Like a virgin...

New surgery to restore hymen

You've got to be kidding. Its things like people who waste $5,000 to have their hymens restored only to have them broken again that make me hate plastic surgery even more.

Now, I can rationalize, even empathize, with being overweight and seeing no viable escape (though I found a way by not eating so damn much), and I've read tons of research about body image and self-esteem and the deleteirous psychological effects of having small breasts, being overweight, or having a cosmetic physical defect can have on people, especially women, and I sympathize.

But this is just too damn much. Let's look at some choide excerpts from this lovely article:

Women have resorted to backstreet hymen repair for centuries in religions and cultures in which marrying as a virgin is sacred and losing your “maidenhead” before matrimony can mean shame, or even being put to death. But an increasing number of women such as Mrs Yarborough are now electing to be “revirginised” using modern techniques as a purely cosmetic or lifestyle choice, to “put the sparkle” back into their marriage or give their husband a surprise on the second honeymoon. They usually opt also to have one of the new “designer vagina” procedures, such as tightening up of the vaginal canal slackened by childbirth, or the cosmetic trimming of enlarged labia.

That's a good reason to waste $5,000, either to decieve your religious authorities (no to mention the person you supposedly love and intend to marry) whom you've openly defied, or to give what has to be the most transitory of presents that I can possibly think of.

And I absolutely love the notion of "designer vaginas." Since when did the everyday vagina become banal? Call me a traditionalist, but I get creeped out by funny shaving designs; I don't know what to think about a "designer vagina."

“I have affluent upper-class ladies coming in from Manhattan, getting ready for a second-honeymoon cruise or something like that. Or some women had a disappointing time the first time they were deflowered and now they have found someone special they would really like to give it up to,” says Dr Marco Pelosi, a gynaecologist and plastic surgeon who has a specialist clinic in Bayonne, New Jersey. He performs ten hymenoplasties a month. “Ninety per cent of them are for women who are in big trouble if they do not appear to be a virgin when they get married. Then there are the small number who just want it done,” he says. For six to 12 weeks after the operation the woman cannot have sex or exercise vigorously while she heals up. Then she is ready to return, in a flash of additional pain, to her deflowered state. “Thousands of dollars, and it lasts a few seconds. People think it’s crazy but to my patients it does not matter. It means such a lot to them,” says Pelosi.

I love the word. "Hymenoplasties." I've got another word to describe the procedure: "Mutilation." Tattoos can be attractive, piercings are, and they are often described with similar terminology. But at least people with these "mutilations" don't hide them. This procedure is all about deception - being something you arent.

"Thousands of dollars, and it lasts a few seconds."

Exactly. That same thousands of dollars could feed or clothe someone stricken by poverty for months, but no, lets have a hymenoplasty instead.

One doctor in Connecticut markets extensively in magazines and on the internet to British clients, offering international vaginal makeover packages that include flight, limousine transfer, hotel — and hymenoplasty. Most clients are Latin Americans, Saudi brides-to-be or British Muslims who fly in to be surreptitiously revirginised before marriage. But there is also a growing demand for “recreational” hymenoplasty. Indeed, it ’s now so common at two New York clinics that the price has dropped to $1,800 (£1,029).

Talk about Extreme Makeover. Here's a proposition: if you can't live up to your religious ideals, then you probably don't need to be a member of that religion. There's a reason I don't practice institutionalized religion.

Hymenoplasty is not licensed by any official plastic surgery or gynaecological association, it is not officially taught and it is so new and on the fringe that there are only anecdotal statistics. All the operations are done privately and paid for in full by the individual.
...
Dr Leonore Tiefer, a New York sexologist, has a different concern — that women are allowing surgeons to dive in with intimate surgery that has not been officially researched or tested, either physically or psychologically. “When it is ‘the new thing’ with very little data available, how do people know it is OK? No approval is needed, such as is required for a new drug. To do a novel surgery you just have to have the idea. We are now seeing people who had other “novelties” such as Botox and penis enlargement surgery coming in with irreversible damage,” she said.

Mmm, safe and fun for the whole family.

“Sometimes their husband left them for someone younger, prettier and tighter,” he (a male gunecologist and plastic surgeon who performs the procedure) says.

How fucking shallow can this guy get? If a man leaves a woman because she's not young or as sexually attractive as she used to be (i.e. she aged like every other person on the planet, heaven forbid), then is that someone that woman really wants to be involved with?

I feel bad for these women. I feel bad in general that women are socialized in such a way that they feel they must do everything possible to be physically attractive, even to the point of self-mutilation. This type of surgery just reinforces the same body image problems that cause anoerxia, bulimia, teenage depression, anxiety, and a host of other psychological traumas.

It's tragic, and it's getting scary.