Voices: If It Ain't Broke
I lost my appetite on Election Day. It hasn't come back yet but I haven't been concerned.
Far from fret, I've sort of celebrated losing a few pounds I didn't really need anyway. Then in The New York Times I saw an article ("The Season of Weighty Dramas") describing Eve Ensler's new play "The Good Body" and our entire cultural preoccupation with fat vs. beauty. The article quotes a finding from Naomi Wolf's 1991 book "The Beauty Myth" that gobs of women would rather lose ten to 15 pounds than achieve any other goal.
Ouch. Why bring that up? Isn't 1991 a long time ago? I remember it well - I was in college and everyone was reading that book.
A lot of good it did us. Pulling out a quote like that now implies nothing has changed. At least not for the better. Have we become even more shallow? It it possible we've been encouraged to be?
Author of "The Vagina Monologues," Eve is now questioning our misunderstandings and misgivings about the rest of the female anatomy. "The Good Body" opened just this week on Broadway. So it was kind of ironic that the first thing to nauseate me this morning was an article from womensenews.org about the rising trend of labiaplasty. Eve may have moved on from the vagina but a lot of women, it seems, are adding it on to their list of plastic surgery must haves.
Don't worry; I'm not going to go into the medical details of vaginal plastic surgery - isn't it coming up next week on "The Swan" anyway? But, the article is by far the most depressing of all the depressing news stories I've read since Nov. 3. Women seem to be accepting a loss of ground and I find that more depressing than the general conservative cultural shift they keep talking about. Don't believe the hype, by the way. This is America. One of these days we'll all be smoking pot at gay weddings.
The majority of women, purports the article, are having this surgery - at a risk of pain and lost sensation - because they feel pressured to more closely resemble the pornographic ideal of beauty. One of the characters in Ensler's play is a model whose plastic surgeon husband is, piece by piece, reconstructing her entire body. Her body, she explains, is like a small business. Maybe the increase in labiaplasty is because with all that other work they're having done, they just want everything to match up.
No. I have to draw the line. It just can't be comparable to the "buy one new piece of furniture and everything else pales in comparison" syndrome.
Recent libidinal drug news announced a female enhancement that uses testosterone to make women horny. It seems so obvious, doesn't it? If we can just make them more like men, then they'll want to have sex. Men inside, porn stars outside. OK.
Apparently there is actually a natural flow of testosterone in women that can fade with age, and being replenished, turns back the hormonal clock. Or something like that. But my alarm's going off anyway. Yes, I'm in my prime right now so maybe I just don't get it yet, but whatever happened to communication? I know it's a dirty word, but why not find out what really makes a woman feel sexy? Does it just take too long?
Maybe it does. Maybe we've given so much credence to the cultural myths that the social fortress of self-loathing we're trapped in, is too strong to break.
In TV sitcom land husbands are getting fatter while wives are getting hotter, but does it translate to reality? True, I'm hopelessly optimistic and I know a disproportionate number of great guys, but humor me for a moment because it's not adding up.
Men are supposedly more visual, I'll buy that, but they don't honestly expect their wives or girlfriends to look like porn models. They do, however, want their women to feel confident and comfortable with their sexuality. They don't want you looking in the mirror every five minutes or getting jealous over every other woman that walks by.
"Love your body and stop fixing it. It was never broken," Eve says in "The Good Body."
With attention comes criticism. Eve's been accused of silly metaphors and for boarding a bandwagon of sorts. Get over it. Ensler has a proven track record of empowering women. She helped millions of women buck up and say the V word out loud. Let her lend a hand. If ladies can learn to love their bodies without affirmation from pop culture, maybe they won't need to fix things that aren't broke in order to feel sexy. They'll just feel that way, naturally.
-- alicia grega-pikul, 11/18/04
Send e-mail to: apikul@timesshamrock.com.
