BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine

by Lisa Jervis

  Sure, maybe pop cultural forces can help undo the history of body hatred foisted upon women and girls—but only if they avoid the kind of hypocritical pap peddled by the likes of 90210 and Living Fit. The blanket statement “Cosmetic surgery is bad for women!” ignores important subtleties. It’s hard to condemn someone whose insecurity about having small breasts poisons the rest of her life; for her, that amounts to a feminist issue. The larger theoretical framework—the idea that by submitting to the knife, women capitulate to a pernicious social code that ranks female worth by adherence to the beauty ideal, etc.—is very real, but it isn’t going to help someone whose day-to-day life has already been damaged by this code and just wants to get implants and get on with living. It’s as hazardous to applaud only those who don’t choose surgery as being worthy of feminist approbation as it is to roundly denigrate those who do.

  Women are increasingly visible in forming culture and instituting change, but when we look at the rising cosmetic surgery statistics, the idea that there might be some sort of connection between the two is impossible to ignore. With visibility comes scrutiny, and we’ve all seen how the annals of pop culture treat the visible woman whose livelihood has nothing to do with her looks. It’s the Hillary’s Hair syndrome—show the world a potent woman and all they want to do is talk about how big her ass is or whether she should go blonder. One of the idealistic myths of feminism is that an increase in female power will somehow effect a momentous change wherein the multibillion-dollar fashion/beauty cabal will magically loosen its grip on women everywhere. It’s the result of years of struggle within the constraints of our image-obsessed culture, but it isn’t necessarily logical.

  So even if nobody’s strapping women to gurneys and rolling them down halls lined with scalpel-wielding men in green, cosmetic Darwinism is definitely greasing the wheels. The terrain of power relations, to cop Haiken’s phrase, is only getting flatter with time. Whether we feel like we need to look a certain way to make up for cultural power that we don’t have, or whether looks are still a major means by which we achieve power—or whether we refuse to give credence to either of these ideas—what we’re born with is still going to be weighed against what surgery can give us. The occasional earnest media dispatch may suggest a minor, if not exactly emphatic, backlash against surgery as we’ve conceived it in the past, but it can’t compete with the sexy media spectacle of safe and groovy space-age technology and a wrinkle-free future. So in spite of a queasy feeling and a temptation to dismiss the whole idea of cosmetic surgery as an antiwoman plot and anyone who “chooses” it as a sucker, we must admit that in a complicated time, our thinking has to evolve, even if our calves, chests, and cheekbones don’t.

  Vulva Goldmine

  The New Culture of Vaginal Reconstruction

  Julia Scheeres / WINTER 2000

  Women: Have you ever found yourself behind closed doors, legs spread, mirror in hand, wondering if what you see is normal? Do those tiny wrinkles on your labia make you feel like less of a woman? Is that extra padding on your pudenda damaging your self-worth? Take a good look at yourself. What are your defects?

  An abnormal vaginal appearance shouldn’t keep you from living life to the fullest. Every woman deserves to feel beautiful. We understand your concerns and we’re here to help. With a simple outpatient surgery,1 you too can have a normal-looking vagina. Just call I-800-BE-NORML for a free consultation.

  SUCH ADVERTISEMENTS SOUND PREPOSTEROUS, BUT THEY EXIST. And they don’t carry a small-print warning. Welcome to the latest fad in plastic surgery: genital alterations for women. In what could be the final frontier of cosmetic cutting, women are paying beaucoup dinero to doctors who promise to make their goddess-given pudenda look younger, smoother, and smaller.

  A sampling of the new genital surgeries includes procedures to liposuction and lift sagging pubes; inject fat into flat labia majora to give them a plumper, more youthful look; tighten vaginas with lasers; prune long labia minora; and unhood clitorises for greater friction. And the doctors playing this market are no fools—at up to $10,000 a pop, they have struck cosmetic gold.

  One of the most popular genital surgeries is labia minora reduction. When a similar procedure is performed on healthy girls in some African countries as a coming-of-age rite to control their sexuality, Westerners denounce it as genital mutilation; in the U.S. of A., it’s called cosmetic enhancement. But both procedures are based on misogynist notions of female genitalia as ugly, dirty, and shameful. And though American procedures are generally performed under vastly better conditions (with the benefit of, say, anesthesia and antibiotics), the postsurgical results can be similarly horrific, involving loss of sensation, chronic pain, and infection.

  Unless you’ve been reading the slave-to-beauty puffery of rags like Cosmo, chances are you’ve never heard of these cosmetic operations. That’s why the doctors performing them—almost all of them men—have been raising public awareness with a hard sell, hawking their services in press releases, newspaper advertisements, and Internet ads. Typical of their marketing strategy is an ad that appeared in the Los Angeles press, appealing to women who “suffer from low self-esteem due to abnormal or enlarged vaginal appearance,” whatever the hell that means. A spot for “vaginal tightening” features a bikini-clad broad on a satin sheet, her back and head arched as if in midorgasm. “You won’t believe how good sex can be,” moans the text. Another press release exhorts reporters to “take out [their] hand mirrors” and examine their vulvas for defects.

  Until now, I had thought of my genitals only in terms of sexual fulfillment. The ads piqued my curiosity: Gee, what’s normal? Don’t plushies, like penises, come in a range of sizes, shapes, and colors? And why would a perfectly healthy woman choose to put herself under a scalpel, especially in this most delicate of areas?

  Under the guise of obsequious-beauty-writer-awed-by-the-great-doctor, I ventured into the world of genital surgery. Not surprisingly, the trend’s epicenter is Southern California, mecca of the forever young and all things silicone. Dr. Jane Norton, who hails from the geriatric oasis of Palm Desert, claims to have pioneered genital cosmetic surgery twenty years ago. According to Norton, she’s snipped “about a thousand” lower lips, unmasked “a couple hundred” clitorises (purportedly for better stimulation), and laser-steamed “a couple hundred” vulvas, as well as lifted scads of sagging pubes. The aptly named Gary Alter, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and urologist whose resume includes everything from facial implants to sex changes, says he’s done about thirty labia reductions, including a pair of identical twins in their twenties whose obsession with sameness extended to their pudenda.

  Gynecologist David Matlock promises women better orgasms with vaginal tightening. (The slogan for his Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute of Los Angeles, the aforementioned “You won’t believe how good sex can be,” is trademarked.) His beaver-cleaving technique consists of using lasers to cut vaginal muscles and sew them tightly back together. A pamphlet distributed at his Sunset Boulevard office refers to vaginas that are no longer at their “physiologically optimum sexual functioning state” or “for whatever reason lack an overall optimum architectural integrity.” But if that jargon confuses you, rest assured: All alterations are “performed electively only at the request of each individual woman.” (Phew! We can all uncross our legs now.)

  Are women really modifying their muffs for themselves? Or are they trying to meet the same standard of female beauty that compels them to stuff silicone bags into their chests, inject bacteria into their brows to paralyze wrinkles, and favor collagen-filled fish lips?

  Matlock insists that his procedure is “specifically for female pleasure.” But Alter says that men routinely tag along to consultations, leaning over his shoulder as he inspects their lover’s crotch to suggest changes. Canadian twat-tweaker Dr. Robert Stubbs fully admits that most of the women who get tightened are doing it for their partners. In his opinion, these new techniques are no more than a twist on the postpartum
“husband’s knot,” wherein the obstetrician throws in a few extra stitches after an episiotomy to create a snugger fit for a penis. In fact, when one couple came to his office concerned about the size of the hubby’s bubby, he said, “I’ll just tighten your wife.” Directly contradicting Matlock, Stubbs explains that the vagina itself doesn’t have much sensation. (“Otherwise the pain of childbearing would have decimated the human race long ago.”)

  Women also get labia reductions to please the capital-M Man, Stubbs says. Case in point: He performed his first labiaplasty on an exotic dancer whose labia “were sort of flapping during her dance routine.” (Sounds like a unique talent to me—maybe she should have incorporated it into her act.) Stubbs glibly markets his lip snips as the “Toronto Trim” and allows as how most of his patients are plastic surgery junkies; for some, remodeling their bodies every few years is as routine as redecorating their homes: “If they redo the kitchen and see something in the basement they don’t like, there’s no reason they shouldn’t get it fixed, too.”

  Queried about the wisdom of such unnecessary surgeries, Alter goes on the defensive. “This is legitimate, it’s not bullshit!” he insists in an interview at his office. But as he riffles through a photo album of “before” and “after” snatch shots, he contradicts himself: “Most of these women aren’t massively enlarged; it’s basically a cosmetic thing. Most of them would fall within the norm.” As a matter of fact, what was abnormal was the eerie similarity of all the cookie-cutter-cunt “after” shots.

  ‘Surgeons’ opinions on why women are seeking out these expensive and risky operations also vary. Some point the finger at a heightened sexuality in our culture; Alter, for instance, ascribes it to a greater diffusion of crotch shots in magazines and film. “Videos and photos that people are seeing of pornographic images are making them become self-conscious.” (Not surprisingly, photographic manipulation is a common practice in pornography. “We do all sorts of enhancements,” says Gary Rohr, who retouches images for Flynt Publications, purveyors of such quality fare as Hustler, Busty Beauties, and Barely Legal. That means erasing stretch marks, banishing wrinkles and pimples, inflating tits, and narrowing hips—even eye color is faked. “The easiest thing to do is to replace genital shots,” notes Rohr. “You take one you prefer and paste it over one you don’t.”)

  Others say the labiaplasty demand was created by doctors trying to survive in an era of managed care. “People just want to do something to supplement their income,” Norton says, without a trace of sarcasm—or self-awareness—in her voice.

  And while these doctors claim they’re boosting women’s self-esteem by prodding pubes at minimal risk, some of their colleagues have raised concerns about the safety of the operations. “Anytime you make an incision, nerves are cut. For that reason, you can have decreased sensitivity,” says Malcolm Lesavoy, who teaches plastic surgery at UCLA. “I would caution anyone against having genital surgeries for cosmetic reasons.”

  Mary Gatter, medical director of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, is more direct. “These operations are completely bogus,” she says, adding that after twenty years as a gynecologist, she’s seen only three women whose labia were long enough to cause physical discomfort. “There is a large variation of what’s normal.”

  In fact, such surgeries can have disastrous results. Nichole O’Neill, a thirty-one-year-old secretary from Bakersfield, California, first had misgivings about her genitalia in eighth grade when she stumbled upon a stash of Hustler magazines at a friend’s house. “I thought I had enlarged labia,” she explains. “They were more exposed than what I saw in porn magazines.”

  In 1993, she took several magazines to a gynecology appointment and told her doctor she wanted similar genitalia. According to O’Neill, the doctor said she’d never heard of a surgical procedure to reduce labia size but assured her that she could perform one in a simple, fifteen-minute operation.

  When O‘Neill woke up after surgery, she was shocked to discover that the gynecologist had simply excised the lower two-thirds of her nymphae. “She amputated my labia,” said O’Neill. “There is just a gaping hole.” A few days after the surgery, the skin turned grayish-green with infection. When the swelling and infection subsided, her clitoris was so exposed that it was too painful to wear underwear or tight pants. During sex, she felt either searing pain or numbness. The gynecologist ignored O’Neill’s complaints, but she visited several other doctors who agreed that the surgery was botched. Finally, she decided to sue her gynecologist. Ten firms rejected her case as frivolous before she found a medical malpractice lawyer to go to bat for her. When the case went to trial in 1997, she endured the display of poster-size close-ups of her genitalia as well as an opposing attorney who characterized her as a slut.

  During the lengthy trial, which she lost, O’Neill drank heavily and, in a moment of drunken desperation, slashed her wrists. She says the operation was sexual suicide. “It absolutely destroyed me. I would exchange all the money in the world just to have my sexuality back again.”

  The big question here is this: What is the beauty standard for vulvas and who sets it?

  In some parts of Africa, long labia are desirable; girls tie weights to their nymphae to stretch them out. In Japan, big is also beautiful—a vulva with large labia is called “the winged butterfly.” But according to UCLA psychology professor Paul Okami, in most cultures the ideal pussy looks a lot like that of a twelve-year-old girl. “Youth is a pancultural determinant of female attractiveness,” he says. “These procedures are designed to approximate pubertal vulvae or vaginas.” (The trend in shaved bushes and the proliferation of Internet sites featuring “teenage sluts” seem to corroborate his opinion.)

  Obviously, no one is forcing women to undergo these surgeries. But those who decide to alter perfectly healthy pudenda should be aware of the risks and implications. It’s too early in the game to know whether these surgeries will spawn medical tragedies on the scale of those wrought by silicone breast implants. The only sure thing is that as long as there’s a quack hawking happiness in the form of snake oil, someone will buy it. Perhaps that someone should heed the classic piece of advice invoked by Planned Parenthood’s Mary Gatter: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  Are Fat Suits the New Blackface?

  Hollywood’s Big New Minstrel Show

  Marisa Meltzer / WINTER 2002

  IN SAN FRANCISCO, MOVIE PREVIEWS ARE MORE THAN JUST ads—they’re a chance for notoriously politically correct audiences to vent their disapproval of Hollywood, corporate America, and the powers that be. The standard mode of expression is hissing. I’ve witnessed The Patriot, Rush Hour, and several Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicles getting the San Francisco treatment. But over the summer, during a preview for Shallow Hal, no one in the audience saw fit to register sibilant protest against one of the most disturbing and offensive cinematic trends in recent memory: the fat suit. Gwyneth Paltrow stars in the Farrelly brothers comedy as Rosemary, the 350-pound love interest of womanizer Jack Black, who, because he can suddenly see only “inner beauty,” falls in love with the Skinny Rosemary; the rest of the world sees Fat Rosemary waddling her way through the movie. Watch Fat Rosemary shop for clothes! Watch her do a cannonball into a pool! Watch her drink a really big milkshake—all by herself! The preview audience laughed uproariously. Not a single “ssss” was heard. I felt a little queasy.

  Leaving aside the incongruity of “inner beauty” being taken so literally, the culturally tired but no less annoying assumption that thin = beautiful, and the fact that Black is no paragon of svelte pulchritude himself, Shallow Hal isn’t an isolated case. Au contraire; Gwyneth has jumped on a veritable fat-suit bandwagon. A brief history of the fat suit would have to include Goldie Hawn, living large and vengeful in Death Becomes Her; Robin Williams—annoying as ever—as the chubby, dowdy Mrs. Doubtfire; Martin Lawrence and a pair of really weird saggy boobs in Big Momma’s House; Mike Myers as Fat Bastard in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me; and Eddie Murphy
playing an entire fat family in both Nutty Professor movies. More recently, there’s Martin Short, unable to cross his legs in his new Comedy Central talk show Primetime Glick, and Julia Roberts scarfing down cookies as a (gasp!) size twelve in America’s Sweethearts. Fat people are now America’s favorite celluloid punch lines. Wanna make a funny movie? It’s a pretty easy formula: Zip a skinny actor into a latex suit. Watch her/him eat, walk, and try to find love. Hilarity will ensue.

  Of course, no conversation about the fat suit could be complete without a mention of Fat Monica, inhabitant of several flashback and alternatereality episodes of Friends. While I will refrain from airing my personal theories about Courteney Cox Arquette’s body image and eating habits here, I believe Fat Monica really takes the proverbial cake. She dresses badly, has no self-control, eats junk food, has poor hygiene, and is a virgin. She’s the opposite of the control-freak Thin Monica, who has the husband, the job, and the adoring friends. Even worse than all that is the dance Courteney does in full fat drag to entertain the studio audience between takes. She calls it “the popcorn,” and apparently folks watching find it quite comical. It involves her moving rhythmically in her latex suit. A fat person shaking her bod: mmmm, funny.