This is an extremely shaming thing for me to admit, being a member of a Womens Study course, but a few years ago, I actually did have a labiaplasty. I had existed most of my life without any feelings that there was something ‘wrong’ my body parts, and I had had fulfilling sexual relationships. No partner of mine had ever made disparaging comments. The insecurities came when I really started to encounter pornography. The doctors in the essay claim that with a labiaplasy, the woman is the designer. This is not so. With a labiaplasty, Playboy is the designer. Before I encountered pornography, the only vaginas I had ever seen had been my own and those displayed in medical textbooks. This was my only basis of comparison, and so I felt just find with myself. Pornography, however, gave me image after image of the idealized, perfect vagina, a clean slit, something I didn’t have. This perfect, airbrushed being on the page was so different from me, and I began to feel insecure and ugly and ashamed of said body part. When my boyfriend at the time broke up with me, I had, by then, managed to convince myself that he wasn’t satisfied with the relationship because I had weird labia. I had a labiaplasty done, and it gave me a true, visceral appreciation for the life I lead in a country where female genital mutilation isn’t done. When the anesthesia wore off for me, the pain was excruciating to the point it made me nauseous, and I blanch to think of what it must be like for a twelve year old gurl who undergoes such a thing with rusty tools and no painkillers at all. Later on, when I had enough insight into the situation to wish I hadn’t had the surgery performed, I realized that plastic surgery, cosmetics, shoes, jewelry, yachts, nearly all of commercial America is built on the foundation of people being unhappy. When people are happy, they want for nothing, therefore they purchase nothing, and the more frivolous industries suffer. No wonder, I realized, we are all bombarded constantly with these images of mythical people in media and commercials who are so different from us and so impossible to attain. As long as the industries can keep us hungry for their products, we will continue to feed them. I look at advertisements (not pornography) with a different eye now, seeing it for what it is, a desperate corporations attampt to cash in on my insecurities. I definitely agreed that attitudes by women about women are just as dangerous as attitudes by men about women, and I know that women can make far more cutting and hurtful remarks than men ever dare to in this society.
Amanda Wright
