Thursday 4 March 2010

Last night, the ABC's Hungry Beast scored a coup because my 80-year-old mum watched it for the first time after having been informed by me, on my way out the door after I'd eaten the dinner she'd cooked, that it was on later.

The program also scored points for showing, on national TV at 9pm on a weekday, female genitalia in its uncensored, unadorned form. Lips and all. Pendulous labia. Protruberant clitoral hood.

The works, in short. But it was all revealed in a good cause because what Kirsten Drysdale - the reporter leading the story - and the Hungry Beast crew had in their sights was the unnecessary and shameful practice of labiaplasty.

It's not a new topic from my perspective. Back in April 2007, I blogged about labiaplasty on this blog. To give the post impact, I included a discrete photo showing a young woman shaving her pudenda.

Needless to say, the post is consistently among the top-scorers for this blog, in terms of hits. Plenty from the Middle East as well as those created by the routinely deviant boys in the West.

You know who you are, fellers.

Labiaplasty is a medical procedure inolving the removal of flesh that constitutes part of the labia minora, or inner lips of the vulva. It may be painless and it may be covered by medical benefits - I'm not sure on this part, actually - but it sure as hell seems like a step down the wrong path.

The right path, it seems to me, is to allow soft porn magazines to show the labia even of women who do not conform to an unnatural stereotype. There's nothing 'wrong' with big lips, and there are plenty of 'specialty' porn sites that celebrate this characteristic of the pudenda.

Drysdale took the fight up to the Australian Classification Board, which is based in inner Sydney, by offering to show them photos of vulvas and asking them to inform Drysdale if any of them would be banned under current guidelines.

The Classification Board member interviewed looked distinctly uncomfortable at times.

Hungry Beast also interviewed a graphic artist employed by a magazine, who described the process of "cleaning up" photos.

Women, it seems, are starting to express their shame about the deviant - in their minds - appearance of their private parts in concrete ways. In addition to labioplasty, we've got the recent practice of vajazzling.

Far less severe, because entirely cosmetic, vajazzling involves removing all the pubic hair and applying rhinestones in a pattern on the mons pubis. A specialist beauty consultant is responsible for performing the procedure, which is entirely painless and does not cause a permanent change in the woman's physical appearance.

It's purely X-rated bling, in fact.

Nevertheless, it's a sign that we've airbrushed this part of the human anatomy out of the public square so efficiently that entirely artificial means are now sought to offset insecurities that are completely undeserved. It's not fair that women have to feel like this.

I can cope with vajazzling. I can't tolerate the conditions that contribute to the reality of labiaplasty.

1 comment:

Vanessa said...
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