Porn-stic Surgery?
I heard about this story the other day while listening to the Stephanie Miller Show on my way to work. At first I was amused by the story because it just sounds funny: plastic surgery on a woman’s privates because they watch too much porn. They want to look like Amber Lynn, Veronika Zemanova, Brooke Burke, or Shannon Elizabeth. It isn’t just boob jobs anymore, either, they gotta not just be clean-shaven, but have everything trimmed: the vagina, labia major and minor, the mons pubis, EVERYTHING. It was humorous in and of itself how they referred to that area of the female body as “real estate”, as if it were something to be bought, built on, improved, invested in and sold to the highest bidder.
The question I have is, what kind of message is this sending young women today? I remember growing up, women were being encouraged to get educations, be independent, have careers, etc. It was nice in college, talking with chicks who actually had brains in their heads, and could comment on things more relevant than the latest stories in Cosmo, Elle, or People. Now it seems, with breast implants for teens, botox, and new places to have plastic surgery, young women are being taught to be sex objects rather than career women. While it is nice for me, being a single guy and seeing all these hot chicks running around, it disturbs me that most of them remind me of the Valley Girl types when I was in grade school. “Like, ohmigawd!” “What ever . . .” “I wanna go to My-emmy”. Conversation is limited to what was on TV last night, and the closest you can get to an in-depth discussion of metaphysics is “What’s your sign? I’m Scorpio.” You can forget about having a real conversation about the dangers of environmental warming and the effects on the walrus population in the Arctic Circle, or discussing the ins and outs of molecular dynamics.
What ever happened to women’s lib? Or is this a product of women’s lib, that women can have more control over their bodies, a misguieded reaction to the Religious Right’s attempts to limit reproductive choice? Is it some weird, sexual offshoot of a reaction to equal rights, so that those women can create perfect bodies for themselves to please the next wealthy man they hook up with? A little liposuction, silicone implants, a tummy tuck, vaginoplasty, a few days in the tanning booth, and you’ve got that 23-year old body you reminisce about. And I can see it now: guys getting pec and lat implants, butt reduction, and penile extensions. If you don’t like your body, just make a new one from plastic. It sounds like a Philip K. Dick novel brought to real life.
Oddly enough, this sort of thing has been floating around for a while. I read the story when I got to work on Factiva, so when I started writing this, I just googled “LA Times vaginoplasty” to find the original article I read. Interestingly enough, I didn’t find the article in the LA Times, so I had to go to their site to search it down. Still, the google came up with an article in The New York Times back in 2004, and here are some more articles about the subject from 1998-2000 in Jenda, a Journal of Culture and African Women. The Jenda page really weirded me out, drawing the allusion to genital mutilation in Africa.
What’s the next step? Bull-dyke women who swear off men and have everything removed? They can’t have sex with a man if they don’t have the hardware. Nuns with no sex organs and eunuch priests would solve a lot of problems for the Catholic Church. Instead of vows of abstinence, they could just have it all taken out. Circus freaks who actually have penises that they can tie around their ankles?
