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

Amongst some people I know though, this tragic event stimulated some conversation about the whole circumcised vs. uncircumcised debate, and led us to an interesting set of theories about why men probably don’t like talking about that topic in particular. The first is the fundamentally brutal nature of the act; in spite of the fact that as teen males, my friends and I always heard the Rod Stewart song The First Cut Is The Deepest in a puerile and humorously different light than our girlfriends and laughed, the fact is, even pondering this procedure is a wince-inducing act for most men. It’s somewhat akin to thinking about the bamboo and fingernail torture methods used by the Viet Cong, or the more evolved methods used by the US military at Abu Ghraib. But once you get beyond that barrier, there’s another whole layer of things going on. Primary amongst those is the fact that until the last decade or so, if you were a male born in the states there was about an 80%-90% chance that you were circumcised. That meant that you could almost reasonably be excused for thinking ALL men were circumcised. You honestly didn’t think about it unless you spent enough time in locker rooms with foreigners, or used a common shower in a youth hostel on your college trip abroad.

The disturbing image and the blog post that started it all.

This has all of course changed, partly because of huge relocation of global populations, partly because of the backlash against circumcision that seemed to first gain traction in the 90′s, and partly because of the wide availability of pornography from almost every country on Earth that has video cameras. So these days, whether or not a man is circumcised has little to do with geolocation, unless the man lives in an area that is primarily populated by people of a religion that dictates the practice.

So this conversation amongst my friends touched on all those issues, but once it came down to specifically talking about the penises of people actually present, rather than hypothetical penises as a cultural phenomena, the tone shifted dramatically. While the women present were quite comfortable expressing their preferences for shod or unshod, making all sorts of tittering or groaning “eeeeyew” sounds as they shared their thoughts, the men remained relatively silent, if in fact they didn’t change the subject to the approaching college football season or recent Olympics events. Part of this is probably because, well, men aren’t particularly interested in anyone’s penis but their own. But I suspected there was something else afoot. Usually, when the topic of penises comes up, men WILL talk about them, at least in regards to the perfection or immense size of their own (or alternately, its tininess, in what one presumes is a clever lowering of expectations). They won’t actually have a USEFUL conversation, but they will at least banter and guffaw for a bit.

I knew that most of the men present knew if the other men were nipped or not, but observed that none of them would reveal their status until a woman of interest to them stated a preference, at which point they became quite forthcoming. So I threw down the gauntlet. No, I didn’t demand a show of, er…hands or anything, but I did ask if perhaps this reticence on the part of the men was based on limiting their possibilities for bagging a potential mate that didn’t already know. After considerable discussion in which the women expressed more open-mindedness than the first time around, the men admitted that yes, although it hadn’t occurred to them, that probably was an underlying motive for their silence on the topic. This led to one of the men finally saying “Alright goddamit, I’m NOT CIRCUMCISED. Big deal!“, which led to a few of the women letting down their charade and replying with a weird chorus of “eeeeeeyeews” and “bow chicka bow wows”.

At the end of it all, I realized I had learned two things:

1.) Like most straight men, I DON’T much care about anyone’s penis but my own.
2.) People are mind bogglingly immature in my social circle

If you happen to be interested in more penis talk, there seems to be plenty on the web. Like, did you know that advocates against the practice of circumcision are called intactivists? Or that there are databases of television references to circumcision, complete with charts and graphs? Don’t scoff; if nothing else, it reminded me of one of my favorite Simpsons episodes.

This space was to be occupied by a picture of a penis, but face it, no-one wants to look at one.

The content of this article is partially derived from
a book and a personal development site I’m working on

Did you have a good day today? Or a bad day? If you had a “good” day, there’s a fair chance that you didn’t even notice it. But if you had a bad day, you may even still be thinking about it. The interesting thing about good and bad days though, is that there’s really no such thing. As a recovering addict, I consider myself to be something of an expert on good and bad days. For a long time, I had plenty of both, and often on the same day! Some days would start horribly – perhaps because of a brain-splitting hangover – and then I’d dig into the day’s activities, and things would be okay. And then later, I’d meet up with friends for drinks (and perhaps more), and things would get really GREAT for a while. A few years ago, I decided to step off that little merry-go-round though, and since then, have sort of made it a goal to have a lot of good days. I’m getting better at it, and ironically one of the biggest reasons is that I’m becoming more and more convinced that there’s no such thing. Let me explain. Think of two of your friends. There’s a good chance that you have one that is a little more easygoing and doesn’t get stressed out easily, and one that seems to flip out at the most minor frustration. Now put them both in a similar scenario. They wake up late one morning because their alarm doesn’t go off. They immediately try to call work to explain why they’re late, and drop their cell phone, sending the battery skidding across the kitchen floor. In the ensuing frantic moments, as they fumble to put the phone back together, they spill coffee on themselves as they rush to get dressed. And then, just for good measure, let’s say shortly after that, they get in their car and it doesn’t start. At this point, there are two distinct reactions a person could be having. On one hand, a person might be well into a frustrated rage or panic that will take hours to subside. On the other hand, a person may have started laughing at the absurdity of it all around the point where the coffee was spilled. Which one of these people is more like you? If you’re inclined to experience the scenario I described as the beginning of a “bad day”, I’d urge you to re-examine things. First of all, on a simple, scientific, and rational basis. Books like Why Sh*t Happens: The Science of a Really Bad Day and Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long both use narrative scenarios to support their explanations for what is really going on when you’re “having a bad day”. The former focuses a lot on the physical science behind things, the latter, more on the brain and cognition. The fact is, we have so many cognitive biases to choose from, that we may as well do just that – choose them! I needed a refresher in this recently, and ran across two audio books that I’ve found useful. I sort of half-listen to them while I work. One was recommended by a long-time friend. A very motivated, practical guy who – as well as being a lawyer – runs a martial arts studio, and is acknowledged worldwide for his mastery of the style of Japanese swordsmanship to which he has devoted much if his study. The book is Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. I’ve focused on the audio version. A key concept that Chopra emphasizes which I find useful is that we tend to place ourselves in an object-oriented reality, forgetting that we are literally, physically continuous with our physical reality, and that all the divisions we create are largely arbitrary. Remaining more aware of this helps me feel less at odds with things and events around me. I mean crikey. I’M PART OF THEM! He also talks about our perception of time, and the benefits of operating in the present. Along the same lines, I grudgingly gave Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (again, the audio version) a whirl. As long as you don’t find his diction or occasional meanderings into slightly woo-woo realms of thought, he offers some remarkable and simple insights into the absurdity of some of our common perceptions of time and and expectations of ourselves and reality. He reminded me that I don’t have an ego, an ego has me. But the fact is, it doesn’t need to be this complicated. We don’t need to wade through hundreds of pages of books and hours of audio. Because there are simple tools to achieving a more present-centered and acceptable life. One of them – the “serenity prayer” – gets a bad rap because of its religious overtones, so I’m going to share a deconstructed version below. This single tool has prevented more bad days than I can count, because it reminds me of the two most essential elements of having a good day: living in the present, and working with or accepting events instead of battling them. Let’s have a little fun with this. My deconstruction is below.

First of all, the serenity prayer often associated with Alcoholics Anonymous:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Okay. Before I do my own deconstruction, let’s observe how much it resembles a mother Goose rhyme from 1695:

For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

And here’s how I re-frame it to make it not only palatable to myself, but quite useful.

“God grant me the serenity”

Let’s stop right there. I do coincidentally believe in God in a way that I won’t go into here, but I don’t necessarily find this grant-seeking useful here. So I change it to:

“Whoa. Chill out for a moment”

Okay, now I can think about what to do next:

“to accept the things I cannot change”

Still not crazy about the wording, but now that I’ve slowed down for a moment, I ask myself “wow, can I really do anything about this right now? If I can, I do. If I can’t, I put it in my little “to review” box for later consideration, and let it go for the moment.

And then…

“the courage to change the things I can”

If I really need to, I just buck up a little and remind myself that whatever it is I’m contending with, it’s highly unlikely that it’s insurmountable.

And lastly, that bit where it goes:

“and the wisdom to know the difference”

Well, just by slowing down and re-assessing, I’ve already exercised some wisdom. I let it all go, knowing that if I made an unwise decision, it’ll come and bite me in the ass and I can do this all over again.

So here’s my version:

Whoa, chill out for a minute. Time out!
Can I fix this right now? Cool. Let’s do it.
No? Okay, let’s take care of this as soon as we can.
We’ve done the best thing we can do for now, which is identified it for review.
Let’s move on.
Damn I’m havin’ a good day!

Who knows. Maybe a “wet house” is
preferable to the Romanian “Please don’t
run over the drunks” approach.

There was a time in my life when – if you told me there was a place I could go live for free and drink my brains out as I saw fit – I would have camped out overnight so I could be the first first in line on registration day. I spent much of my adult life proving how well I could maintain an orderly existence while ingesting mind-boggling amounts of intoxicants selected from the veritable smorgasbord of both socially acceptable and not-so-socially acceptable recreational drugs available to the modern party monster, and I guess I was pretty good at it for a while. My views have changed a bit though, after slowly calling it quits over the years, finally ending my personal war on drugs a few years ago when I surrendered to the most resilient of my challengers, alcohol. Which is why I have to say I have some mixed feelings about the idea of something I’d never heard of before today: a concept called a “wet house”. The idea is that trying to rehabilitate “chronic inebriates” (i.e.: hopeless drunks) is such a financial burden on society that giving them a place to live for free and just letting them drink their brains out is a better solution. They’re trying it in St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Francisco was considering the idea last fall, after seeing the results of a wet house program in Seattle that started in 2006. As you can imagine, the responses to the idea tend to be rather polarized, ranging from those who deride the program as “bunks for drunks” to those who argue in favor of the idea based on the concept of harm reduction. I’m still trying to process the realities of this scenario; although my gut reaction is that it’s an awful, awful idea, reason urges me to consider the possibility that if managed well, it may actually present an “end of the line” alcoholic with one last chance to get sober, when it’s obvious that the existing system has failed to help them.

I think I discovered a great new weight loss program today. It’s based largely on carefully selected seafood. Perhaps you’re thinking “Duh, we all know the benefits of seafood as a healthier, leaner protein source, rich in Omega 3″, right? Well this is a fairly new approach. It’s based on selecting seafoods that aren’t tainted with Mercury or other toxins, and that aren’t in danger of extinction from overfishing. Today I was making a simple Niçoise salad, something I enjoy once in a while. I only occasionally use a fresh piece of tuna, so today, as I opened the can of moderately high-quality tuna, I realized I hadn’t checked on the imperiled state of tuna populations in a while, and thought “Wow. What if this were the last can of tuna I ever opened?” So I did a little research. And after about fifteen minutes, I realized that if I commit to a seafood-only diet, and wade through all the conflicting and poorly-coordinated information available about overfishing and toxins, I should lose about ten pounds before I have it all sorted out. I’m not going to offer any advice here, beyond suggesting you do some research of your own before you order that Striped Bass special the next time you go out to dinner. But I’ve rounded up some good start points if you want to learn about the health risks or sustainability of your favorite fish. One lengthy but fairly easy to review summary is the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s 2010 Culinary Chart of Alternatives. It lists what to avoid, alternatives for each item, and has little red asterisks to highlight the ones that are the ocean equivalent of eating paint chips for dinner. This chart assembled by the Environmental Defense Fund breaks down how often you might want to eat some PCB’s and/or Mercury, based on whether you’re a woman, a man, an older kid, or a younger kid. Like we said, if the waiter recommends the Wild Striped Bass, call the cops. He’s trying to kill you. There’s also a wealth of information about seafood on the NOAA Fisheries Service FishWatch site, but personally, I’d take any US government agency’s “safe to eat” advice with a grain of salt, especially regarding the impact of BP’s use of Corexit on gulf seafood. In spite of their claims of rigorous testing, they’re talking about less than 2,000 samples being tested for a rather limited number of contaminants, and simply can’t speak with authority on long term impact, it hasn’t been long enough! If you’re interested in the process they use, which includes sensory testing, i.e. fish-sniffing, check out A Step-By-Step Journey: How Gulf Seafood is Deemed “Safe”. I wonder what a tofu Niçoise would be like?

Would it trouble you – as it troubled me – to learn that there are plans afoot to significantly restructure the National Institute of Health to enable the pursuit of drug discovery because of concerns that the drug companies aren’t creating enough new drugs? Would you feel better if you knew the plans were being spearheaded by Francis Collins, former director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, which he managed to keep ahead of schedule and under budget while identifying the sequence of all three billion base pairs of the human genome in 2003? If the fact that such a disciplined scientist is at the helm makes you feel better about things, how would you feel if you were to discover that he is also an evangelical Christian who founded the BioLogos Foundation, and the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief? Personally, the only thing that troubled me as I read about the plans to create this new research agency within the NIH was the idea that according to this NYT piece, one of the main motivations for establishing the agency is the fact that in spite of spending billions annually on research, the pharmaceutical industry is cutting research budgets because profits are down. Which should not be surprising, when you ponder the fact that the industry – in spite of historically claiming that drug prices are high to support research – actually spends twice as much on advertising as it does on R & D. Which may also explain why there were only two major mental health drug discoveries in the past century – lithium for the treatment of bipolar disorder in 1949 and Thorazine for the treatment of psychosis in 1950 – and why they still don’t even understand how Lithium works. Which of course hasn’t stopped them from deriving other drugs from it and rushing them to market. In my view, the only concern is do we need more drugs? It will be interesting to see what kind of controversy springs up around these plans; they were quietly announced in December, but they plan to have the new center at the NIH operational by October 2011. What do you think – do we need more drugs, and do we need a government agency developing them?

If you don’t feel like drinking a lot tonight, we already suggested some excellent New Year’s Eve movies. But if you DO decide to drink a lot tonight, do me a couple favors: First, don’t drive. And second, don’t complain about your hangover tomorrow. Drinking to excess is all fine and dandy, but man up and do it right, or don’t do it at all. Although I kicked the habit a few years ago, I actually have considerable experience in this arena, so you can trust my expertise. I estimate that in the more productive period of my illustrious drinking career, I easily consumed over a thousand gallons of vodka. Which is my first tip. If you’re going to funnel poisons into your body for an evening, be scientific about it. Anything other than straight vodka may be tasty and enable a lot of highbrow banter about palates, noses, and finishes, but is frought with peril. Wine, beer, and whiskey are variously chock full of fungus and mold, cogeners, and fusel oils. It should be telling enough that the smoky and fiery character of bourbons are derived from something that in German means bad liquor. Some of us have understood this vodka trick for years, and now science has finally validated the idea.Speaking of science, I bet you didn’t know that there’s an enzyme in our systems specifically for breaking down alcohol. Well there is. So while you’re drinking the most-distilled vodka you can get your hands on to ensure that it’s almost entirely simple ethanol, EAT SOMETHING for chrissake. Russians have understood this for ages; they do a little shot, have a little Zakuski, do a little shot, have a little Zakuski… wipe, rinse hands, repeat. Until you’re grabbing everyone within reach (your reach will dwindle as you slump under the table) by the neck to kiss them and tell them how much you love them, goddammit. Oh, and have a glass of water now and then. This isn’t rocket science; it’s just science. And one trick I’ve never heard or read about but I swear worked flawlessly for me for years: eat a couple of eggs right before bed. And by “right before bed” I mean as you’re passing out on the way to it. And aspirin? Whatever. If you’re drunk enough that you’re already anticipating a brain-splitting hangover, your body is so busy detoxing already I doubt it’s going to notice you slipped it a couple puny aspirin. No, the end of a hard night of drinking is hardly the time to start taking medicine, unless of course by “medicine” you mean copious amounts of recreational drugs. In which case, have at it. I never understood the idea of ingesting intoxicants and then not ingesting ALL THE INTOXICANTS AVAILABLE. I mean, the objective here is intoxication, right? No sense mucking things up by trying to figure out ways to not be intoxicated. I mean, if you don’t want to be intoxicated, WHY THE HELL ARE YOU DRINKING? And that leads to our last little tip, which is dealing with the hangover if you fail to prevent it. Not to be insensitive or anything, but this part is pretty simple too. Either get up, have a bloody mary, and go on about your day, preferably engaging in difficult manual labor, or lay in bed swearing you’ll “NEVER DRINK AGAIN OH DEAR GOD I SWEAR IF YOU JUST MAKE THIS STOP“. If you choose the latter, take a cue from the movie Trainspotting, in which the character Renton shares a list that very nearly matches exactly what you’ll need to feel better: “one mattress; tomato soup, ten tins of; mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold; ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of; Magnesia, Milk of, one bottle; paracetamol; mouth wash; vitamins; mineral water; Lucozade; pornography; one bucket for urine, one for feces, and one for vomitus; one television; and one bottle of Valium“. Hopefully you won’t actually need the first and second buckets, but otherwise this list is just about right for a hangover. In reality, I in fact hope you’re smart and responsible enough to not get blithering drunk tonight, but if you must, do it with dignity, and tomorrow, accept the fact that bacchanalian revelry is in fact a pretty freakin’ stupid way to start the year. Whatever you do tonight, just don’t hurt anybody else. And truly, I wish you and yours and all of us on Earth a Happy New Year.

Flying The Crack

I’ve gone skydiving and hangliding, but this is INSANE in comparison. I’d still do it before I’d get a flu shot. The music’s a bit of an earworm; if you’re curious, it’s Chaiyya Chaiyya from the Dil Se soundtrack

Any of the bizarre cures featured in this amazing series of images on Totally Cool Pix

Watching The Eyeball Slicing Scene in Un Chien Andalou

Bungee Sledding Off A Roof In Russia

Listening to Bill O’Reilly reading the “steamy” passages from his book Those Who Trespass

Sample: “Say baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe up.”

More here.