Female Genital Mutilation, American Style
Today is The other day was apparently "Blog Against Sexism" day, although as Amanda at Pandagon noted, this is a little superfluous when you blog about it regularly, but oh well.
This bit of madness has gone the rounds on feminist blogs for a while, although there are regularly new developments as it gets discussed more in the mainstream media, but I haven't had anything to add except another "Oh, yick!!" before. But the latest addition to the trend of groinal cosmetic surgery procedures kicked something loose, and it fits the topic of the day and the longstanding themes of my writing, so here goes.
--Yes, I did say "groinal cosmetic surgery procedures," that isn't a misprint.
Like what? I assume that if you haven't already heard of this, your legs are probably crossing involuntarily, no matter what your chromosome-pairing, and maybe even if you have. And I agree, it does sound like something out of the more twisted British satirists these days, or maybe old Mad Magazine, but no, it's not a joke. But not to worry, guys - nobody is making a killing off false foreskin surgeries, at least not yet. Of course it's targeted towards women.
Here's one of the doctors offices which does this, Liberty Women's Health Care, so you can see right off, it's not a hoax.
Now, right off, we're not talking about reconstructive surgery for structural damage, like vaginal fistulas or tearing during delivery. This is cosmetic surgery, not medically necessary procedures.
I don't know what order this all started in, since it isn't something that was widely discussed until recently at all, and I think the first I heard of the "issue" was when it came out a few years back that some men were encouraging their women to have C-sections so as to avoid getting stretched out of shape - the internal equivalent of Scarlett O'Hara complaining that she can't fit into her pre-pregnancy corsets any more after her daughter was born. Apparently - not being male I wouldn't know directly - it's just not as fun to have sex with a woman who's born children naturally, it doesn't feel right or something, so for those women who didn't think of this in time, modern medical technology has come to the rescue.
Okay, if you're stretched out by childbirth so far that you can't feel your SO's penis (is this even possible?) enough for comfort, then I can see where you might be willing to have people cutting slices out of you to put in a gusset in your vagina. Me, unnecessary scalpels near sensitive bits of my anatomy are a no-go, starting with fingertips and nail-beds. But YMMV, and yes, it's your body and your money and your choice. --Or is it? Really?
Ileana Vasquez is a 29 year-old Southern California housewife with four children. She read about vaginal rejuvenation after she saw an ad in a magazine. Her marriage was in trouble and she noted that her husband wasn't happy with her sexually.
"One time he had a few beers and told me that because I had all our kids and was looser now he didn't want me as a woman anymore," Vasquez said. "He did say he was sorry later on but I knew he was telling the truth."
Vasquez had the surgery and she noted her marriage is back on track and her sex life is good again. "He's become my sweetheart again," she said. "He bought me a house and he wants me all the time."
Hmm....Okay, maybe I'm not the one to comment, since I don't think much of legalized prosti-- ahem, marriage, anyway. If given by magic only the choice between being Mrs. Vasquz or a toad in a ditch, well, hello duckweed. A while back there was a lot of amused disgust on various boards and blogs about a product called "Absorbshun," which was just overpriced cornstarch marketed for the same purpose, the idea being that if you dust your partner's Tab A it will dry up the "excess" mucous produced to make sex go more smoothly and make your Slot B tighter and harder for him to get into. Fun for everyone! Or at least for the guy, who may be so pleased he'll treat you better (if not so far as to buy you a house.) But at least it doesn't involve knives or lasers cutting things--
But it gets worse. At least the vagina-tightening surgery is about how it feels, meaning that there is some substance there, even if it's all or mostly on one side. In the rest of the article, we find out about other women who have bits of themselves chopped off in order to look more like stalks, so to speak. And sensitive bits, too - the girl in the article had the natural, god-given and perfectly healthy structures of her groin docked like a Doberman Pinscher's tail because hers didn't look like those of the women in the girlie magazines, and she wanted to look more like a porn star, less like a real human being.
"I looked in like, those magazines, and saw that inner labia shouldn't stick out like mine did," said Crystal, who requested her last name be withheld. "So I had a labiaplasty and now I love the way I look; nice and neat and new. My vagina looks perfect."
In a labiaplasty, the surgical reshaping of female external genital structures, larger or uneven inner vaginal lips are cut and shortened.
[...]"The most common reason we hear is that they have had a negative comment made by a male sexual partner. Women are made to feel that they are not perfect the way they are and often it's the partner that sets this off," Loftus said.
"My feeling is that women who aren't sex workers are getting this kind of thing because there's pressure from someone who's telling them they're not perfect," Young said. 'There's often pressure from a man who tells them they need it," adding "I assume that their standards for labial beauty were set by a combination of the porn industry, sex-oriented magazines and the Internet." [...]
"Ever since I had the surgery, I feel young and free and prettier for my boyfriend," Crystal said. "Even if it's something nobody else can see, I feel better. It's not on my mind all the time anymore
Crystal, btw, was 20 when she had the surgery done.
So now if you're not thoroughly squicked yet by the idea of having doctors chop off bits of the most sensitive tissues on a woman's body in order to make them conform to artistic fashions, and the tastes of their male owners, we move on to the worst thing yet - the fad for hymen reconstruction surgery.
Of course this originally came out of those cultures which still [overtly] prize virginity as the most important personal quality of a new wife, and is not it turns out a modern invention. Since the Torah sets as the standard bloodied sheets stained by the freshly-ruptured hymen of the bride, to be presented as evidence by the defence in a divorce/stoning case, this created a strong pressure from antiquity on through the Renaissance to fake the evidence by young women whose abstinence-only education had not worked. From ancient versions of Absorbshun to the ever-popular pre-inserted chicken-blood-filled sponge, up to and including the internal re-stitching according to Talmudic and Christian discussions of the problem of mandatory female purity with drastic punishments for transgressing--
Now, let's not assume that it was all sneaky women trying to get one by the man they were being forced to marry - according to the histories, both parties would be frisked sometimes going into the nuptial chamber, to make sure they weren't carrying some pre-stained sheets under their clothes, back in these pre-forensics eras (alternately, a little scalp pain and a sharp needle would satisfy the DNA problem) either because the young couple had forgotten like so many parents of seven-month-babies that True Love Waits, and didn't want to get caught, or because the guy didn't have that proper manly jealousy and knew and didn't care that his fiancee wasn't a virgin. Draconic punishment --> ever-more creative evasion tactics.
These days, most American medical sources point out that all kinds of things can cause a ruptured hymen, not just sex, and not all women have an obvious one, and an obviously-popped cherry and bleeding aren't inevitable with first-time sex if both parties are careful and considerate of each other's pleasure - although there are still conservative Christian sex guides which caution against virgins using tampons, lest their future husbands think them unchaste, just as in the 1930s and '40s "family handbooks." And every bodice-ripping romance novel still features a combined cherry-popping/bloody orgasm "first time" scene, even if they're not all the rape fantasies they used to be.
So while the way that the media (and blogs) originally portrayed this was as an exclusively Other thing, something only done by those benighted Moslems who valued virginity so much that they'd automatically have an honor killing (just like an Old Testament family) if the bride weren't proven such by bloodied sheets, it shouldn't be that much of a surprise to find out that American women are paying big bucks too to have their hymens restitched shut - if not for the same reason, exactly, still for a reason which at root is just the same: a fetishizing of female virginity and the ritual purity symbolized by the "sealed gate" of the hymen, and a fetishizing of male power and privilege as the one with the "right" to break open the seal and be the sole posessor of "his" woman's body.
“I have affluent upper-class ladies coming in from Manhattan, getting ready for a second-honeymoon cruise or something like that. Or some women had a disappointing time the first time they were deflowered and now they have found someone special they would really like to give it up to,” says Dr Marco Pelosi, a gynaecologist and plastic surgeon who has a specialist clinic in Bayonne, New Jersey. He performs ten hymenoplasties a month.
I've said it before, and I will say it again: prudery and prurience are two sides of the same puritanical coin. Those African cultures which practice FGM (since it predates Islam by a few thousand years in Egypt as a ritual blood sacrifice, and is carried out even among Christians in the groups where it is a tradition, and isn't mentioned in the Quran, blaming it on Islam makes less sense than blaming male circumsision in the West on Judaism) do so ostensibly because it is believed that women's genitalia are unclean and harmful to both men and women, physically and spiritually contaminating to all who come in contact with them; actually or simultaneously because it is seen as a good way to guarantee female purity, a biological chastity belt that can never be taken off; equally actually, because women - who are the chief practitioners and enforcers of FGM - want other women to suffer and be kept down, under the guise of doing them good, since "no man would want to marry" an uncut woman--and men wanting it, or going along with it, because of the concern for maintaining female chastity and the pleasure of a tighter fit--
All of which are to be found in white, Western culture, in different styles - and while it used to be able to be said that well we might think it but at least we don't torture women by cutting their vulvas off, that isn't actually true now.
Nor was it ever - it turns out that as recently as the Gilded Age and quite openly, some doctors were doing just that to control female masturbation, just as other doctors were spaying women a generation before that, to make them more docile and less emotionally-disturbed, into better housewives. Women's genitalia are harmful to psychological health, disruptive to society - cut them off! Women stretched too loose from giving birth? Stitch them tighter for their husband's sake!
And now we have women having their own genitalia cut off and cut into because they think they are unclean-looking and will not be attractive enough to their boyfriends, or that they have an obligation to be as tight as possible, no matter how it hurts them, and even having a fake hymen stitched into themselves, to give their male owners the "pleasure" of piercing them and the illusion of ravishing a virgin--
“Now my sister is thinking of becoming a virgin again for her 45th birthday to surprise her husband,” says Mrs Yarborough gleefully, as she sits in her modest family home in San Antonio, Texas, talking unabashedly about such intimate matters.
“She insisted that she really wanted to do it for us. After the surgery in November 2004, we waited and waited while she healed up. It was all planned for a romantic Valentine’s weekend. I was nervous - we both were. It felt very strange - but it was also instant pleasure,” says Mr Yarborough. So did it hurt? “Oh yeah,” says Mrs Yarborough, almost proudly. “And I bled a bit.”
And they're paying for the privilege of all this. Paying thousands of dollars, for it all.
Whether or not the guy really wants the joys of sex that causes friction burns, as Pseudo-Albertus talks about.
You know, after finding out that after all the hypocrisies of sneering at those Oriental Others with their foot-binding, American women are having their own feet butchered at the price of pain and the risk of lameness in order to fit into fashionable shoes, let alone boob-jobs and nose-jobs to look more like porn stars, I really shouldn't find this surprising. Just because I'm not willing to undergo anything more painful than a pierced ear for the sake of personal adornment (something I did, once, and won't do again) won't even put up with the itchiness and stink of a mask of makeup on my skin, and certainly not to spend much money on my looks, whether for myself or to conform to custom - well, I've never been under the illusion I was normal. It isn't as if I haven't studied fashion history as a costumer, and don't know about corsets and boning.
But still. You'd think with all this going on, that we'd be a little less hubristic about how much more liberated and benign we Westerners are than the benighted foreigners--
...And that is not all. We have engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist - making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast!
--CS Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1941
This bit of madness has gone the rounds on feminist blogs for a while, although there are regularly new developments as it gets discussed more in the mainstream media, but I haven't had anything to add except another "Oh, yick!!" before. But the latest addition to the trend of groinal cosmetic surgery procedures kicked something loose, and it fits the topic of the day and the longstanding themes of my writing, so here goes.
--Yes, I did say "groinal cosmetic surgery procedures," that isn't a misprint.
Like what? I assume that if you haven't already heard of this, your legs are probably crossing involuntarily, no matter what your chromosome-pairing, and maybe even if you have. And I agree, it does sound like something out of the more twisted British satirists these days, or maybe old Mad Magazine, but no, it's not a joke. But not to worry, guys - nobody is making a killing off false foreskin surgeries, at least not yet. Of course it's targeted towards women.
Here's one of the doctors offices which does this, Liberty Women's Health Care, so you can see right off, it's not a hoax.
Now, right off, we're not talking about reconstructive surgery for structural damage, like vaginal fistulas or tearing during delivery. This is cosmetic surgery, not medically necessary procedures.
I don't know what order this all started in, since it isn't something that was widely discussed until recently at all, and I think the first I heard of the "issue" was when it came out a few years back that some men were encouraging their women to have C-sections so as to avoid getting stretched out of shape - the internal equivalent of Scarlett O'Hara complaining that she can't fit into her pre-pregnancy corsets any more after her daughter was born. Apparently - not being male I wouldn't know directly - it's just not as fun to have sex with a woman who's born children naturally, it doesn't feel right or something, so for those women who didn't think of this in time, modern medical technology has come to the rescue.
Okay, if you're stretched out by childbirth so far that you can't feel your SO's penis (is this even possible?) enough for comfort, then I can see where you might be willing to have people cutting slices out of you to put in a gusset in your vagina. Me, unnecessary scalpels near sensitive bits of my anatomy are a no-go, starting with fingertips and nail-beds. But YMMV, and yes, it's your body and your money and your choice. --Or is it? Really?
Ileana Vasquez is a 29 year-old Southern California housewife with four children. She read about vaginal rejuvenation after she saw an ad in a magazine. Her marriage was in trouble and she noted that her husband wasn't happy with her sexually.
"One time he had a few beers and told me that because I had all our kids and was looser now he didn't want me as a woman anymore," Vasquez said. "He did say he was sorry later on but I knew he was telling the truth."
Vasquez had the surgery and she noted her marriage is back on track and her sex life is good again. "He's become my sweetheart again," she said. "He bought me a house and he wants me all the time."
Hmm....Okay, maybe I'm not the one to comment, since I don't think much of legalized prosti-- ahem, marriage, anyway. If given by magic only the choice between being Mrs. Vasquz or a toad in a ditch, well, hello duckweed. A while back there was a lot of amused disgust on various boards and blogs about a product called "Absorbshun," which was just overpriced cornstarch marketed for the same purpose, the idea being that if you dust your partner's Tab A it will dry up the "excess" mucous produced to make sex go more smoothly and make your Slot B tighter and harder for him to get into. Fun for everyone! Or at least for the guy, who may be so pleased he'll treat you better (if not so far as to buy you a house.) But at least it doesn't involve knives or lasers cutting things--
But it gets worse. At least the vagina-tightening surgery is about how it feels, meaning that there is some substance there, even if it's all or mostly on one side. In the rest of the article, we find out about other women who have bits of themselves chopped off in order to look more like stalks, so to speak. And sensitive bits, too - the girl in the article had the natural, god-given and perfectly healthy structures of her groin docked like a Doberman Pinscher's tail because hers didn't look like those of the women in the girlie magazines, and she wanted to look more like a porn star, less like a real human being.
"I looked in like, those magazines, and saw that inner labia shouldn't stick out like mine did," said Crystal, who requested her last name be withheld. "So I had a labiaplasty and now I love the way I look; nice and neat and new. My vagina looks perfect."
In a labiaplasty, the surgical reshaping of female external genital structures, larger or uneven inner vaginal lips are cut and shortened.
[...]"The most common reason we hear is that they have had a negative comment made by a male sexual partner. Women are made to feel that they are not perfect the way they are and often it's the partner that sets this off," Loftus said.
"My feeling is that women who aren't sex workers are getting this kind of thing because there's pressure from someone who's telling them they're not perfect," Young said. 'There's often pressure from a man who tells them they need it," adding "I assume that their standards for labial beauty were set by a combination of the porn industry, sex-oriented magazines and the Internet." [...]
"Ever since I had the surgery, I feel young and free and prettier for my boyfriend," Crystal said. "Even if it's something nobody else can see, I feel better. It's not on my mind all the time anymore
Crystal, btw, was 20 when she had the surgery done.
So now if you're not thoroughly squicked yet by the idea of having doctors chop off bits of the most sensitive tissues on a woman's body in order to make them conform to artistic fashions, and the tastes of their male owners, we move on to the worst thing yet - the fad for hymen reconstruction surgery.
Of course this originally came out of those cultures which still [overtly] prize virginity as the most important personal quality of a new wife, and is not it turns out a modern invention. Since the Torah sets as the standard bloodied sheets stained by the freshly-ruptured hymen of the bride, to be presented as evidence by the defence in a divorce/stoning case, this created a strong pressure from antiquity on through the Renaissance to fake the evidence by young women whose abstinence-only education had not worked. From ancient versions of Absorbshun to the ever-popular pre-inserted chicken-blood-filled sponge, up to and including the internal re-stitching according to Talmudic and Christian discussions of the problem of mandatory female purity with drastic punishments for transgressing--
Now, let's not assume that it was all sneaky women trying to get one by the man they were being forced to marry - according to the histories, both parties would be frisked sometimes going into the nuptial chamber, to make sure they weren't carrying some pre-stained sheets under their clothes, back in these pre-forensics eras (alternately, a little scalp pain and a sharp needle would satisfy the DNA problem) either because the young couple had forgotten like so many parents of seven-month-babies that True Love Waits, and didn't want to get caught, or because the guy didn't have that proper manly jealousy and knew and didn't care that his fiancee wasn't a virgin. Draconic punishment --> ever-more creative evasion tactics.
These days, most American medical sources point out that all kinds of things can cause a ruptured hymen, not just sex, and not all women have an obvious one, and an obviously-popped cherry and bleeding aren't inevitable with first-time sex if both parties are careful and considerate of each other's pleasure - although there are still conservative Christian sex guides which caution against virgins using tampons, lest their future husbands think them unchaste, just as in the 1930s and '40s "family handbooks." And every bodice-ripping romance novel still features a combined cherry-popping/bloody orgasm "first time" scene, even if they're not all the rape fantasies they used to be.
So while the way that the media (and blogs) originally portrayed this was as an exclusively Other thing, something only done by those benighted Moslems who valued virginity so much that they'd automatically have an honor killing (just like an Old Testament family) if the bride weren't proven such by bloodied sheets, it shouldn't be that much of a surprise to find out that American women are paying big bucks too to have their hymens restitched shut - if not for the same reason, exactly, still for a reason which at root is just the same: a fetishizing of female virginity and the ritual purity symbolized by the "sealed gate" of the hymen, and a fetishizing of male power and privilege as the one with the "right" to break open the seal and be the sole posessor of "his" woman's body.
“I have affluent upper-class ladies coming in from Manhattan, getting ready for a second-honeymoon cruise or something like that. Or some women had a disappointing time the first time they were deflowered and now they have found someone special they would really like to give it up to,” says Dr Marco Pelosi, a gynaecologist and plastic surgeon who has a specialist clinic in Bayonne, New Jersey. He performs ten hymenoplasties a month.
I've said it before, and I will say it again: prudery and prurience are two sides of the same puritanical coin. Those African cultures which practice FGM (since it predates Islam by a few thousand years in Egypt as a ritual blood sacrifice, and is carried out even among Christians in the groups where it is a tradition, and isn't mentioned in the Quran, blaming it on Islam makes less sense than blaming male circumsision in the West on Judaism) do so ostensibly because it is believed that women's genitalia are unclean and harmful to both men and women, physically and spiritually contaminating to all who come in contact with them; actually or simultaneously because it is seen as a good way to guarantee female purity, a biological chastity belt that can never be taken off; equally actually, because women - who are the chief practitioners and enforcers of FGM - want other women to suffer and be kept down, under the guise of doing them good, since "no man would want to marry" an uncut woman--and men wanting it, or going along with it, because of the concern for maintaining female chastity and the pleasure of a tighter fit--
All of which are to be found in white, Western culture, in different styles - and while it used to be able to be said that well we might think it but at least we don't torture women by cutting their vulvas off, that isn't actually true now.
Nor was it ever - it turns out that as recently as the Gilded Age and quite openly, some doctors were doing just that to control female masturbation, just as other doctors were spaying women a generation before that, to make them more docile and less emotionally-disturbed, into better housewives. Women's genitalia are harmful to psychological health, disruptive to society - cut them off! Women stretched too loose from giving birth? Stitch them tighter for their husband's sake!
And now we have women having their own genitalia cut off and cut into because they think they are unclean-looking and will not be attractive enough to their boyfriends, or that they have an obligation to be as tight as possible, no matter how it hurts them, and even having a fake hymen stitched into themselves, to give their male owners the "pleasure" of piercing them and the illusion of ravishing a virgin--
“Now my sister is thinking of becoming a virgin again for her 45th birthday to surprise her husband,” says Mrs Yarborough gleefully, as she sits in her modest family home in San Antonio, Texas, talking unabashedly about such intimate matters.
“She insisted that she really wanted to do it for us. After the surgery in November 2004, we waited and waited while she healed up. It was all planned for a romantic Valentine’s weekend. I was nervous - we both were. It felt very strange - but it was also instant pleasure,” says Mr Yarborough. So did it hurt? “Oh yeah,” says Mrs Yarborough, almost proudly. “And I bled a bit.”
And they're paying for the privilege of all this. Paying thousands of dollars, for it all.
Whether or not the guy really wants the joys of sex that causes friction burns, as Pseudo-Albertus talks about.
You know, after finding out that after all the hypocrisies of sneering at those Oriental Others with their foot-binding, American women are having their own feet butchered at the price of pain and the risk of lameness in order to fit into fashionable shoes, let alone boob-jobs and nose-jobs to look more like porn stars, I really shouldn't find this surprising. Just because I'm not willing to undergo anything more painful than a pierced ear for the sake of personal adornment (something I did, once, and won't do again) won't even put up with the itchiness and stink of a mask of makeup on my skin, and certainly not to spend much money on my looks, whether for myself or to conform to custom - well, I've never been under the illusion I was normal. It isn't as if I haven't studied fashion history as a costumer, and don't know about corsets and boning.
But still. You'd think with all this going on, that we'd be a little less hubristic about how much more liberated and benign we Westerners are than the benighted foreigners--
...And that is not all. We have engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist - making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast!
--CS Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1941