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I applied for a job role a few months ago and was rejected after they prompted me asking for lots of personal information, such as age of my children (I don’t have any), my date of birth, my marital status, etc. A whole raft of questions that could be interpreted as targeting me based on my sex and the perception that I might have (or soon have) children.
Today I’ve been informed that they want to settle with me for a small sum of money. Not great but still feels like a victory.
I’d really recommend trying to challenge employers using ACAS or Employment Tribunals and I might be recording interviews in future as I am sometimes asked these sorts of questions in interviews even though it is obviously discriminatory. Any interview where being a woman is mentioned results in no job offer. I have let far too many instances of this slide and I’m not prepared to walk away any longer.
There's a strage little snippet that is explained as a proof that even in middle-ages, women were expected to shave their pubes. If true, then even in middle-ages men were pedos.
Another interesting thing: the culture of bathing died because people became afraid to contract syphillis in the bathing houses. So we once again must thank the perverted men for ruining things.
Women in many parts of late medieval and Renaissance Europe were expected to have full body waxes.
A swath of their hairline was taken off, and then everything else down, except for pencil-thin eyebrows. Even peachfuzz on their faces was removed.
The ideal was to have smooth, fair skin allover, with no texture.
There were professional women beauticians, who would make house calls or go to the public baths. They had recipes for depilatories and waxes, had tweezers, and razors made of sharpened glass. Ouch!
The medieval humoral theory justification for this was that body hair was excess sexual drive being excreted, and it ought not to sit on women's bodies. For men, it was just fine funnily enough.
Hair removal was largely a class and urban thing. Peasant women did not have the means or the time to do it, and men used that as excuse to view them as overly sexual and asking for it.
Women who did do this, risked censure from the many male religious moralists about, but ultimately it can down to the husband's pleasure.
Men have not fucking changed.
For further reading I suggest John Block Friedman's article, "Hairs Less in Sight". He puts a lot of his work on Academia.
Interesting! (and gross)
Do you have a link?
Not to excuse men, but my impression is that in today's era, the custom of women in the USA waxing and shaving their pubes to have hairless crotches isn't a trend that can be entirely blamed on men - the practice seems to have been wholeheartedly embraced and spread largely by (some) women themselves.
As a boomer from the USA, I came of age when women kept our pubic hair and both sexes thought the very idea of women shaving their pubes so as to have a hairless crotch was/is extremely weird - and gross. None of the women I know who are around my age 69) that I've asked about it have ever shaved or waxed all their pubes off. (The most we did was trim the hairs that would peek out when wearing a bikini or other kind of swim suit.
None of the men I, my friends, sisters and acquaintances slept with/sleep with ever wanted us to be hairless in the gential area, either. The "boomer view" of women's pubic hair is that having a "bush" is normal, healthy, hygienic - and it makes having PIV sex more comfortable because it reduces friction and skin irritation and it provides cushioning.
I remember when it started to became fashionable for (young) women in NYC to go to salons for "Brazilian waxes" in the mid-1990s. I first became aware of this new - or new to me - trend through reading a novel by Candace Bushnell, the woman who wrote the "Sex and The City" series. It seemed peculiar and unappealing to me. It still does.
I feel like you can say that about many things... Especially about the beauty industry.
Speaking of the " Brazilian wax " ... I heard that Brazil may have been one of the first if not THE first country where the practice of removing all pubic hair started...
I heard something about the Native people of South America removing all their pubic hair because they did not have the practice of wearing any clothes to cover their genitalia until European colonization of the region... Therefore they removed all pubic hair to supposedly make their genitalia more clean and easier to look at or something like that...
It seems like Brazilian beach culture played a role. G-string bikinis aren’t unusual there.
I did get the impression that that was the authors assumption rather than what was written. It seemed more like they were advised to keep it neat a trimmed to avoid matting and other gross stuff festering down there. Bear in mind that people didn’t have daily baths and stuff like semen and excrement and urine could be sat there for possibly a week causing issues. Keeping it trimmed and combed and tidy was more about hygiene than perversion.
If women did shave their pubes in medieval Europe, I highly doubt it was for the visual aesthetics. I suspect the main reason they would have shaved their pubes was the same reason so many women, children and men back then had shaved heads - ubiquitious lice. Also, scabies and worms.
If you look into the history of combs, you'll find that the reason combs have always had two kinds of teeth is that combs historically had two equally important purposes: detangling and styling the hair, and removing lice and nits. In the Middle Ages as in other periods of the past, dealing with head lice and pubic lice ("crabs") was part of everyday grooming.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/some-of-historys-most-beautiful-combs-were-made-for-lice-removal
As recently as my youth in the 1960s and 70s, pubic hair lice aka crabs were common amongst sexually active people who "slept around" - even though by then, it had become the norm in the USA and some other Western countries to shower or bathe frequently, often daily.
(BTW, the switch in the USA from taking a bath just once a week to showering or bathing daily happened within my lifetime. However, even in the 1970s there were still a wide variety of norms. In 1973-4 when I was in college/uni, I lived in France with a French family who owned a single family house - and it was their custom for everyone in the family (who at that point were all adults and teenagers) to take a bath and wash their hair just once a week, on Saturday. On the days during the rest of the week, everyone just "spot washed" a few select parts of the body in "sponge baths" and using the bidet. I found this hard to adjust to, because in the USA I had gotten into the habit of taking a shower and washing my hair every day.)
“If she’s well brought up, I’d say,
All the cobwebs she’ll sweep away,
Scour and trim, and smooth and gloss,
So that naught can gather moss.”
Gross.