Immortalize your lovely labia at Vulvalovelovely @ Etsy. Click on photo for link.
Commenter aspiringexpatriate recently sent me an e-mail entitled: I don’t even know what to say. It included a link to a BBC News article entitled “New Warnings on ‘Perfect’ Vaginas.” The article presents a new medical study about the perils of labiaplasty–surgery to trim and sculpt the labia–and the misguided reasons women (and plastic surgeons) think we need it.
Yes, plastic surgeons can fix your ugly nose, your teeny boobs and your fat-ass cankles. Now they can snip your unsightly, dangly labia too!
Wait, you didn’t know your labia needed surgery? That’s because they don’t:
Research published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology questions the very notion of aesthetically pleasing genitals.
Operations to improve the appearance of the sex organs for both psychological and physical reasons are on the rise. But consultant gynaecologist Sarah Creighton and psychologist Lih-Mei Liao challenged the ethics of offering women surgery to address such insecurities, suggesting it was adverts for a “homogenised, pre-pubescent genital appearance” which created these anxieties in the first place.
Apparently the problem is with our perception, not our pussies. To make things worse, it turns out that labiaplasty can result in post-surgical complications, “by damaging the nerve supply to the area, impairing sexual sensitivity and satisfaction.”
Readers will probably be unsurprised when I say that blame porn for this shift in popular perception. When one version of female genitals–sleek, pink, hairless, and yes, “pre-pubescent” looking–is widely glorified and eroticized, that’s going to become the standard for “sexy.” What’s especially fucked up is that women may be permanently sacrificing their own sexual pleasure in order to obtain that porn-star look:
“Furthermore, quality research is needed to improve our understanding of the psychological drivers behind women’s decision to sacrifice sexually sensitive tissue that contributes to erotic experiences, for a certain genital appearance that used to be an obligation only for some glamour models.” (ed: Glamour models being Brit-speak for Playboy/Penthouse-type nude models)
Even the pro-labiaplasty surgeons quoted in the article agree that it’s rarely medically necessary, and that porn-y media influences women’s decision to have the surgery:
“Women want this for a number of reasons…but for the majority it is aesthetic, that’s true.
“Lads’ mags are looked at by girlfriends, and make them think more about the way they look. We live in times where we are much more open about our bodies – and changing them – and labioplasty is simply a part of this.”
By “open” he means “willing to expose ourselves to other people’s criticism and let them define how we should look” and by “changing”, he means “willing to undergo potentially damaging surgery on our perfectly healthy bodies to conform to someone else’s idea of sexy.”
A couple years back, Jezebel editors Anna Holmes and Tracie Egan wrote about labioplasty in “Pimp My Vadge”. Egan went to a Manhattan plastic surgeon specializing in labiaplasty to see what he’d say about glamorizing her completely normal genitals:
Frankly, I think this whole cookie-cutter cooch thing is bunch of bullshit. [Egan wrote] I’m a feminist and everything, but I’ll be the first to acknowledge that vaginas aren’t always pretty. The thing is though, vaginas are supposed to be like that. And just like snowflakes, no two are the same. I’m sure there are occasions of extreme physical abnormality, but those cases are rare. Because if they were common, then they wouldn’t be abnormal, now would they?
Honestly, I have no beef with my lips—they’ve always done right by me. So when I was finally in the doctor’s office, and he asked me what I wanted fixed, I had to think fast on my feet—or in my stirrups, rather. It’s really clear to anyone looking that I don’t have a labia minora problem, so I made up a complaint about my labia majora. I was somewhat shocked that he agreed that something could be done to improve the appearance of my pussy.
The whole visit was recorded and you can listen to the audio. You may want to cross your legs while the surgeon describes the procedure to “cut a wedge out” of her labia majora.
What makes this whole mess especially ridiculous is that genitals–female AND male–have never been the most beautiful part of the human body. But as reproduction-loving mammals, we have always found them plenty alluring–until now. Thanks to porn and porn-y media, some people now think our normal protruding labia are a problem that needs a surgical fix. But they aren’t, and the physicians who authored the study score major points with me when they:
…also suggested that any pain apparently caused by [labia's] protrusion may well have a psychological root – noting that male genitalia protrude far further without causing major discomfort.
If theirs can stick out, so can ours.
Just thinking about slicing into my vulva makes me cross my legs in pre-emptive protection. I’m pretty neutral on what I think genitals look like, and don’t find penises or vulvas particularly eye-pleasing. But generally I don’t spend a lot of time LOOKING at them, as I’d rather be doing things with/two them. I’ll stick to “bumping uglies” and leave my ladybusiness the way it came– it may not be much to look at, but it feels nice and makes me and my partner rather happy.
labioplasty and female genital mutilation are linked in my brain, I wonder why?
In Infidel Ayaan Hirsi Ali says her grandmother talks about (evil) women’s labia hanging down.
I love those pendants in the image… the middle one looks like Our Lady of Guadalupe.
As far as labiaplasty goes, if a guy EVER suggested that my vulva looked unattractive, his access to my vulva would be revoked.
And who sets the standards on this particular body part? If guys don’t like the way we’re made, hair and dangles and all, they can take it somewhere else. I’m sure that blow-up dolls have a lovely, sleek feel to them. *rolls eyes*
In vulva-related news, I’m reading a book about the culinary history of
england, and it says that the Romans used to eat cow vulvas. No wonder the empire collapsed.
AmandaS
Guadalupe==Vulva images
http://www.almalopez.net/ORnews/010604az.html
@rodriguez: I love those images! Viva la Virgencita!
rodriguez you do have a point but there are other kinds of genital “mutilation” practiced in for example Uganda that involve labia stretching — so there isn’t just one model of the perfect vagina we are all supposed to have.
Wait, slicing up a body part rich in nerve endings might have a negative impact on the functioning of those nerve endings?
So stupid and hateful. We need to bring back Betty Dodson and her mirror brigade. People laugh nervously at the mention of her, but what she did was/is really valuable. So are projects like these vulva galleries (I’m trying to overlook that they’re being presented on a show called “Embarrassing Bodies.”) (Obvy NSFW.)
Other than gender-reassignment surgery, is there any need for labioplasty ever?
@PhDork: There are medically necessary labiaplasty–for women with congenitally deformed labia, or whose labia have been affected by disease or injury. But the VAST majority of women having labiaplasty are doing so for purely cosmetic reasons.
And co-sign on the mirror brigade. It seems like a ’70s throwback, but knowing and appreciating what you look like “down there” is absolutely vital to women’s emotional AND physical health.
Betty D is alive and well!
http://dodsonandross.com/
Jeez some men won’t get vasectomies because they are afraid their dicks won’t work afterwards, and some poor misguided women are willing to risk disfigurement and loss of sensation to “look better?” To whom??
Becky, you are absolutely right to “blame porn.” Unfortunately it took me until later in life to love my junk. And I use “junk” in the most flattering empowering way!
Rodriguez… Big thanks for the link!
A Dutch documentary about the influence of photoshop etc on women’s view of their bodies can be watched here: http://www.beperkthoudbaar.info/docu/
(‘Beperkt houdbaar’ means something like perishable goods)
It’s a very personal film. It starts with the observation by the film maker Sunny Bergman: “I’m 34 years old, have two kids, worked as a documentary maker for 10 years, I have a degree in philosophy… and I’m worried about my wrinkles.”
Among other things, she goes to see an (American, so that part of the film isn’t in Dutch) cosmetic surgeon who does labioplasties and asks him what she might ‘need’…
I recommend a colouring book my mum bought me when I was younger – “The C*nt Colouring Book” (also previously called “LabiaFlowers”)
I have never thought about having surgery, in part due to this book. Because like snowflakes, no two vulvas are the same.
I totally agree about how awful this is, but again I wonder about the quick ‘blame porn’ move. A slightly different interpretation might be: misogynist fear of female sexuality has stigmatized labia as ‘unsightly’ for ages and ages, and porn figures into this largely as a side effect of the ubiquity of shorn vulvae therein. (one thing I was recently upset to learn: the ‘correct’–NOT slang–German word for labia is apparently schamlippen ie ‘shame-lips’. Grrr! Bad Germans!)
… Ugh, spam filter won’t let this through. Ha– is it suspicious of labia? Oy… Wonder if I can split it.
Why bring up this different interpretation? Because I think there’s a significant difference, and an even more significant potential for more, between ‘mainstream pornography’ (bad) and ‘the mainstreaming *of* pornographt’ (both good and bad, much more complicated). Much love to Betty Dodson, yes– and one set of her ideological heirs today really is the feminist, queer, anti-homogenous porn scene. Just like with the gallery and etsy site linked above, part of the *point* of this porn is precisely to raise consciousness about bodily as well as sexual diversity.
(BeckyS- I know when pushed, in earlier threads, you’ve said you only mean ‘mainstream p’, but I think this is one issue where it really *is* a distinction that matters and is worth emphasizing, as the example of Dodson shows!)
… Grumble the spam filter really hates this one.
@ X. Trapnel.
Um, I don’t mean to be nit-picky and all, but I wouldn’t blame the Germans too heavily for this. Sure, language can tell us a lot about a culture, but it is probably more useful to focus on current uses of words rather than ancient etymologies. Meanings change over time and result in surprising modifications or even reversals. It’s worth pointing out for example that in Greek the clinical word for vulva is «αιδείο» (aideio), derived from the Greek word «αιδώς» (aidos), which also means shame. However the Greeks have two different words for shame, one with positive and one with negative intonations: aidos refers to what in English we might call “modesty”, “shyness”, “decency”, “demureness”. «Αισχύνη» (aiskhyni) on the other hand means disgrace and dishonour. A similar history is likely evidenced in the etymology of “Schamlippen” as well, especially given that the English “shame”, along with the German “Scham”, are actually connected to the Indo-European word for “cover”.
I don’t know if others here disagree, but I would find this idea neither surprising nor objectionable. I do understand that such mentalities when translated into an obligation imposed on women to keep their legs closed at all times and avoid sexual encounters (as they eventually were) are limiting and damaging, but I do think it makes a difference if we understand old meanings as indicating that your ladyparts are something to discreetly cover, as opposed to something you are actually supposed to be ashamed of. After all, even today most of us tend to avoid showing off what’s between legs to anyone but an elect few, right?
@X.Trapnel: It’s not just me doing my usual caterwauling, though. Well, okay, it IS, but as the article shows, doctors both sides of the issue–both those who think labiaplasty is no big deal and those who are leery of it–say outright that the reason so many of their patients want cosmetic surgery on their labia is because of the influence of “lad mags” and “glamour model” images of the vulva. People in the medical field are blaming porn for this as well.
And you’re right, I mean mainstream porn when I talk about porn. I realize there’s porn out there that is not mainstream het porn, but the truth is, the porn that is downloaded billions of times a day and whose images are leaching their way into our cultural conciousness is not porn by sex-positive feminists like Betty Dodson.
When was the last time you saw a teen who knew anything about woman-positive porn or where to find it? But they know Jenna Jameson and Vivid Video and Club VIP.
It’s like saying “oh, when you talk about fast-food, you also have to mention the fantastic taco truck in Red Hook whose food is all homemade with slow-cooked ingredients.” No, dammit, I don’t. When there are millions of Red Hook taco trucks serving billions of people daily, then I will call them fast food. But that taco truck is not even remotely in the same fast-food universe as McDonalds. Same thing with porn. What’s being served up in millions of places to billions of people should be the focus of our discussion.
(OMG the Red Hook Taco Truck.)
Check out this amazing link of every Playboy Centerfold since the first one, Marilyn Monroe. You can click through and see when we started seeing pubic hair at all, to the strip, to bare. How can this not be related to easier, more accessible images of porn? If Playboy is the most mainstream watered-down filter of what is going on in terms of sexual imagery, then it’s hard not to argue. As I understand it, absence of hair is better on camera and allows the viewer to see exactly what is going on. The most recent centerfolds not only have no pubic hair, their vulvas are obviously photoshopped! Yikers. Keep your clone tool off my bits!
In short, we can do whatever we want to our bodies, but understanding why we do it is interesting to me.
http://igorkazakov.ru/playboy/
p.s. I know this isn’t a post about pubic hair but it was a long rambling road to the photoshopped vulvas. Anyway! To work!
Lady, don’t get me started on the topic of shaved pubes or we will be here ALL DAY. (In a nutshell: I blame porn. The End.)
Cristina: oh, I know, that wasn’t what I meant. I just thought it both head-desky, and symptomatic of broader problems, that the German word just *is* the German word for “shame-lips”; I’m not talking about origins or influence on English or anything. I would be similarly irked if, say, the English word for “penis” was, I dunno, “shame-banana.” It’s hard to come up with a parallel of course since English doesn’t use compound words to the same extent.
And arrgh: at this point I’ve put far too much time and effort into an extended reply to BeckySharper to be deterred by a spam-filter that seems to really hate me, so hey, now it’s a blog post.
@x.trapnel: Sorry about that. It’s actually happened to me a couple times today too.
I think the longer the comment and the more certain words like “sex” and “porn” appear, the more likely to trigger the filter. I had to cut down some comments and use those words less to make mine go through. Unfortunately the filter keeps having to be beefed up in order to keep the Russian drug dealers from infecting the crap out of our site. Please don’t let it stop you commenting!
Good post, though! Thanks for linking.
@ X.Trapnel
Well, all of this is entirely off topic of course, so apologies to the Harpies, but that’s actually not really what I’m saying here. What I’m saying is that the German word for vulva is not “shame-lips”, unless you make a crude translation of a compound noun that ignores the erosive evolution language undergoes. The way I’d say it works would be thus: “Scham” is the German word for shame. “Lippen” is the German word for lips. And “Schamlippen” is the German word for… vulva. Obviously the three words are etymologically connected, but not because the ancient German tribes thought that vulvas are something to be ashamed of, but because the ideas of shame, modesty and covering up were loosely connected, the result being that the German for shame eventually ended up sounding identical to the first part of what would be better translated as “modesty-lips”, i.e. the lips that are not on your face for the whole world to see.
I understand that you weren’t talking about etymology here – what I am saying however is that if you understand the etymology, it ends up so that there is not much really to head/desk about, except an unfortunately parallel evolution of two words. One gave birth to another and then went on to subtlety change in meaning leading to misinterpretations of the meaning of the second word when taken out of the historical context, which is especially unlucky as it gives the false impression that the word was born of sexism, something towards which today we are especially sensitive. But that still doesn’t mean that “Schamlippen” actually means “shame-lips”.
To give you an idea of how weird these connections can be: “empathy” comes from the Greek “en” and “pathos”, i.e. “in” and “passion”. In modern Greek “empathia” is a very negative word meaning basically “lack of emotional control”, “lack of logical approach” and even “hatred”. In English (and many other European languages) the word has evolved to indicate a sensibility to the emotions of another. Do the elements of the compound really dictate the meaning of the whole? If so, both the current English *and* Greek definitions of “empathy” are entirely wrong! Or does the compound word take on a new meaning all of its very own, while simply making use of familiar (and possibly loosely connected in meaning) sounds? I really think it’s the second.
Having said all of that however and probably come across as a pedantic stick-in-the-mud, I would like to point out that I do get the cringe-factor here, X. Trapnel. I just don’t agree that this is something that is symptomatic of broader problems (although that doesn’t mean that the broader problems don’t exist of course) or the result of the logic-fail that would make me personally head/desk, that’s all…
Ah, ok, I think I get it now. You’re totally right Christina, I was thinking like an adult learner (~ 9 months, <2 living here) rather than a native speaker! Thanks for trying to set me straight.
And hah, you'll get no accusations of pedantry from *me*, Mr. Living-in-a-big-glass-house, at any rate …
Weird. It just ate my comment! Boo.
(Short version: Christina right, me wrong!)
thelady
Wow. That Playboy slide show was really interesting. Watching how body types changed and homogenized, the change in positions, pubic hair, and tan lines! People used to have tan lines!
X. Trapnel, you just blew me away! A conflict of opinions on the interwebs which ends with one party admitted they the other one is right??? But, surely, I must be hallucinating!!!
Thanks, you really just made my day! Let me just say however that I don’t think your initial reaction was entirely off-base… I mean, like I said in the beginning, attaching the idea of modesty to ladyparts is not in itself particularly objectionable, but you are right on target when you point out that no word modern or ancient connects the concept to male genitalia as well – which is strange since men aren’t generally in the habit of letting it all hang out in public either. Instead the etymology of words such as “penis”, “phallus” or “scrotum” in most European languages tends to rest on descriptions of shape or – ehem – mutability. So I think the connection between the language and the ideas still pervasive in our societies that women should demurely cross their legs and turn bright red if somebody catches sight of their panties, while men can freely brag about their package (now I sound like Cosmo) and what they do with it is indeed very much there.
Again, apologies for the off-topic!
Christina,
I don’t think you’re being pedantic at all…the linguistic issues you’ve brought up are really fascinating. (yay for word nerds!)
@Titania
Yay for word nerds!!!
I did labiaplasty after I saw some ads that suggested that big labia were abnormal.
Before that I had no physical discomfort or insecurities.
But after I heard about labiaplasty I got extremely ashamed of myself.
Now that I have done it I look mutilated and after 7 months I still have agonizing pain and sex is impossible.
To what extent do we have to butcher our normal bodies to catch up with the media created “ideals”?
I wish someone informed me (other than the money-grabbing plastic surgeons) about what normal vagina looks like!
You’re a hero. No one should be lured into voluntarily genital mutilation.
I wish you best of luck!
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Oh no! Yet another way to make $ from woman’s insecurities. I’ve have seen before and after… from inviting petals to sterile clamped shut. Poor ladies; don’t believe your lips are not beautiful.
I’ll be blunt. Hustler magazine made its fortune by displaying what some surgeons are removing. Despite what I’ve read here, porn stars actually show-off their “pussy lips”. Men love pussy.
I don’t know what else to say. I’m flabbergasted.
[...] so much of it that I get to write lots of posts blaming porn for all kinds of sweeping negative cultural trends. I truly believe there should be more porn for women. We deserve quality wank material that [...]
I largely agree with you, but I think you are somewhat overstating the risks to sensitivity.
On the other hand, I can’t imagine too many men deciding their testicles just don’t have that “in” look.
Have you seen the “anal bleaching” thing? Can’t imagine paying someone for that…
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Late reply to the comments above:
In Germanic languages, the root for “Scham”/”skaam”/… is not only connected with shame, but also with shyness; so, before you get upset at German, a better literal translation of “Schamlippen” would probably be “shy-lips”, without implying that they’re anything to be ashamed about.
I feel like your focus may be on the asthetics of labia, but labiaplasty isn’t always about attractive labia. Though I’m not trying to justify the procedure, there are other reasons women seek this operation that you haven’t discussed.
Some women can experience discomfort on a regular basis because of enlarged labia, and it doesn’t feel fair that you accuse them of being superficial when it seems you don’t have do deal with the discomfort they do.
Yes, discomfort CAN have something to do with the decision to get labiaplasty but it’s not likely. think about it men have testicles that could rub and chafe more noticeably than labia. And as for aesthetics testicals aren’t really attractive by many peoples standards but there not frowned apon. I have larger inner lips, and small outerlips but as long as i wear underwear theres no discomfort. I’ve seen a lot of before and after pictures of this surgery, many of the girls had perfectly beautiful vulva to begin with and then got their lips sliced off to look like barbie dolls. eww! And it’s not even really true that men prefer vaginas with small inner lips, i have never had a guy complain about my vulva, and my fiance absolutely LOVES it he says it’s like a flower, and makes oral sex more fun(more to work with i guess)
[...] of feminist snark—about the many ways women are told that our genitals need to be pinker, surgically altered, and more aesthetically pleasing. But that was just to lambast some ridiculous new trend in genital [...]