Loving your bits

I recently watched a BBC America documentary (part of the BBC Reveals series) called Perfect Private Parts. The hour long documentary is about labiaplasty and other genital plastic surgery. Labiaplasty, for those who don’t know, involves cutting and reshaping one or both sets of the labia, to make them smaller.  The documentary is adamantly opposed to any surgery and the director, Lisa Rogers, states on camera that she is making the film in hopes of not only understanding why women undergo labiaplasty, but  also dissuading viewers from considering these surgeries.

The film raised two issues I want to address. The first is the way in which, once again, an apparently feminist argument is really covering over a certain kind of misogyny that I find appalling and a bit dangerous. The entire documentary presented women as weak and lacking in self esteem, unable to see themselves apart from the male gaze. And while I am certainly not going to deny the pressure on women to conform to ridiculous beauty standards–or the penalties meted out to those who fail–I do think that women are intelligent and self aware, and might actually, on occasion, be able to make decisions about their bodies that are not mindless attempts to placate the patriarchy. To believe that any woman who chooses breast implants or a diet or a tight skirt is doing so because she has been colonized by male patriarchal thinking is as sexist as believing that a woman who doesn’t choose those things is not a real woman.

The cases Rogers chooses also reveals her limited thinking. The women profiled are a girl of perhaps 17 who has the surgery because her sister and a few friends made fun of her, a divorced single woman who specifically stated that she needed the surgery in order to raise her self esteem before getting back to dating and a mother who, upon looking at her vagina in a mirror, bolts from the room in tears because all she sees are the varicose veins from giving birth.

What the show never addresses is that some women seek labiaplasty because their lips are so large that it is uncomfortable to wear a bathing suit or tight clothes, or ride a bike. Other women have hypersensitive lips, so sensitive sex can actually be unpleasant. I suppose these women could “rebel against the patriarchy” by wearing oversized jeans, but I don’t think that if they seek out labiaplasty they are “chopping off bits” to please men! The low point in the show actually came when Rogers interviewed a Muslim woman seeking to be “revirginized” through a hymenoplasty. She explained that if her parents found out she was not a virgin they would kill her and themselves from the shame. Later, the director tearfully muses to the camera how horrible this young woman’s life is. “Her life is going to be absolute crap.” I’m not sure if Rogers means because she’s a strict Muslim, because she’s basing her marriage on a lie, or because of the gential surgery itself. And while it would be wonderful if we lived in a world that celebrated women’s sexuality, I’m not convinced that this woman can’t have a happy life.

My second issue with the show has nothing to do with the show itself, but rather with the broadcast. Considering that the the point of the show is to urge women to become comfortable with their vaginas and see the range in normal vaginas, it makes absolutely no sense to blur the vaginas!!!!

Okay, I understand FCC regulations and such. I realize there was no chance that close up shots of genitalia (especially female genitalia) were ever going to make it onto American television without drastic blurring. I get that. But it wasn’t just genitalia that were blurred. In one scene, we actually watch a labiaplasty being performed and in one shot, the doctor holds up the strip of flesh that he has cut off. They blur the strip of flesh!!!! Yes, because there’s nothing more erotic than detached bits of labia!

The documentary also profiles a sculpture, The Great Wall of Vagina, by Jamie McCartney made up of plaster casts of 200 vaginas. The goal of the sculpture is to show women just how wide a range there is, and how all are beautiful. And of course the sculpture is blurred. Not the casts (inside out vaginas are apparently okay), but the actual sculpture. Sigh. So yes, an entire hour long program designed to make women feel better about their genitals turns into an hour long reminder that genitals are so upsetting that we can’t look at them. Way to support the project!

Here, unblurred for your edification, is a link to  The Great Wall of Vagina. Now go look at your genitals in the mirror.