There's a need for this?

I support cosmetic surgery for anyone who wants it. I don't think it's fundamentally different from any other kind of aesthetic modification from pedicures to body piercing to couture clothing. The risks are higher for surgery compared to most aesthetic indulgences, but for some people the benefits are higher, too. It's all about informed decisions and rigorous regulatory oversight--for all of medicine, and especially completely elective procedures.

However, this LA plastic surgeon's characterization of the market for "designer vaginas" is singularly ridiculous.*

“There's a need for this,” he said. “Women are driving this. I didn't create this market, the market was there.”

This quote is from a story about a doctor who specializes in sculpting women's external genitalia to resemble the models in porno magazines:

Los Angeles — Women from around the world flock to David Matlock's marble waiting room carrying purses stuffed with porn. The magazines are revealed only in the privacy of his office, where doctor and patient debate the finer points of each glossy photo.

The enterprising gynecologist sees countless images of naked women, but none are more popular than Playboy's fresh-faced playmates. They represent, he says with a knowing smile, the perceived ideal.

“Some women will say, ‘Hey, you take this picture and hang it up in the operating room and refer back to it when you're sculpturing me,'” he said in an interview in his clinic overlooking hazy Los Angeles. “I say, ‘Okay, all right, fine.'” [Globe and Mail]

Doc needs a better publicist.

(UPDATE: My fellow Globe readers at The Reaction are on the same page.)

*I mean, I've recently gotten paid to write posters suggesting to men that Viagra may help them lead a more fulfilling life--but we wouldn't dare suggest that anyone actually needs Viagra. Oh, no! Marketing to men's sexual insecurities is all about "you're wonderful, but you could be extra-personally-fulfilled." When marketing to women's sexual insecurities the message seems to be "You are vile, but you could be acceptable."

Comments

[Matt]

Is there really that women's genitelia "looks in porno mags"? I mean, I suppose I've seen a fair amount of porn and it seemed like the female genitelia was pretty varried, as far as such things can varry, just like in real life. While I'll be happy to agree that this should not be illegal, it does strike me as shockingly dumb. I just hope no one says that women are being told what their genitelia must look like or else I'll have to start screaming no one is saying that- these women are making it up! (or else they are involved with people that are shockingly dumb enough to deserve them.)

[Laura]

Um, vaginas are not part of women's external genitalia. The vulva (which consists of the labia, et al) is what you see on the outside. Calling the vulva the vagina is like saying the mouth is the throat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulva
http://cephalogenic.blogspot.com/2005/08/i-dont-think-it-does-much-for-anyone.html
http://alleyrat.blogspot.com/2005/08/thats-not-vagina-youre-looking-at-sir.html

[Joel]

I don't know whether to laugh or cry about this one....had to admit, Laura, that when I read "vagina" I had this vision of women probing themselves with flashlights while contorted at strange angles....

[davidS]

This story does not make sense to me. Playboy famously does not expose the genitalia of their models. In 50 years of life I've never heard anyone comment on the attractiveness (or lack thereof) of their own or somebody elses vulva or vagina. The presence of one is considered quite enough.

[de Selby]

Reading the links, it seems that there are two types of surgery under discussion. One is purely cosmetic. This one gives rise to statements like this (from the Globe and Mail article):

“This is essentially a cultural problem that we fix medically,” said Prof. Atkinson, who studies cosmetic surgery. “We have this notion the body's a problem to be worked and if you slightly deviate from a supposed norm you should do something about it, which is really a market logic. That's how we make a lot of money in our culture, to plant these cultural ideals in people's heads and then try to enforce them.”

True enough, but it's true of ALL cosmetic surgery. Is the OK-ness of it somehow proportional to the number of people who will see it? If so, What's less weird about a boob-job? Falsies would serve as well if you're clothed, right? Isn't the "healthy" reason for cosmetic surgery all about one's self, not other people?

The other procedure has more practical ramifications:

For the past 14 years, Julie Gause was troubled by the after-effects of an “extremely awful episiotomy,” which is an incision to facilitate childbirth, that she had while delivering her son. But “the No. 1” reason she sought the surgery was to “enhance” her sex life. “It's definitely going to be worth it for the rest of my life,” the bubbly, tanned, 35-year-old Los Angeles resident said in an interview. “It takes you back to before children, for sure. It's an amazing difference. It's unbelievable.”

I don't know if that's credible, but if, for instance, I were a woman who already needed surgery for incontinence or something, I'd certainly want to look into it.

I'm completely mystified (and generally grossed out) by the popularity of cosmetic surgery, but I don't find anything extraordinary about this kind.

[Cynical Mom]

The first thought I had upon reading this was 'Wow... on the bright side, these women must have no other outward flaws that bother them more, so I guess that's a plus that they love all of their body except the vulva." Of course I'm probably being naive.

[Gary Sugar]

Pretty funny, and sad if you think about it, but I guess I don't see a big difference between this and other cosmetic surgery. Genital piercings have been popular among both sexes for years. Nearly everything we do with our sex lives is silly.

[Mr Ripley]

Great article about this trend a few years back: "Loose Lips Sink Ships" by Simone Weil Davis. Feminist Studies 28:1 (Spring 2002): 7-35.

[Amanda]

Yes, Matt, there is a "look" to female genitalia that is considered standard now. Granted, it's achieved through photoshop. The look is small clitoris, round but not fleshy outer labia, small and short inner labia and everything the same shade of pink. Indeed, as many of my readers remember, there is also asshole bleaching going on to get the perfect look.

A friend of mine recently had a shit fit because a guy she was dating asked her to shave her upper thighs, something she didn't even know that women did. She freaked until other people assured her he was the weirdo, not her. The moral of the story is obvious enough--there are standards that men have come to believe they have a right to enforce on women and they are strict. And yes, men are guilty, not just women. I'm sick of hearing how women do this to ourselves and men are not involved.

Like I said in another thread where a guy claimed that it was women and women only who enforce the thinness standard--I've never seen a woman wearing a "No Fat Chicks" t-shirt.

[de Selby]

Amanda -

When you say 'men', do you intend to include me?

I'm no more impressed by that than you would be by any sentence that included the phrase 'women have come to believe...'.

[Nancy]

The first thought I had upon reading this was 'Wow... on the bright side, these women must have no other outward flaws that bother them more, so I guess that's a plus that they love all of their body except the vulva." Of course I'm probably being naive.

Posted by: Cynical Mom | August 14, 2005 10:45 PM

Can you be cynical and naive at the same time?
;)

Pretty funny, and sad if you think about it, but I guess I don't see a big difference between this and other cosmetic surgery. Genital piercings have been popular among both sexes for years. Nearly everything we do with our sex lives is silly.

Posted by: Gary Sugar | August 14, 2005 11:11 PM

I think Gary has a good point. Although labia tampering seems an incredible waste of time, it's not worse than foot-binding or neck-stretching, or my favorite peeve, long, painted fingernails. I'm sure the amount of time and money wasted on fingernail aesthetics is greater than that wasted on labias. And with no discernable increase in sexual success resulting from either practice, I'll wager.

[Herbert Browne]

Re: "..is essentially a cultural problem that we fix medically,"� said Prof. Atkinson, who studies cosmetic surgery. "We have this notion the body's a problem to be worked and if you slightly deviate from a supposed norm you should do something about it, which is really a market logic. That's how we make a lot of money in our culture, to plant these cultural ideals in people's heads and then try to enforce them.."-
Applied to fashions, I might agree; but 'deviating from a norm' Physically is also one of the determinants in the establishment of paradigms of beauty. This is the reduction of skin to a form of apparel- and, I suppose that it will require shaving regularly to be appreciated- & then there are product placement issues.
Anyhow, if vulvas are 'sculpted', will the attempt be to mimic aroused, turgid outer labia?.. a kind of "I'm always in heat" look? How will the sculpting affect function? Is this a lipo-transplant or silicone? Is "Dodaesque" about to move South? (Oh Boy, we can have contests- "Did she?.. or didn't she?") sheesh... ^..^

[Richard]

Sorry I didn't catch this one earlier. I've been off spending a weekend with one of the few but real loves of my life. She, and the others that qualify as highly as she does, is perfect from her soles to her head and from her soul to her feelings. Nothing a surgeon could do would make her more or less attractive. What are the men these women hang out with looking for? I guess I just don't get it.

[cfrost]

Ok, this really does take the cake. I had no idea there was a proper vulvar “look”. Though I suppose it’s no weirder than all the nose jobs, boob jobs, cheek bone grafts, and Christ knows what other kinds of surgical self-mutilation.
Oh yeah, and the nails. Whitened, varnished, cut off square, painted with little stars or patterns or whatever. It’s the female equivalent of the mullet. Please.

[gordo]

I always shake my head in wonder as a new "trend" is proclaimed by a media outlet. The number of teenage clients this doctor has "doubled" in 18 months? To what, two? L.A., the plastic surgery capital of the universe, supports how many doctors that specialize in this procedure? One?

[Thomas]

There's something of a unique problem with cosmetic surgery as a way to achieve a body mandated by artificial societal standards. Reality used to place a certain limit on how unrealistic and homogeneous images of women could become.

Certainly, before the advent of mass media, the overwhelming majority of images of women anyone saw were, well, actual women. Real women come in widely varied shapes and sizes, and certain phenomena (like really large, firm breasts of otherwise very thin women) are really rare.

Photography and air-brushing and photoshop have altered that somewhat, so that there are lots of images that don't have to actually look like real women. But cosmetic surgery adds another layer of unreality even to this: there are women who have physically altered their bodies to meet an ideal that it naturally would not.

This has two effects. One is that it makes more expected that which is rare or non-existent naturally: for example, the Barbie-doll proportions. This gets plenty of attention, and I won't belabor the point. The thing about this is that everyone's aware of it. When a woman with a 24 inch waist has giant breasts, we all wonder if they are surgically altered.

The more insidious thing, to my mind, is the homogenization of the female body. In a world with no breast implants, people see all women's breasts more or less at they are. An altered image looks like an altered image, because everyone knows real women don't look like that. But as more and more women get breast augmentation, there are more and more models available to give rise to images of women with augmented breasts, and more and more images get more and more women to have surgery. Does this lead to the extinction of natural breasts? Of course not. Most women do and will continue to live with their breasts as they grow naturally. But it does create a danger that the _image_ of the natural breast will become extinct. If augmented breasts are desirable, and women who model tend to get them, then they become almost mandatory, etc. The vast majority of real women's bodies become almost invisible in the face of a media that tells us what women look like.

I raise this on this thread because it is potentially a much bigger problem with vulvae than with breasts. Most people see clothed breasts all around them their hole lives, and lots of partially or wholly uncovered ones, too. But vulvae are harder to come by. (That pun is entirely in your head. Pay attention.) Straight men in their formative years see lots more professionally produced images of female genitalia than actual genitals of real women. If one physical appearance of vulva became the "photo standard" anatomy, and women who got pictures taken of their genitals got surgery to conform to this ideal, then the image of anything other than the "standard" could become marginal or invisible. And guys could grow up thinking that normal variation was pathological. And women could grow up thinking that their genitals were ugly and misshapen (which is already a huge problem.)

This is a threat to the biodiversity of women's bodies.

[Amanda]

By no means do I think all men, de Selby. I phrased that badly. I meant that men learn from our culture they have a right to ask for certain things. But yeah, most men I know reject that message, at least to a certain extent.

[Matt]

Amanda,

We don't totally disagree, I think. But, I do also think that much more of the "women should look this way" idea comes from, say, women's magazines than from men directly. Women have a way to stop this, though- by saying no. If a guy is a dick, don't date him. It's not so hard, really. (Is shaving one's upper thigh weird? I'd guess not- if you don't want to, don't do it, surely. But it's not weird, I think. What are these people's problems? If you 'freak out' over this, you need help.)

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Women's magazines don't show genitals. That's why the alleged trend towards vulva remodelling is disturbing. You can bet that het women aren't getting labial tucks to impress other women who will never see them anyway. The double irony is that most women don't really know what their own genitals look like, much less how their equipment compares aesthetically to that of the average woman.

There's one "look" that's in vogue in porno right now. But as we all know, beauty standards in any given medium tend to encompass pretty narrow range of what's actually considered attractive even by the prevailing aesthetic of the culture at large. As any aspiring model will tell you, you can be heart-stoppingly beautiful and yet unemployable because the rosebud lip is in this season and not the collagen pout, or vice versa.

According to that creepy news item/press release, women are paying a lot of money to be reconstructed to look exactly like the beaver shots in the latest crop of hardcore men's magazines.

I emphasize that I've got nothing against porn or cosmetic surgery or cosmetic surgery inspired by porn. Consenting adults and all that.

[Thomas]

I do this with full knowledge that this may degenerate into a porn-war, and if it does, it will be my fault.

Lindsay, do you really have "nothing against porn or cosmetic surgery"?

I've made it quite clear what I have against cosmetic surgery. I'm not looking to ban it, and I'm not looking to throw stones of judgment at women who do it, but I am interested in saying that there's reason to criticize it, and I am interested in dissuading women from having cosmetic surgery, especially particular kinds. I do not think that respecting the right of consenting adults to treat their bodies as they see fit is the same as saying, "I have nothing against it." I don't want to ban smoking, either, but I damned sure have something against it.

My thinking brings me to the same conclusion about porn: I'm not going to let a government with one foot in the fundamentalist pool decide what porn is acceptable, so I end up saying that I want the law to stay out of it. But it would be untrue to say I have nothing against it. There's plenty of porn out there that I abhor, that I think people ought not to watch, and ought not to make. Just because I'm not advocating censorship doesn't mean I shouldn't discourage people from participating on the supply or the demand side.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Let me qualify. I have nothing against porn or cosmetic surgery in general. I disapprove of some porn products, not strongly enough to say that they're wrong, but strongly enough to wish that they didn't exist. Likewise for cosmetic surgery--some procedures are too risky to be medically ethical, some just plain don't work, some are promoted in unethical as socially destructive ways.

In my ideal world there would still be porn and nose jobs. They just wouldn't exist in their current context. I'm sure that both bad porn and inappropriate cosmetic surgery contribute to inequality in the real world. But I'm not convinced that the effect is all that large, and even if they were, prohibition and shaming aren't good ways to deal with the problem.

[joe o]

I have a hard time thinking the demand for external genitalia surgery is very strong. Certainly that one doctor wants it to be strong. But, I think he is exagerating. People may fly to him from all over the world because there is noone else to go to. And, even he doesn't do it full time.

I really can't see much of a market for this beyond strippers and porn stars.

[Andrew C.]

It would be cooler if women were walking into the Doc's office with paintings by Georgia O'Keefe and saying -"I want one like this."

I have no beef with body mods (There are a few I'd get myself if I weren't such a coward), but I do have a beef with homogenization, particularly when it's due to cultural pressure. If the Cha-cha Doc was doing things like tatoos, implanted vibrators, teeth, and a host of other things I'd be all for it.

Unfortunately the way our (advertising driven) culture works I don't see things changing, except perhaps for an increase in pressure for men to conform to an unrealistic ideal.

[Julian Elson]

So long as vagina-sculptors don't send e-mails to my AOL account with subjects like "make your vulva look like a pr0n-star!" I don't need to add 1-3" to my penis, and I certainly don't need a vulva-remodelling.

I think that the problem we're having here is not with the procedure itself as the sense of obligation the women have in doing it. I suspect we mostly think tattoos are okay, because no one thinks that someone without a tattoo is somehow deformed or lacking. Want a tattoo? Get one. Don't want one? Don't.

With labiaplasty, are women doing this with the attitude of, "I want my pussy to look extra-awesome," or "I hate how I look down there. I want to be normal?" Of course, that varies by woman, but I think it's the attitude in the second sentence that most of us are finding offensive.

[Scott Hagaman]

I don't think he needs a better publicist. Look at this:

http://www.drmatlock.com/images/magazines/pages/Cleo/4.jpg
http://www.drmatlock.com/images/magazines/pages/Closer/1.jpg
http://www.drmatlock.com/media.htm