There seem to be no limits to which some women will not go to please their men (and themselves) writes Kathryn Holmquist after watching a documentary this week on plastic surgery
I am lost for words. That doesn't happen often, fortunately (considering my profession). But the truth is that I and my friends, who (at my request - sorry girls) tuned in to Channel 4 on Tuesday night, are traumatised. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Designer Vaginas. Catchy title. Like a lot of other catchy titles we've grown to expect from Channel 4, catchy but harmless.
Not so.
In fact, very harmful.
How can we erase those images from our minds? Who in their right mind wants to look? I know all that feminist stuff from the 1970s about hen nights with hand mirrors . . . but honestly. The labia majora and labia minora and aesthetic contrasts between the two meant nothing to me before watching this programme.
Although, I shouldn't be squeamish because the Irish are no strangers to the aesthetic powers of the vagina. Síle na Gigs have adorned sacred places of worship through Co Clare, for example.
In place of Síle na Gigs, we have Channel 4 frightening us off the notion of ever looking at any woman in any natural, biologically determined way "down there" again. Just when we'd dealt with greying hair (dye it), ageing faces (facelifts and Botox), pudgy tummies (liposuction) and small or drooping breasts (enhancement), we've been challenged with a whole new aesthetic to worry about.
It's disturbing that more and more women want to look like airbrushed Playboy centrefolds. The women in those pictures aren't even real. Their fantasies - grown women with unnaturally skinny bodies, unnaturally enhanced bosoms and nether regions like hairless, prepubescent girls. It's sick.
Yet so many women take these images seriously they blame their "failure" to look like airbrushed models for their relationship problems.
Men are coaxing women into surgery meant to improve sexual performance. Surgeons are promising 40-year-old women 16-year-old bodies and even offering to restore hymens. Who in their right mind would comply? Madonna's Like a Virgin was a state of mind, not a recipe for plastic surgery.
Designer Vaginas offered up the picture of innocent, slightly overweight, childbearing Rose (her real name, can you believe it?) meaning well and wanting to please her husband with a tightened . . . what's the word? . . . but . . . (big but) making a huge mistake in allowing Channel 4 to film her gynaecological surgery.
There's no privacy any more. People are so desperate for their 15 minutes of fame that they'll do anything to be on TV, even to the point of inviting cameras into that most intimate realm of all.
The man responsible for this trend in designer vaginas is Dr David Matlock, attractive, smooth, Afro-American surgeon and founder of the Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Centre of Los Angeles. By deciding to "service a market that was already there" he has acquired a Hollywood-style mansion with swimming pool. According to him, it is perfectly reasonable that lots of us women - aged 16-71 - are unhappy with our appearance down there.
If you're 71, what you want to do with your body is your own business. But it's alarming that the mother of a 16-year-old full of good intentions and with limitless financial reserves would see her child's self-esteem problem as something correctable by laser surgery. We've stopped being shocked by nose jobs, breast enhancements, liposuction, Botox, lip enhancements and face-lifts. But the idea of allowing a 16-year-old to have her genitals resculpted is repugnant.
Who's the audience? Is sexuality nothing but a performance for the imaginary cameras? Or do real men want women with unreal vaginas? Designer Vaginas told us that men can use cruel language ("you could drive a bus through it" and "it's like waving a pencil in a cavern" are memorable phrases from the documentary). But surely if a man is so vicious and ignorant, you should leave the man. Or, as British gynaecologist Julia Cole suggested, if the man is unhappy, then it's up to the woman to get a bigger man.
That's not the whole story though. Many of these women claimed to be having the surgery "for themselves". A young British woman - with a gorgeous face and body like that of a 14-year-old - left her baby for the first time to fly from London to LA for the surgery.
She couldn't deal with the fact that having a baby had changed her body. Returning home, she wasn't happy. She'd developed scar tissue. Her jeans were chafing. Why not buy larger jeans? Yet this woman would rather die, it seems, than change her trousers. Her only reassurance was a phone call to Dr Matlock, whose bedside manner would convince anyone that his results are good. He even promises to make women multi-orgasmic by altering them with laser.
Hello? If having a baby has damaged a woman's genital-urinary area to the extent that she needs alteration, any good Irish gynaecological surgeon will perform the required procedure. But here we're moving into something else altogether - the vagina as an aesthetic statement.
An acquaintance of mine, a female independent TV producer, tells me that the only way to get a documentary or series produced these days is to use the shock effect. Find something so new, so disturbing, so bizarre that viewers won't be able to sleep after seeing it, and you're on a winner.
She, personally, would like to be doing intelligent, critical programming.
However, an idea that cannot be held in the mind for more than one millisecond by a goldfish is not worth considering. Hence, Designer Vaginas.
What happened to romance? In Victorian times, the glimpse of a woman's ankle was enough to set men swooning. In the 200-plus years since, women have been expected to expose more and more.
Let's fight it. Let feeling rule. Let's remember that falling in love is irrational, indescribable, a Peggy (God rest her soul) Lee moment.
Kathryn Holmquist is a feature writer with The Irish Times