Throughout the course of this semester I’ve noticed the alarming trend of an increased desire for homogeneity amongst women. Be it the clothes we wear, the style of our hair, or even, the aesthetics of our genitalia. The article I’ve chosen, “The Vagina Dialogues” By Johanna Gohmann, displays how utterly ridiculous society has become in its venture to make the beautifully diverse human race into identical robots. Gohmann’s article takes a look into the growing trend for undergoing “vagioplasty”, reconstructive surgery done to remove or re-sculpt the labia to achieve the “ideal vagina.” The surgery has immense popularity in the UK and the numbers are increasing in the US as well. The vast majority of women say they partake in the surgery for “cosmetic” reasons, while others say it enhances their sexual experience. However, there is no medical study that confirms this result. In reality the issue has less to do with physical discomfort during sex, and more to do with self-consciousness. Why is it that all these women desire the “Designer Vagina”? This new trend is yet another example of our society pushing “norms” onto us that don’t exist. Normalcy is in the eye of the beholder, the real issue is that this is a silenced discussion; the lack of awareness of the fact that there is no “normal” vagina has led to this bizarre trend.
The enormous increase in the number of women undergoing cosmetic surgery is an issue in and of itself. The fact that women feel they must endure copious amounts of pain to achieve an unnatural image is outlandish. Who decided that beauty must equal pain? It is incredibly frightening that most women who have vagioplasty put down cosmetics as their incentive. In Gohmann’s article she explains how nearly all women seeking this surgery bring in photographs of porn stars and reference these women's labia as their end goal. “Docs concur that porn is the gold standard. Gang Alter is a Beverly Hills-based surgeon who has perfected his own ‘Alter Labia Minoria Countouring Technique.’ He says ‘ The widespread viewing of pornographic photos and videos has lead to a marked rise in female genital cosmetic surgery. Women are more aware of differences in genital appearance, so they wish to achieve their perceived aesthetic ideal’”(pg.1, Gohmann.) As we discussed in previous classes, porn is not real, its fiction. These women are picked to be on the screen because they look the way they do, and if they don’t fit that look, many times they are airbrushed and blurred in order to fit an image. But in todays society we continue to confuse what we see in the media with reality, its almost as if the media is more present in our lives than reality is. “While lesbians are probably a bit more informed, many women aren’t familiar with the look of regular, everyday vaginas, which come in an endless range of shapes and sizes. If you’re straight, its very likely your vadge knowledge is limited to a squat with a hand mirror or Jenna Jameson”(pg.2, Gohmann.) This displays how dangerous silence and ignorance can be. If women were comfortable enough to discuss this topic, perhaps they wouldn’t be so entranced by the “playboy”-looking vagina.
The women who don’t say cosmetics are their motive claim that they get the surgery to enhance their sexual experience. This is where the issue gets tricky. “In 2004, Dr. Laura berman, director of the Berman Center (a treatment clinic for female sexual dysfunction) completed a study on the relationship between women’s genital self image and their sexual function. She surveyed 2,206 women and not surprisingly found that they way you feel about your vadge plays a big part in how much you enjoy sex”(pg.3, Gohmann). For women, much of their sexual experience is “cerebral” meaning their enjoyment depends a lot on how they personally feel about their bodies. Gohmann then poses the question; why are we dealing with these women’s sexual dissatisfaction with a scalpel when it’s a mental and emotional issue, not a physical one? The reason is that dealing with the cerebral aspect of the issue is far more difficult and time consuming (this procedure is under an hour) then working “inside the system” and “trimming away the ‘ugly bits’”(pg3, Gohmann). I found this theme to be strikingly similar to the issues of intersex genital “corrective” surgery. Countless people who are born intersex have been forced into a gender role through surgery on their genitalia in an effort to make them fit with the “norm.” But these norms are social constructions, as is the notion that there is a “normal” looking vagina.
“Until very recently the specter of intersexuality has spurred us to police bodies of indeterminate sex. Rather than force us to admit the social nature of our ideas about sexual difference, our ever more sophisticated medical technology has allowed us, by its attempts to render such bodies male or demale, to insist that people are either naturally male or female. Such insistence occurs even though intersexual births occur with remarkably high frequency and may be on the increase. The paradoxes inherent in such reasoning, however, continue to haunt mainstream medicine, surfacing over and over in both scholarly debates and grossroots activitism around sexual identities”(pg.54, Fausto-Sterling).
This desire for normalcy is taking us down a scary road. Fortunately efforts for change are being made.
The New View Campaign is a group that strives to “challenge the medicalization of sex.” Many of their efforts involve opening up a dialogue amongst women so their most prominent resource of information isn’t their television. “Its latest efforts include the International Vulva Knitting Circle, a playful way to bring women together to talk about their bodies and knit vulvas”(pg.5, Gohmann.) Talking is the first step to eliminating ignorance, which can help put an end to this misguided trend. The New View also has a website, http://www.fsd-alert.org/default.asp which has links to books and videos that provide important information on women’s sexual health. This video posted below is a look into the mission of the New View Campaign. /p>
British Artist Jamie McCartney is currently working on a project called “Design a Vagina” in an effort to display publicly the wide variety of vaginal appearances. He was quoted in this article and I believe he pinpoints a key message, “everyone is different and everyone is normal”(pg.5, Gohmann). Continued efforts such as Mccartney’s are the only way to end this vaginal confusion.
This Article can be found in Bust magazine's June 2009 issue, or simply follow this link http://www.bust.com/component/option,com_zine/Itemid,273/id,2/view,article/
Right when I started reading this post I immediately thought about the intersex surgery discussed by Anne Fausto-Sterling, so I'm glad you addressed that! Vagioplasty is an interesting concept I think mainly because it is an attempt to conform to an ideal that does not really exist when compared to more visible, obvious physical traits such a person's musculature. I'm being pretty cynical here but frankly, vagioplasty seems more like a plastic surgeon's ploy to earn some extra money. To have the procedure exist as a cosmetic surgery it suggests that there is this a need for its existence, thus creating a market for it that is obviously helped by pornography. I wonder what a man would say if he knew that his female partner had vagioplasty...would he really care that much?
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