“The Barbie” labiaplasty: cosmetic surgery and the influence of porn
Posted: January 27, 2013 Filed under: Beauty, Britain, Feminism, Misogyny, Porn, Sex | Tags: feminism, gender, labiaplasty, misogyny, sex, sexism 28 Comments »Since the 90s, labiaplasty has been a force to be reckoned with. Cosmetic surgery, purely for aesthetic and not medical reasons, on the vagina is now worth a whopping $6.8million per year, with around 5,200 women going under the knife each year. Now, the surgery has been revolutionised, with the introduction of “the Barbie”: the complete removal of the labia minora. This isn’t just restricted to America; in 2012, the BBC reported a five-fold increase in cosmetic labiaplasty.
Disclaimer: I am not saying I am *against* labiaplasty or waxing as such. I am very much of the school of “it’s your body, do with it as you will.” What I think is really important, though, is to examine the trends in areas such as this and examine why womankind at large seems to be so dragged under by the pornstar ideal.
Muff march outside Harley Street
Why are so many women opting to have their perfectly normal, functional vaginas operated on just to fit some plastic ideal? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But this doesn’t seem to apply where labiaplasty is concerned – or most plastic surgery for that matter. The finger can only be pointed squarely at porn. Pubic hair on women has done a disappearing act, as shown by a recent study by a “sex researcher Dr Debra Herbenick, 58.6% of young women sampled reported going hairless at least some of the time.” [1] First it was bikini waxes, then brazillians, then Hollywoods, then whopping off part of your vagina, and now chopping off the whole labia minora. I can only posture that by the end of the decade, women will be reduced to nothing but a plastic slit, to be objectified, held up to an ideal created by porn, and still unhappy with the way that they look. The problem does not lie in the body, but in culture, and its poisonous influence on the way that we view ourselves.
Most heterosexual cis women will hardly ever see another woman’s vagina unless it is in porn. Censorship on television programmes and films means that we rarely see “normal” vaginas, and so our only point of comparison is porn. And despite womankind being clued on, knowing that porn isn’t realistic, it still has an impact. It still imbues itself into our minds of what the perfect body should look like, and it fills us with self-hate.
See this Australian documentary on the subject below.
This documentary goes behind scenes at a soft porn magazine, where one graphic designer’s job is to erase labia from the photos. He has to edit the photos to get rid of any protruding labia, so that only a “single crease” is showing. The porn that has sunk into our culture is based on lies and editing. It is a fallacy, yet we still base our beauty ideals on it. Yet we still chop off bits of our body to achieve an ideal that never even existed anywhere in the world before the labiaplasty surgery was invented. But we are told that the unedited vagina is “too offensive” for print. Normal female bodies are “too offensive”.
Guernica’s Kirsten O’Regan took a step forward for womankind and slipped into enemy territory. She posed as a would-be patient for labiaplasty to see what’s really going on behind scenes. What she found was a culture of body-shaming by the doctor’s themselves – well, with $6.8 million a year at stake, what do you expect? Professional ethics, care for patients, morality? Nah, whop off half your vagina and pay up.
“Neatness counts,” says Dr. Blatt’s website, one of the doctors O’Regan dealt with.
Of course, Blatt and proponents of so-called “cosmetic rejuvenation” of the vagina are failing to point out to their patients that, actually, neatness doesn’t count. Genital beauty is a relatively new concept. The ideals that these women are striving for aren’t normal. The vagina in its natural state is what is normal, not a Barbie pornstar vagina lacking a labia minora. I would even go so far as to say that the Barbie is distinctly abnormal; all cis women are born with labia minora. These doctors are removing what is truly normal and pushing destructive, body-shaming ideas on their patients of the “perfect vagina” – that being hairless, “tucked-in”, and plastic.
O’Regan spoke to Dr. Gary Alter, the creator of the “Alter labia contouring” procedure. “Rather than simply trimming or amputating the labia, this technique removes a wedge-shaped segment of tissue from the central section of each inner lip, then sutures the upper and lower edges of the excision together, creating smaller labia from the remaining tissue,” explains O’Regan.
Worryingly, Dr. Alter admits: “It can fall apart.”
I cannot even comment on the above statement. My jaw has hit the floor. What happened to medical ethics? Or did patients – y’know human beings – fail to matter where money is concerned? (I guess that’s capitalism for you…)
Alter estimates that 20 percent of his labiaplasties are performed to rectify the mistakes of previous surgeries. “I’m not mentioning names,” he says, “but some of the famous gynecologists—I’ve done a lot of revisions on their surgery.”
It would seem that these unnecessary operations (because, of course, I am talking about labiaplasty done for purely aesthetic reasons and not because of any medical condition) aren’t even safe. Women are putting themselves at serious risk and for what? A tidy vagina?
Further reading:
http://jezebel.com/5977025/unhappy-with-your-gross-vagina-why-not-try-the-barbie?tag=porn
http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/kirsten-oregan-labiaplasty-part-i/
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[1] http://www.sexualityresource.com/the-perfect-vagina-why-is-genital-cosmetic-surgery-suddenly-so-popular/
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Well, the idea of my labia falling apart is my new nightmare.
The pros of reading my blog: labia nightmares!
Oh my god, I’m crying.
Timely post: this is a big thing in the media at the moment, isn’t it.First off, I can honestly say that, from this guy’s viewpoint at least, what your genitals look like is just totally NO BIG DEAL! Surgery on on breasts, buttocks, chins, wrinkles etc is at least explicable – if still deeply suspect – insofar as it does impact on how one is perceived in the world. In a world where women were fundamentally better-regarded and more valued those would be no big deal either,but we live in the climate we live in, so… But genitals – how many women are even that intimate with their own genitals? Probably sounds like a weird thing to say but I’ve read some of Shere Hite’s research and also Nancy Friday and and it seems many women
With regard to porn, my first thought is ‘if porn has had so much influence on mainstram culture, what influenced porn (in respect of this nipped and tucked, hairless ideal that all of a sudden seems ubiquitous)?’ I don’t use the stuff any more – more on that in a future post – but I have done over the years; and when I first came upon it back in the ’80s the prevalent ‘look’ was decidedly ‘au naturel’. ‘Shaved’ was considered a ‘specialist’ (i.e. fetish) market – now the reverse is the case: hair (pubic or otherwise) is notable for its absence. Also notable for its absence (in porn) is story: the sex depicted is increasingly casual – insofar as it ‘just happens’ – without any, albeit risible, narrative to explain it. Force is increasingly the scenario.
I wonder if there’s a connection there somewhere? Men forcing themselves on women, not only literally – and they do: ‘rough’ sex and ‘gagging’ blow jobs as tropes in porn sex were things I found increasingly common and increasingly off-putting – but also in terms of forcing a stereotype of attractiveness and availability. I suspect there’s a subtext of ‘backlash’ in there somewhere: as women increasingly break away from ‘traditional’ roles in society, so reactionary elements seek new ways to confine them.
This is about sex, and ‘sexiness’, but really there’s a more general point to be made; it’s an old wine in a new bottle, or as The Who once sang ‘Meet the new boss; same as the old boss’. It’s not so much about what the ideal is; rather that there’s an ideal at all and that one is penalised for not measuring up. Not fitting in leaves one vulnerable. There are parallels with gay and Trans* culture to be made here, as well as foot-binding and FGM; self-harm and drug-abuse. I had a conversation with a guy via GenderTrender a while back who wanted to chop off his dick: the real work, I suggested, was to be done in the mind, not the body. As a former self-harmer, I can attest to that.
Barbie was always a mythical figure: now that the myth is becoming reality, I dread to think where we might go next.
Here are a couple links, sites run by women who are trying to champion female genital ‘naturalness’ and love, over ubiquity and hatred. Warning, the Tumblr one is sexually-explicit
http://vaginasoftheworld.tumblr.com/archive
http://iheartmycunt.blogspot.co.uk/
Andy x
There does seem to be a trend in porn of becoming more and more airbrushed. As you were saying, from the bush, to the fetish shave, now to the waxing, breast implants, lipo and finally onto labiaplasty. It’s trying to remove women from reality and turn them into mythical creatures to be used and abused in porn (with the debasing acts with no sense of context or even showing female pleasure often, just for humiliation). It makes it easier for the viewers to see them as something not quite human that are fair game to do anything to and think anything of. Of course, the knock on effect is that this mythical women is implanted in the collective psyche of womankind as the “perfect” woman to emulate, and to a certain extent, especially young males growing up with the internet, to expect women to be. Most boys I know are revolted at the idea of pubic hair, or quote “messy” vaginas, and I don’t think that this is something evolutionary and natural to want, but expectations gotten from watching TOO DAMN MUCH porn.
“There are parallels with gay and Trans* culture to be made here, as well as foot-binding and FGM; self-harm and drug-abuse.” <– what is this? I would like to learn more about this.
I love explicit. Thanks for the links and thanks for your thoughtful comments.
Sarah x
The last point was a general one about what constitutes ‘normal’ – hetero-normative, cis-normative (don’t much like the term, but get what it means) – who gets to define that – men, for the most part! – and finally the measures that are on offer in order to ‘normalize’ ‘deviants’. As cosmetic surgery is increasingly being sold – to women, especially – as not merely a choice but a necessity to meet standards of normal-ness and acceptability; so once was electro-shock therapy sold to gay people wishing to be ‘straightened’. Probably it still is in some places, and certainly in the US the Christian Right promotes ‘counselling’ for similar motives. I see a parallel with Trans* too – my alignment with the radical feminist position in some recent posts, stems not from a lack of empathy with their suffering – which is undoubtedly real – but rather because I question whether radical surgery, or even lifelong hormone treatment is the best solution. It’s certainly the most profitable one, and the one which best supports the patriarchal/capitalist system; and that’s exactly what leads me to question it. And as mentioned elsewhere, there’s an obvious parallel between labiaplasty and fgm – even if the latter is presented as a ‘choice’, the notion that such surgery is even desirable to achieve acceptability is troubling.
That first paragraph ended mid-sentence: sholuld have read ‘…many women have little familiarity with their vaginas free from notions of how they might appear/function outside of outside of sex with a partner’.
I might add, though, being as most women are ‘straight’ is orientation an issue? Maybe you feel/have experienced differently?
I think for non-straight women, they get the opportunity to see real women up close – ie sex with other women – and so they have a point of comparison. Whereas straight women only ever see themselves and images by, basically porn, not even the media. So it can skew it.
Also as a bi woman with a complete aversion to heterosexual pornography, I think that has affected me because I haven’t taken in a lot of the ideals that porn pushes, and neither have my partners who also don’t watch that porn. I could be wrong here, a glitch myself! But for me, I feel sexuality on this issue can help women to have realistic expectations of their bodies and normalises how they look. They understand themselves in context to other real women rather than to airbrushed pornstars.
Reblogged this on living with feminisms.
This is sick and twisted. Women should learn to love themselves and their bodies. FYI: Real men love real vaginas.
GOOD TO KNOW!
Really well researched post – first there was fake breasts and they fell apart (PIP implants) now this, god only knows what’s next!
Thank you
I don’t think anyone will be happy until every inch of a woman’s body is carved into the masculine ideal. It’ll never stop.
This horrified me. And it’s terrifying that young men are being socialized to think that anything different from the porn look is — ugly or disgusting. And it’s worse that girls are learning to think that also. And wouldn’t the natural swelling of the genitals during relations be counter to what the procedures described above attempt to achieve — and does that mean that female gratification is somehow dirty or wrong or visually unacceptable — i.e. the female circumcision?
Now you’ve said that, the female circumcision is sounding remarkably similar to the Barbie. A very worrying connection!
What the what?! How does someone look down and think, “Ah, yes, a few snips will do me some good on this thing that relatively few people will ever see, much less complain about, but yet is intensely personal to me. Not to mention super-sensitive.” How is this even a thing that is done by medical professionals?
Sigh.
I don’t understand how these doctors have any sense of morality to be pushing this upon young women for financial gain. The poor vaginas
Weird – my first comment is still ‘awaiting moderation’ yet my second, posted just moments later’ appeared immediately (and makes no sense by itself). A glitch?
I have no idea why that happened. I just got both your comments now. Some approved and some not, which is strange cos I’ve got it set to if I’ve already approved one comment in the past, all future comments don’t need moderation. Oh, WordPress!
I’m gonna check out those blogs you sent me. The whole subject baffles me, especially the “barbie”. Say what you will about waxing… but THE BARBIE?!
NSFW!!!!!!!!!!!!! I think I just lost my job
where’s the ‘wow, frightened super-dislike’ button?
I recently moved to an upper Midwest town with a large Somalian population. Up to this point, I had never seen female circumcision in my patients. Now that I’ve had several Somalian Muslim women as my patients, It’s clear that this is almost the same thing. The only difference is these women still get to keep their clitoris…for now. And we look down on African cultures who circumcise women but we do the same thing and more!
Hi Sarah. I’ve been meaning to comment for a while, but was procrastinating.. lol Awesome article! i think you have accurately exposed a situation where people become unnecessarily insecure about their bodies because they are trying to compare themselves to unreasonable and unrealistic superficial (and artificial) social norms. .. and if this is the case, then i feel sorry for anyone that feels the need to spend thousands of dollars on this. then again, given that i am a post-op transwoman, i’m probably the last person in the world who should be denouncing genital surgeries.. lol
Not wanting to hijack Sarah’s comments thread, or imply that I’m owed any answers – I don’t and I’m not – but how do you feel your condition differs from a ‘cis’ woman who chooses to undergo radical surgery?
Andy.
Gender Dysphoria is a recognized medical condition that is formally diagnosable by doctors, and for which sex reassignment surgery is a recognized prescribed medical treatment that is signed off by the presiding physician. this medical diagnosis and it’s implied medical necessity, makes it different, although not necessarily completely unique, to a cis person’s experience of genital dysphoria. while i won’t necessarily suggest that genital modification for cis people is not a necessity in some cases, it would appear that the motive of a cis woman to undergo genital modification surgeries are not related to gender identity or dysphoria related to being forced to live in an opposite gender role from that traditionally expected of one based on birth sex, but rather other factors that make them uncomfortable or dysphoric about their existing genitals.
Are there even words to describe a culture that produces a generation of women who believe that they need their labia removed in order to feel good about themselves?
[...] is, the porn stars are photoshopped. (Sarah Gets Critical has a detailed expose on this topic here.) They don’t really look like that. They aren’t risking their health and sexual [...]
Hi Sarah, loved this post and the irony that the porn stars don’t have the surgery themselves but are photoshopped is clear. I linked to this post from my blog about Vajazzling. http://womanmdsguide.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=971&action=edit&message=6&postpost=v2
Just imagine for a second that the tables were turned between women and men and we lived in a society where there were dirty magazines of guys were on shelves for women to objectify but instead of showing their normal junk they’d airbrushed their balls out. imagine the only place a guy would every really see another mans bits was in these magazines so they’d stand their looking in the mirror wondering what the hell are these hanging down? those guys in porno mags don’t have them, and then guys going around feeling ashamed and self conscious just for having balls and paying £1000s to get them removed. I wish these sick surgeons would put themselves in those shoes. It’s exactly the same thing. All women’s pussys have lips when they reach puberty just like guys get balls, what are these surgeons pedos or something? Ask any guy picking up one of those magazines have u ever seen a pussy like that? The answer will be no. It’s like they don’t have clits. How would you get pleasure? The whole things insane and it makes me want to cry that anyone would hate themselves that much…