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As you hint, female genital mutilation in the name of sexual desirability is nothing new. In some cultures, women's genitals are re-mutilated every few years and/or after every childbirth to restore a "virginal" tightness to the vaginal canal and/or opening of the vagina, as well as to decrease a woman's desire and her availability to men other than her husband. The kinds of "vaginal reconstruction" surgeries that are sometimes performed in the West are generally not as extreme as the infibulations, clitoridectomies, or introcisions that are practiced elsewhere. However, barring the case of some rare and severe injury to the vagina, reconstructive surgery is completely unnecessary for normal, healthy reproductive and urinary function or sexual pleasure. I spent some time doing research on the kind of surgery you mention, and just between you and me, I can think of a whole lot of better uses for my hard-earned dollar than having some surgeon give my pussy a nose job. It's just another example of the ways in which women are encouraged to believe that their bodies are flawed and undesirable unless they modify them physically to make them conform to some pre-set norm, and of how there's always someone ready to belly up to the trough of endless dollars that seem to flow from women's insecurities about their own attractiveness and worth. In order to explain why "vaginal reconstruction" surgery is really pretty pointless, it's probably a good idea for me to give a little background on the anatomy of the pussy and how she works. Among the many things you can do with your cunt (or that she can do for you), the three biological biggies are these: transport menstrual blood and vaginal discharges out of the body, permit the entry of a penis during sexual intercourse, and provide a baby with a way out of the uterus. Right there you have three very different functions which require very different degrees of vaginal dilation, from almost none to "whoa Nellie!" This is why the interior of the vagina exists basically as potential space. Normally the vaginal walls comfortably close in on themselves. When there's nothing in it, there's no space! The cunt is not the Callahan Tunnel, wide open and ready for rush hour traffic. The act of inserting something into the vagina is literally what opens it, by pushing the vaginal walls apart. When something is inside the vagina, the vaginal walls surround it, hugging it closely, with a degree of muscular tension that depends on a lot of factors, such as the size of the object, the size of the vagina (vaginas, like penises, come in an array of possible sizes), the woman's general muscular tension, and whether or not there is any other voluntary or involuntary muscular stress or tension going on. Despite the boorish locker-room vision of a "fucked out" vagina that sort of flops around like an old gunny sack, that's not the way pussies work in actual physical fact. The vaginal muscles are a combination of smooth and striated muscle tissue, and mostly respond in an involuntary manner to stimuli. In other words, you can consciously control some of your vaginal muscles but not all of them. There's a commonly-held myth that since, according to popular belief, a virgin woman has never had anything in her vagina, the vaginal walls will magically be tight as a girdle the first time she has penis-in-vagina intercourse. This scenario is wrong in so many different ways that it's hard to know where to begin. First of all, it is certainly possible to have had objects of various sorts in your vagina without having ever had sexual intercourse or, in fact, any sex of any kind. I for one had a full gynecological exam two years before I lost my virginity. Most certainly a gynecologist's fingers and a speculum count as "objects inserted into the vagina." Second, and more importantly, neither gynecological exams or masturbation or fingerfucking or even penis-in-vagina intercourse are going to be very likely to cause any stretching of anyone's vaginal muscles. Those muscles are extremely elastic -- don't forget that they're made to push babies out into the world -- and any man who thinks his dick is as big as your average full-term baby is suffering from severe delusions of grandeur. Fucking won't compromise the tone of your vaginal muscles in the slightest. Even penetration with rather large objects, as with vaginal fisting, won't do any harm to the vaginal muscles if you're doing it right. If any form of sexual penetration were likely to cause a loosening or stretching of the vaginal muscles, it'd probably be fisting, and I can tell you first-hand (as it were) that this is simply not necessarily the case. Forcing penetration when the muscles resist it, on the other hand, can damage the vaginal muscles. Sometimes women do experience strained or stretched vaginal muscles as a result of sexual assault, accident, or childbirth. This kind of muscular injury is not too different from pulling a hamstring or any other kind of muscular injury, and it can recuperate in the same way: rest, physical therapy, and exercises. What's known as the "Kegel exercise" is an excellent way to tone the pelvic and vaginal muscles. Anyone at all can do Kegel exercises: regular healthy exercise is good for every part of your body, and that includes your pussy! Just contract your pelvic muscles, as if you were cutting off the flow of urine while peeing, and voila! you've just done your first Kegel! Repeat the exercise as often as you like. You can do Kegels any time, anywhere (they make a fabulous way to pass the time when you're stuck in traffic), and not only will they help keep your vaginal muscles toned, they'll also cut down on any existing or potential problems you might have with incontinence. You can even do Kegels with a dildo or a penis (guys really really like this!) inserted into the vagina for resistance, sort of like weight training for your pussy. There is a lovely surgical steel dildo called the "Kegelciser" that is marketed precisely for this purpose, but to tell you the truth, when I tried it out, I was so entranced by how nice it felt that I completely forgot about doing the exercises. Kegel exercises can definitely enhance your muscle tone, improve your ability to focus on genital sensation, and they even feel nice while you're doing them. This is one of the reasons I found it so interesting that of the two major types of vaginal reconstructive surgeries, one of them, the so-called "vaginal rejuvenation" surgery -- a name which, I might point out, really shows just how much the whole twat-tuck racket plays into women's fears about aging and losing their sexual desirability -- is marketed as a way of increasing a woman's sexual response. This kind of surgery appears to consist primarily of taking a tuck in the vaginal muscles in order to narrow the diameter of the vaginal opening and the outermost third of the vagina. Vaginas aren't all that long. You can usually reach in with a finger and touch your own cervix, in fact, and I highly recommend that you try it sometime. Feeling the inside of your vagina gives you a good idea of how it feels to someone else, and additionally shows you how relatively small the outermost third of your vagina really is: usually a little more than one knuckle deep. "Vaginal rejuvenation" surgery may or may not include what is called a "hymenalplasty," or a reconstruction of what would look (and possibly feel) like a hymen membrane using a little piece of skin, effectively "restoring" the tiny vestigial membrane which is popularly but incorrectly assumed to be proof of a woman's virginity. So the rationale usually given for "vaginal rejuvenation" surgery is enhancement of sexual pleasure, but I have to wonder whose pleasure it's really designed to enhance. I'm not sure, for instance, how having even a high-tech bionic hymen installed contributes to anyone's sexual satisfaction. One doctor who performs this surgery suggests that it improves a woman's "orgasmic platform," whatever that's supposed to be. Suffice it to say that such a thing is nowhere to be found in Gray's Anatomy. Certainly, if the opening to the vagina is narrower, a penis that is inserted into it is likely to be more strongly felt, but this doesn't guarantee greater sexual satisfaction. In the first place, for many women clitoral stimulation is much more likely to produce orgasm than vaginal penetration. Secondly, is it just me, or does surgically narrowing your vagina sound like a really stupid substitute for finding a bigger dildo or penis (or a larger number of fingers) to play with? Vaginal surgery and/or mutilation in the name of what I might vulgarly call a tight box is hardly new, as you know. In some cultures, women undergo repeated genital mutilations called infibulations, first during childhood and later repeated after every childbirth. In infibulated women, the only external opening left in their fused-together labia is a tiny hole to permit the passage of urine and menstrual blood. In order to have intercourse, men either cut the tissue with a razor blade or knife until it's big enough for them to fuck through the hole, or else they simply hammer at it with a hard penis until they've pushed through into the vaginal canal. Not only does infibulation supposedly "ensure" virginity, it creates an extremely narrow passage into the vagina -- but what's a little life-long mutilation, traumatic physical shock, high infection risk, abuse, and psychological trauma compared to a really tight opening to the pussy? The popular myth of the "virgin pussy experience" makes a fetish of an unrealistic idea of an almost vise-like vaginal grip. That kind of vaginal tightness isn't "a tight pussy," it's more likely to be a condition called vaginismus. Vaginismus is a (often stress or fear-induced) sustained contraction of the vaginal muscles that is basically the body's attempt to prevent the vagina from being penetrated. Chronic vaginismus can make intercourse painful or impossible. I believe that the legendary iron-hand-in-velvet-glove "virgin pussy" sensation may well be nothing more than the romanticization and fetishization, compounded over time, of the vaginismus that a lot of frightened women experience because of the tension and fear of their first experience of penis-in-vagina intercourse. Yes, penises tend to like a very tight grip and a lot of friction -- one look at the way most men masturbate should be enough to tell you that -- but a vagina is not a hand, and the muscles simply aren't designed to exert that kind of force unless they're trying to push something out of the vagina. I am not trying to equate infibulation and "vaginal rejuvenation" surgery, but I do think it's important to point out that they stem, at least in large part, from the same roots. In cultures where infibulation is practiced, women who are not infibulated are considered unmarriageable and often are treated as whores because of their genital "openness." Western women considering vaginal reconstructive surgery may well feel that they are similarly "too open" or "too loose" to be sexually attractive or interesting, that their partners might leave them for someone younger or simply "tighter." Fear of being found sexually unattractive or undesirable is a powerful, powerful goad. This leads me to the second type of vaginal reconstructive surgery, which is entirely cosmetic. Among the things a woman can have a surgeon do if she feels she has an unattractive pussy is "microsurgical liposculpturing" in which the mons or the labia majora can be pumped up with an injection of fat cells sucked out of her thighs. Boy, doesn't that sound like fun? Also, women with uneven labia can now choose to have them symmetrically snipped, and according to one plastic surgeon's publicity materials, "some patients desire to have a more youthful appearing external vagina by having the ends of the labia majora meet in the middle." Pardon my bluntness, but if the day ever comes when I am sitting around the house wishing I had "a more youthful appearing external vagina," I invite you to smack me upside the head with a copy of Joani Blank's book Femalia. This wonderful book of photographs, much like Tee Corinne's Cunt Coloring Book, proves that not only do pussies come in all sorts of shapes and configurations, they are also amazing to look at and really very beautiful. Don't women have enough body image issues to sort out without having to be worried about whether their labia are too droopy? The last time I checked, most penises didn't have eyes, and I know my fingers don't. My primary concerns in regards to a partner's pussy are how nice it feels, how soft and warm it is, and how much it makes me want to tease and explore it. I strongly suspect that I am not alone in not being too concerned with imposing some arbitrary standard of physical aesthetics on the cunts I love. To sum up, I can't think of any really good reason to have any sort of surgery done to reconfigure your genitals unless there's a truly valid medical reason to do so. Your gynecologist will tell you if there's something going wrong that does require surgery to fix it. If you're concerned about the tone and strength of your vaginal muscles, the best thing you can do is to learn how to do Kegel exercises. Of course, there is one other kind of exercise that's wonderful for improving or maintaining the tone of your vaginal muscles, and that's having orgasms. Beat the vaginal reconstruction boys at their own game: come more often! Want to ask the Fat Broad a question? Email her. |
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
unexpected as ever.
In the meantime, by all means, enjoy our years of past content,
all of which still remain in the public and subscription areas.
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