Editor's note: Some links in this story lead to adult material and are not suitable for viewing at work. All links of this nature will be noted with "NSFW" after them.
If you've been paying attention for a while, you know that cosmetic surgery creeps me out. It's a personal thing.
I'm not going to dis you if you've had it. I have a piercing in what used to be considered an exotic place, before low-rise jeans became all the rage (again). Body jewelry gives some folks the heebie-jeebies; my reaction to cosmetic surgery is similar.
Well, that, plus I think it's rude to waste surgical skill on appearances when so many people don't have the luxury of medicine to prevent and manage diseases. Or surgery when they need it for health purposes. Or even clean water and enough to eat.
I know you can turn that argument on anything. How can I justify spending $5 on a super-colossal soy chai with a shot of espresso, even if it's the only thing between a completed chapter and a missed deadline? Surely I could make a pot of Yuban at home and get the same effect.
Because I know you can turn that argument on anything, I hesitate to make it.
But that doesn't change how I feel about cosmetic surgery. I find I have very clear boundaries for what is OK with me and what is just further evidence of the American potential for truly obnoxious narcissism.
And cosmetic genital surgery is not OK with me. I don't care if porn star pussies make you feel bad about your labia minora, which leads to a loss of your self-esteem. That's too damned bad. Go to Ghana where girls routinely suffer having their clitorises cut off and their labia sewn shut, only to be sliced open by their husbands when it's time for him to have sex.
Oh, no. I'm not even close to TMI yet. Read this article from Amnesty International, if you can stand it. Then come back and tell me surgical enhancements to Western pudenda are a worthy expenditure.
I'm not opposed to elective surgery when it restores functionality or replaces a body part lost to cancer or injury.
For example, surgical vision correction can be considered cosmetic, because most people can see without an operation if they wear glasses or contact lenses. However, I consider the operation functional because it restores vision. But an eye transplant because you'd rather have green eyes than blue is a waste of an ophthalmologist.
I made up the eye transplant thing. At least, I hope I did. But having recently heard a radio commercial promoting 20 percent off of a "breast aug" plus "add lipo for just $6," I can't help but wonder what people are thinking.
Vaginoplasty is old news, even something of a tradition, for women who want to tighten things up again after bearing children. And I can see how women with extremely long inner labia might experience painful intercourse, and therefore welcome the chance to reshape the lips into a smaller form.
It's the bio-sculpting of labia to match some arbitrary standard look that gets my panties in a wad. Where did that "ideal labia" come from, anyway?
It has to be porn. Where else would you see enough vulvas in close-up to develop a spec for standardization? Fleshbot might have enough material to maintain a Celebrity NippleWatch (NSFW), but we're a long way from Celebrity LotusLookout.
But no one should base their concept of what is "normal" or desirable on what they see in porn. The whole point of porn is fantasy. It's not even trying to depict normality.
Meanwhile, the Sex Drive forum has been discussing the practice of hymen reconstruction, which allows a woman to pretend to be a virgin again. (Ouch.)
We've had a great conversation about what constitutes virginity in the modern age and whether virginity is a physical state or something entirely different. But none of us can see the appeal of surgically adding a hymen. A hymen doesn't make you a virgin, and lack of one doesn't make you deflowered.
Modern girls stretch and tear and lose their hymens during athletics long before they become sexually active. I'm pretty sure mine was toast after all the horseback riding I did as a child. My first intercourse still hurt, but it was a stretching kind of hurt, not a tearing-through-a-barrier kind of hurt.
Then, just when you thought our newfound obsession with genitals couldn't get sillier, Viafin-Atlas announced the availability of the SenSlip pseudo-foreskin, to the delighted horror of bloggers everywhere. Honestly, I thought the product was going to be outed as a hoax before now -- one of those that we believe anyway because it's so probable.
Same goes for the Glansie, which does the opposite of the SenSlip. Where the SenSlip garment provides an artificial foreskin for a circumcised man, the Glansie helps an uncut man stretch his foreskin open enough to expose the glans.
Both products claim that covering the glans most of the time protects it from environmental abrasion that leads to loss of sensitivity. Then when you uncover it for sex, your pleasure increases dramatically.
I've always been anti-circumcision, although of course I wouldn't refuse to date or sleep with a guy for that reason alone. It's not his fault his parents bought into the claptrap about hygiene, or that the religious reasons for circumcision have persisted long after the practical situation has changed.
Viafin-Atlas positions its product as restoring a man's right to choose. A baby hardly has a choice about whether a grown-up with a blade is going to snip off part of his body. All the youngster can do is hope the lummox doesn't miss.
These devices are nonsurgical and about function, not reshaping a penis to look more fashionable. And I actually support the idea of men having surgery to reverse their circumcisions, were such a thing possible. (Yes, I know that you can undergo a long "restoration" process, but you can never get the missing parts back.)
A friend once told me that growing up in the rural South, any family who could afford it had their boys circumcised. The poor families usually didn't, and uncut boys suffered ridicule in the locker room.
How ironic if any of those tormentors -- why were they even looking at other boys' equipment, anyway? -- are now wishing for a fully functional foreskin.
It all makes anal bleaching sound like routine grooming.
See you next Friday,
Regina Lynn
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Regina Lynn is the author of The Sexual Revolution 2.0 and the hostess of the Sex Drive forum.
