due weight to be mentioned and linked in the lede, there is no valid reason for an image of it not to be presented along with the others further down in the article - to support it's inclusion in the first place.

You can't have it both ways. Please discuss here, instead of using massive edit summaries which don't allow for responses. Chaheel Riens (talk) 12:09, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

This article is not a general "genital waxing" article. If it were it would be called Genital waxing or something to that effect. The article is specifically about bikini waxing i.e. a particular subset of genital waxes. Male genital waxing is not covered by this article; it is only mentioned in the lead to acknowledge the male equivalent i.e. bikini waxing is mentioned in that article but how silly would it be to add images of a bald chuff to an article about male genital waxing? All three of our images are clearly defined types of bikini waxes with specific names; you can find books and sources with images similar to the three in the article that commonly refer to them as a "bikini wax" (see here for example). Simply put, the proposed image does not identify any acknowledged bikini wax style. Betty Logan (talk) 21:49, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Well, I suppose it would be silly to "add images of a bald chuff to an article about male genital waxing" as you say, but that would be because the article, in your example, is called "Male genital waxing. This article is not called "Female Bikini waxing", and as pointed out with a section (including images) over on the Bikini page - the term is also applicable to men: Men's bikini.

And you are singularly wrong to say "Simply put, the proposed image does not identify any acknowledged bikini wax style" - the image identifies a male brazilian bikini wax, in exactly the same way as the other images. There's even sources too[1] for example.

It just smacks of double standards to me. Chaheel Riens (talk) 09:20, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

That source does not refer to a male Brazilian as a "bikini wax" so I don't see any double standard at all, just WP:SYNTHESIS. Betty Logan (talk) 09:33, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

It refers to "male brazilians". This article, including one of the pictures, states "Brazilian wax: all hair is removed." and makes contant reference to the brazilian wax. It is not synthesis to make the connection that if if the same term in the same context is applied to both genders that it means the same thing. If the results of a brazilian when applied to a woman are relevant here, then the same should hold true to when applied to a man? Chaheel Riens (talk) 09:41, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

A "Brazilian" is a general waxing term that can also be used to refer to male genital waxes, hence the term "male Brazilians". So yes, the image violates WP:SYNTHESIS and WP:WEIGHT because I don't see any examples in the bikini waxing literature that identifies the proposed image as a type of "bikini wax". Betty Logan (talk) 10:02, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

A brazilian is not a general waxing term - it refers to a very specific area of the human body, regardless of gender - the bikini area, which as previously stated and supported by sources can refer to the male gender as well as the female gender. It is not synthesis in this context - the word is inextricably linked to the bikini area. People do not say "I had a brazilian under my arms", or "I brazilianed my upper lip". The term brazilian very specifically means the bikini area of the body, regardless of gender.

Anyhoo, I see no reason to assume you're going to change your opinion, so will back off this topic, unless I happen across better sources, but I'm not going to intentionally look for them having other things to do as well. Chaheel Riens (talk) 12:51, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Betty Logan have raised policy issues that Chaheel Riens couldn't address or explain away. WP:SYNTHESIS and WP:WEIGHT are serious issues indeed. I guess Logan's point holds, despite Riens's justified irritation. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 17:30, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

April Masini as an historian

I removed a claim about hair removal in ancient India that was based on a self-published dating guide by April Masini. To my great surprise, this was reverted.[2] It should be uncontroversial to dismiss relationship columnist as a reliable source for historical. Just to clarify, the relevant works are self-published and they are not written by WP:UGC someone "an established expert whose work in the relevant field has [previously] been published by reliable third-party publications".

Peter ^Isotalo 11:45, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Excessive imagery

I understand that Wikipedia claims to not be censored, but I still think the amout of imagery in this article is excessive. 89.242.129.234 (talk) 16:38, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

I agree. Some of them are redundnant and some are irrelevant so I've, erm, trimmed them. Betty Logan (talk) 17:00, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I had used exactly these four images before. I have also re-positioned the lead image and put it in the technique section, where it belongs. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 12:16, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Can we use diagrams of pubic hair styles instead of photos? They are easier to understand. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 12:29, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't have any objection to using them to illustrate styling. However, there is an aesthetic aspect to consider i.e. the diagrams illustrate styling, they don't actually show the finished effect of a wax, so we should keep at least one of the photos. My suggestion would be to use diagrams in the style section and move the Brazilian photo to the lead. Betty Logan (talk) 12:36, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Sounds good. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 12:50, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

"Styles" section

I have reinserted the section about styles, with the comments from Desmond Morris.

In the theme of WP:BRD they were boldly removed, and I reverted, but to also begin Discussion, here are my reasons for doing so:

The edit summary is wrong: "Morris is probably a good source for something in this article, but does not support this particular material; rm some ridiculous unsourced claim (ex dying pubic hair pink is common on Valentine's day); moving some lines to relevant sections" All the claims are supported by the Morris source - even the "popular on Valnetines day" phrase. This was checked previously here when I borrowed the book from my e-library to be sure - which resulted in some neatening up to be even more accurate.

What other reasons do you have for removal please? Chaheel Riens (talk) 06:59, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Undue and/or off-topic

IMO this material is undue and/or off-topic and should be removed from the article, but Chaheel Riens apparently feels it belongs in the article:

The three major types are described below. Anthropologist Desmond Morris has identified other waxing styles:

• The full bikini or the European is the removal of pubic hair except for a small amount on the mons pubis.
• The moustache is the removal of pubic hair except for a wide, rectangular patch just above the hood at the top of the genital slit. This is sometimes called "Hitler's moustache", or "Chaplin's moustache".
• The heart is the shaping of the main pubic tuft into a heart symbol and may be dyed pink.

(1) I still don't see where this material is supported by the source and I've tagged it with {{quote request}}. (2) There are infinite styles we could include, why are we giving weight to these three? I think it's undue to include more than these 3 styles: American, French and Brazilian, based on the coverage in reliable sources.

This part I think is off-topic because it has to do with styles that explicitly don't involve waxing:

"Natural" (also known as "au natural" or "bush") refers to pubic hair that has not been removed, trimmed or styled at all. "Trimmed" or "cut" refers to pubic hair that has been shortened, but not completely removed other than shaving the inner thighs. Some women trim, but keep hair on their labia, while removing the pubic hair on the mons pubis. Salons often use their own unique names for common types of waxing, for example referring to a Brazilian with a "landing strip" as a "Mohican" or a "Hollywood" as "Full Monty".

The part about Salons using different names doesn't really make sense in context because the "landing strip" and "Hollywood" haven't been defined in the article prior to this point. I also think it's kind of trivial information and Salons can give any number of personalized names to different styles, so what's the point in giving random examples and what's the justification for picking those specific examples? —PermStrump(talk) 08:23, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

References

I'm not sure how to explicitly respond to a "quote request", never having seen one before, but the current reference does tell you where to look - page 199 and goes from 199-201 outlining the styles (and several others) that are listed on the article. IIRC I had to change the text slightly to avoid being a direct C&P, but it's still easy enough to find. If you wish to check yourself, if you get the book you can search for the term "valentine" which only appears once in the book, in the section we are discussing. We give weight to these three because they are highlighted by an eminent anthropologist in a reliable source. You think it's not relevant to bikini waxing - I think it is, as does Desmond Morris.

I think it's relevant to mention the "natural" style because it's a single sentence (not undue then) to simply point out the alternatives to waxing and that they exist.

Again, it seems relevant to mention that the same style may have different names depending on the salon (or I suppose geographic region) that it was gained or is known in - but I agree that it actually needs expanding slightly to clarify the terms used. We use those terms because they've been used in reliable sources, and I think it's a bit excessive to say that "Salons can give any number of personalized names to different styles" which I suppose is true, but that doesn't mean it actually happens - there seem to be only a few accepted names for each style, not "any number". Chaheel Riens (talk) 08:44, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Pages 199-201 aren't available in the preview. If you click on {{quote request}}, the template explains "Please add this template after a reference to an unquoted source that you think may be inaccurate...This is used to request a direct quote from the cited source, so that it may be verified that the source can verify the statement or that the editor has interpreted the source correctly. This is particularly helpful for: sources that are not available online..." From what I can read of the Morris source, this material does not sound like the type of thing that would be in it. I'll put my foot in my mouth if I can see the quotes. —PermStrump(talk) 08:59, 27 August 2016 (UTC)