Why are cosmetic surgeons so eager to get their hands on your vagina?

I’ve never actually had one myself, so maybe I’m not really qualified to talk about them, but you know what I like about vaginas? Pretty much everything. I mean, I think it’s pretty fair to say I never met a vagina I didn’t like. In fact, when I fill out forms that ask for my religion, I write in “Vagitarian”. Still reading? IMPRESSIVE! I thought this would be a cakewalk, but as I sat down to say the things I meant to say about the terrifying beast sometimes referred to as “vaginasaurous rex”, I was finding it hard, and finally decided to jump right in, rather than trying to ease slowly into it. We’ve touched on penises before here, and pointed out the odd societal discomfort with the topic, so I thought it was time to give some equal airtime to vaginas. The first hump in this process seems to be the use of the very word vagina, so we’re going to desensitize you a little more. Vagina vagina vagina. There! You should be ready now. But before I go on, I have to ask once again – what IS it about our nethers that makes them so unspeakable? People will talk comfortably about nearly any other body part, both internal and external, usually hesitating only when mention of human waste or mucous seems imminent. That kind of makes sense; both of those things are kind of gross, right? But our genitals? This is an area of the body that otherwise is practically worshipped in many contexts. Perhaps that’s it. It’s sacred somehow. Weird.

Anyway, my interest in doing a spread on vaginas was originally aroused by an article on LiveScience.com called Designer Vagina Websites Need Makeover, Study Suggests. Whoa Nellie! What the hell is a “Designer Vagina”?, I wondered. I’m sure by now we’ve all heard of vajazzling; was it some kind of vajayjay bejeweling for the jet set? I honestly was astounded to learn that not only was cosmetic surgery for vaginas a booming business, it was rife with deceit and exploitation, offering scientifically unsubstantiated promises of not only visual redesign – like a nose job for your no-no – but procedures to enhance your satisfaction, and claims about how a labioplasty will boost personal hygiene and curb infection risk, both claims completely unsubstantiated by research. I wondered to myself what kind of quack doctor would make it their life’s work to focus on such procedures. Medical school is quite a rigorous and expensive pursuit. One hopes that as well as wanting to make piles of money, another part of the motivation would be to make people HEALTHY. I don’t have issues with reconstructive cosmetic surgery, but the vanity-driven variety is something I generally find literally offensive in a number of ways. And to extend the exploitation of poor self-esteem to someone’s rarely-revealed personal parts seemed to me especially creepy and opportunistic.

I figured the leaders of the field would be men, and for some reason I imagined them with creepy smirks on their faces. Well, “the internet, it do not disappoint“, as pretty much no-one says. A quick Google search for “Designer Vaginas” turns up the Designer Vagina’s page (misplaced apostrophe and all) of “Dr. G’s Cosmetic Surgery”. If you don’t find the pose of the doctor with his elbow on the female patient’s back creepy (screenshot below), I don’t think I want to be your friend. And sure enough, this and other Designer Vagina clinics seem to be based mostly on selling women into the idea that their hoo hoo is a horrible thing to behold, and should at least bring them more sexual pleasure than it does. Not that their sexual partner has anything to do with the latter, of course.

Look, I’m all in favor of a woman hacking her vagina  as she sees fit, but can’t we otherwise just LEAVE THE VAGINAS ALONE? Aside from a few peripherally-related complaints – which I’ll get to in a minute – a woman’s “promised land” is generally a wonderful thing, in its varied splendor of form. And that use of the silly euphemism “promised land” was intentional, as a segue into my main complaints about vaginas. First of all, about nomenclature – can we PLEASE find a better term for the entire area “down there”? A vagina is a vagina, and it’s only one part of a woman’s “private parts”. As flip as I can be to make a topic more amusing and palatable, I do my research, and especially when the topic is something I have such a natural passion for, I’m thorough. After an extensive search of both “polite” and “dirty” terms for a woman’s genital area, the list was pretty sad. The less-offensive “cute” terms like “cupcake”, “hoohoo”, “kitty”, and “coochie” seemed to have been conceived by three year olds, and the supposedly “polite” terms like “lady garden”, “girly bits”, and “honey pot” aren’t much of an improvement. And you can always tell when the term was created by a man; it usually refers to animals, meat, odor, or hair. Of all the nasty manwords for the girly bits, even the amusing ones – like “panty hamster” – conjure a rather disturbing image. And my other complaint? WHY MUST WOMEN PERSIST IN MAINTAINING THE MYSTERY??? It took me the first several years of my sexually active life to get even a basic grasp of what’s going on with the “bald man in a boat” (who came up with THAT one, by the way?) and I have many times talked to men in their 30′s or 40′s who – once they open their mouth and say anything not humor and fear based – are clearly clueless.

It’s like women WANT it to be a mystery, so they can complain about how inept the man is. Granted, it’s a little unfair that the man parts give away their function at the slightest touch, so there’s little need for a manual explaining how to “raise the crane”. But seriously. Even that vagina hacking engineer – in a 4,000 word article about modifying her sex toy – failed to mention even ONCE any details of the Mysterious Mechanics of Pleasure Down There, and what was really going on in the Lady Garden. Not to excuse the nasty manwords listed below, but they’re probably largely born of ignorance that our society perpetuates. Ah well. I guess these are meant to be the eternal mysteries of the Tunnel of Love. Bonus vagina slang list below.

Bonus: A Categorized Vagina Slang List