Only $16,000 (U.S.) to feel like a natural woman

Well, Edward Greenspon has outdone himself yet again.  Doubtlessly inspired by the ample news coverage of an LA strip club advertising "Vaginas 'R Us", the Editor-in-Chief of the Glib and Male has decided to expend precious front-page inches keeping us informed on the ins and outs of Los Angeles cunts.  There's nothing like starting your weekend with a cup of coffee and an article that tells you step-by-step how to feel flabby and raggedy in your girly bits:

Women from around the world flock to David Matlock's marble waiting room carrying purses stuffed with porn. The magazines are revealed only in the privacy of his office, where doctor and patient debate the finer points of each glossy photo.

The enterprising gynecologist sees countless images of naked women, but none are more popular than Playboy's fresh-faced playmates. They represent, he says with a knowing smile, the perceived ideal.

“Some women will say, ‘Hey, you take this picture and hang it up in the operating room and refer back to it when you're sculpturing me,'” he said in an interview in his clinic overlooking hazy Los Angeles. “I say, ‘Okay, all right, fine.'”

Dr. Matlock is a colourful pioneer in a controversial — and growing — frontier of plastic surgery: nipping and tucking vaginas. Patients from the United States and more than 30 other countries pay thousands of dollars for his “designer vagina,” a purely esthetic procedure that includes shortening or plumping up the labia, or vaginal lips. He attracts even more women for an operation he claims improves sex by tightening, or “rejuvenating,” the vagina.

See, I when I use the word "rejuvenating," I think of splashing cold water on something.  Dr Matlock obviously uses "rejuvenating" in OED sense 2b: "to take advantage of the lesser gender's insecurity and disadvantage, by carving into the flesh of its primary sex characteristics for fun and profit."

But I shouldn't be so harsh.  Dr. Matlock and his ilk are philanthropists, after all, doing what they do for the good of women everywhere:

“There's a need for this,” he said. “Women are driving this. I didn't create this market, the market was there.”

While doctors have long known how to enhance women's genitals, demand for vaginal surgery has mushroomed in recent years because physicians — led by Dr. Matlock — market it as enhancing sexual satisfaction.

In other words: If you build it, they will come.

Matlock defends his creepy and advantageous vocation by claiming that he's only trying to make women's famously inept naughty bits more useful - not for MEN, you see, but for WOMEN.  And plus, they're asking for it:

“They say, ‘Look, I want to enjoy this. I want to have the best sexual experience possible. It's for me.' That's what they're doing. If a man was pushing a woman to come in, I'm not going to do it.”

See? He's a pretty ethical guy.  If some dude "pushes" his woman through the door bound and gagged, he's not gonna cut her open for the sake of making her cootch all symmetrical.  He'll only do the surgery if the guy's more subtle than that.

Still, a husband of a woman with stress incontinence in the mid-1990s played a large role in Dr. Matlock's inadvertent realization of the demand for vaginal reconstruction, which builds on decades-old surgical techniques. Some physicians have long quietly added an extra stitch “for the husband” while repairing new mothers' episiotomies.

After he treated her, the woman reported that her sex life had dramatically improved. Then her husband telephoned to thank Dr. Matlock profusely, and the couple sent flowers.

See? Send flowers.  Vagina carvers love flowers.

Pardon the pun, but his whole thing gives me the willies. 

Comments

[Steph]

So what happens when the surgery goes bad? Men just can't leave women's cunts alone can they?

I'm so discussing this in my Women and Health class I'm teaching this fall.