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Monday, January 02, 2006
Beauty’s Newest Frontier
The New York Times Sunday Magazine can be rather strange, but the most recent edition offers a real eye-opener:
Our Vaginas, OurselvesThese are cruel times for vaginas. Lately, as if I don't have enough to worry about, with the deadline on various unkept 2005 resolutions fast upon me, I have begun obsessing about various aspects of my genital appearance. Take my labia minora, for instance. Tucked away as those intimate folds of flesh are - hidden in the underbrush, you might say - I have never given them much thought, except as they relate to experiences of sensual pleasure. Ditto my labia majora, which dutifully served their purpose in guarding the entryway to what the Victorians would have quaintly referred to as my maidenhead. As for the much vaunted hymen (named for the Greek god of marriage), mine remained intact longer than most thanks to my slow-blooming erotic life, until such time as a boyfriend's patient late-night exertions finally parted me from it at the age of 25. Needless to say, its absence - much less the idea that I might be harboring a deep sense of nostalgia for this tiny piece of overinvested membrane, might indeed be secretly yearning to reclaim it - hasn't so much as crossed my mind in the intervening years.
The authoress -- Daphne Merkin? Really now! -- goes on at length about modern trends in, ah, pubic fashion, at most of which she affects an air of faintly amused disapproval. Allow your Curmudgeon to say that an organ whose supposed stance on women's bodies is that women have an absolute right to do whatever they please with them is a strange place to find an article that barely resists outrightly condemning vaginal depilation and rescuplting.
More likely than not, the editors approved this article because of its unconcealed disdain for such activities when performed specifically to please men, and because they simply couldn't resist the lure of that headline over that byline. Agreed, sexual correctness plus a naughty pun makes a strange cocktail, even for the Times Sunday Magazine, but stranger things have happened. This, after all, is the paper that was once the home of Howell Raines and Jayson Blair, and hosts ice-queen / aspiring siren Maureen Dowd to this very day.
Still, the matter deserves deeper penetration. The human body is a fount of endless delight, and of course sexual delights are a part of that. Large numbers of women have discovered that large numbers of men will willingly offer a particularly delightful form of homage to their temples of Venus, if it's given just a few passes with a razor. Why should anyone have a problem with that?
Oh, a thousand pardons. Your Curmudgeon has forgotten that sexual correctness holds men to be the enemy, and their desires to be oppressive...even when they mesh perfectly with women's desires. Too much of a chance that women might actually discover that they like men and are willing to please them, don't y'know.
The climax of Merkin's thrust is as follows:
[A]lthough it's true that the very structural inaccessibility of the vagina may lead to difficulties with body image (how do you go about envisioning something you can't see?), it also serves as a kind of protection against the relentless judgment - the fierce critique - of every pixel of our appearance that women, far more than men, are inclined to. Men may have begun to worry a bit more about their drooping jowls than they used to and may be the target of those abject penile-enhancement ads that pop up all over the Internet, but 90 percent of all cosmetic procedures are performed on women. So having one less visual surface to commodify - to narrow our eyes at accusingly, checking out for acceptability or desirability in terms of size, shape and firmness - leads me to offer up silent thanks for small favors of chromosomal destiny.
Daphne, Daphne, Daphne! If your "slow-blooming erotic life" hasn't taught you anything else, it should have taught you that time and tide wait for no man -- or woman. We who've attained a certain age are often uncomfortably aware of the pleasures we've stinted, for whatever reason. If we're honest about it, we acknowledge those omissions to our progeny, and counsel them to do better, if they can. Technological advance often allows them to do much better indeed. If they find that their tastes are so inclined and their means will allow, why should they refrain? "Life is not a dress rehearsal." [Paul Hogan] If women find that their sex lives are enhanced by harmless vaginal alterations, whether they be as easily reversible as a Brazilian wax or as dramatic as labial reshaping, where's the harm? Is your aversion to pleasing a man as absolute as all that? It sounds suspiciously like a bad case of toxic penis envy, dear; you should have it taken care of at once.
Ahhh! That was a highly satisfying screed to compose. Gentle Readers, was it good for you, too?
Comments
Dang, now I need a smoke.
Posted by og on 01/02/2006 at 12:21 PMAwesome!!!
I actually sat back to read and enjoy your romantic commentary on such an interesting organ of the erotica. Because this is my homeground.
I did a project on FGM(Female Genital Mutilation) and I actually take my time to study the Vaginas of my girlfriends and the more I did the more they loved me.
I know the Vaginas of most women than they know them.
Thank you.
Posted by Orikinla Osinachi on 01/02/2006 at 01:22 PMThe Best of Rush today recapped the item on chocolate “vaginas”—which, as Dolly pointed out on BTB, aren’t really modelling vaginas but vulvae.
Which makes one wonder at women’s assertions that they have come to know their own or other’s netherworlds, yet they know so little of gross anatomy.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 01/02/2006 at 03:08 PMI want something to eat! Scrambled eggs preferably!
Posted by on 01/02/2006 at 07:08 PMNothing kills my sex drive more perfectly than a feminist twerp trying to reduce that most delightful of mysteries to politics.
No wonder they can’t get laid.
If you’ll pardon my sexist attitude, of course.
Posted by Misha I on 01/04/2006 at 02:15 AMP.J. O’Rourke calls them the “perpetually indignant”. They flock to anti-war rallies, organic produce markets and union picket lines. Increasingly, they write for puffed-up landfill liners such as the NY Times Sunday Magazine.
Does it surprise us that Daphne Merkin takes oodles of ink to obsess over the trivial genital adjustments of the bored, the desperate, the deliberate caterers to men?
Totally lost in her unfocused pseudo-hysteria over shaving and botox plumping was any comparison to real genital crimes against women. If maidenhead reconstruction surgery is politically suspect, how about clitorectomies, gang revenge rapes and honor killings?
Or is the thought of male-pleasing, sex-loving, pc-impaired women so threatening to the NY Times that all sense of proportion is lost? Bikini wax, rape rooms, all the same thing, hey?
Come on, Daphne. This is a case where the personal is definitely not political. Relax, lie back and just enjoy it. We promise we’ll call you in the morning.
Posted by on 01/04/2006 at 05:20 AMI think you’re a “deviated prevert”—Col Bat Guano.
Posted by on 01/04/2006 at 11:14 AM
