A friend of mine used to be a personal support worker in a nursing home. Once she was telling me about how when the residents had people visiting them, they'd get their hair done and she'd help them get dressed in their favourite clothes etc., and one of the things she said she did was shaved their whiskers. Like on female patients.
I was shocked. "You don't tweeze?" I asked, "Or thread? Or wax or sugar?"
"I'm not an esthetician!" my friend replied.
That makes me want to weep. I've had whiskers since adolescence - a few coarse, dark hairs that grow out of my chin and would probably grow to be a couple of inches long if I let them. They disgust me, so my morning and evening beauty routines include a visual and tactile inspection for any emerging coarse hairs, which are then promptly and ruthlessly pulled out with tweezers. Using tweezers makes them grow back slower and less frequently, but if they had to be shaved off with a razor then I'd have masculine stubble by dinnertime. And since it seems to be done only for special occasions, that means they're probably walking around with visible long whiskers the rest of the time. They're in a nursing home and need a PSW to help them dress and groom, they probably lack the dexterity and/or eyesight to take care of it themselves.
I hate my masculine body hair - it's a humiliation - so the idea of being sentenced to the rest of my life without ever having my always-visible facial hair properly groomed makes me want to curl up in a ball and cry my eyes out. But a more appropriate-for-female-facial-hair method of hair removal is beyond the scope and/or the skill set of the PSW.
So what they need is esthetician services in nursing homes. They already have some provisions for a barber and/or hairdresser (because you don't see elders sitting around nursing homes with long hippie hair), so just adding an esthetician shouldn't be too difficult. And services that bring the patient up to general social standards of grooming (removal of facial hair from the root, separation of unibrows, etc.) should be included in the price of the nursing home. The esthetician should be empowered to recommend treatments rather than waiting for the patient to ask, because patients with failing eyesight or cognitive abilities might not be able to or think to ask to have their chin waxed.
A patient who can't bathe themselves properly gets help from someone professionally trained in bathing patients. A patient who can't control their waste functions get a colostomy bag from someone professionally trained in installing such things. So why not also provide basic personal grooming services by someone professionally trained? It's a matter of dignity!
4 comments:
High-end nursing homes in the US have this. Many women like manicures or having their eyebrows tweezed or waxed. It's "included" in the fees, but the fees are high, or else it can be a monthly extra.
I don't know anything about nursing homes here in Canada, but I imagine there are ritzy ones that do that, too.
Unfortunately that leaves ordinary working class women at the mercy of their hair growth. I guess we have to hope that by the time we're in a nursing home, we won't know if our whiskers are showing. *sigh*
I wonder if there'd be a sex discrimination case in here, because men get their beards shaved (at least, not all men in nursing homes have beards). The logic for using different hair removal methods could be the same as how it's widely considered perfectly reasonable to get hairdressing that's consistent with societal gender norms.
I'm sure there's a sociology thesis in here about how people whose body hair exceeds social norms are seen as somehow Less Than.
It does seem discriminatory, but somehow I doubt it will ever come up in a lawsuit.
Do you know the book Femininity? Your sociology idea reminds me of it.
I don't know it. I quickly googled it and don't' have enough to tell if it was relevant. What I was thinking of when I posted that was parents on the internet talking about when it's appropriate to allow their adolescent daughters to remove their body hair, and then thinking back to my own days as a prematurely hairy preteen. I'll spare everyone the grotesque details of body hair, but basically I felt like I was Being Bad, both for having hair in the locations and quantities that I did, and for not being secure enough to be blasé about it. I felt like Good Girls were able to keep all their hair inside their bathing suits, but I also felt like to Be Good you have to feel beautiful in your own skin without spending hours primping in the bathroom.
So now I'm very glad to have things under better control and to be able to spend as much time and money as I want primping. But I'm picturing being 103 in a nursing home and someone lecturing me "Stop being so picky! Gladys next door doesn't ask us to have her chin tweezed!" (Because Gladys next door doesn't have chin hair.) (And the nursing home residents in my imagined future have current old-lady names, even though IRL my next-door neighbour when I'm 103 will probably be an 83-year-old named Madison.)
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