Thursday, March 3, 2011

Infantilizing Vaginas

Reader Marina just sent me a link to the following article and asked me to blog about it:
You’ve tried everything to spruce up your lady parts. First, you made sure your garden was neat and tidy. Then, you trimmed up the hedges. (Read Does Bikini Razor Commercial Go Too Far?) Finally, you decided to go for the gold and deforested all of “virginia.” Where does a girl go from here?One sparkly, special word: Vajazzle.
Vajazzling is a burgeoning beauty treatment, popular with celebs and kinky Martha Stewart-ites alike, that involves ladies bedazzling their freshly waxed lady parts just as they would their neato neckerchiefs or fancy fannypacks – with tiny, magical crystals.
So women aren’t just obsessively coiffing their “areas” to look like pre-teen Barbies – they’re now glue-sticking Barbie’s earrings down below, too?
Jennifer Love Hewitt sparked this sparkly trend a few weeks ago when she announced her labia luster on Lopez Tonight. “After a breakup, a friend of mine Swarovski-crystalled my precious lady," J.Love said, while discussing her new dating book. "It shined like a disco ball, so I have a whole chapter in there on how women should vajazzle their vajayjays."
There is more in the same vein but I realized that I was about to throw up and stopped reading. Lady parts? Precious lady? Vajayjays? Before you follow the link to read the article in full, I have to warn you: there are photos of very very weird people vajazzling or whatever it's called. Don't say I didn't warn you.

For centuries women denounced the patriarchal society for infantilizing them, for trivializing their experiences, for reducing them to perennially childlike toys whose only role was to be consumed by men. Today, nobody forces women in our society to refer to their vaginas as "precious ladies" or to stick Swarovski crystals into them. I know for a fact that a woman can have a very fulfilling personal life without vajazzles, Brazilian waxes, vaginal plastic surgery, or any other atrocity of the same ilk. I even happen to believe that a fulfilling personal life is a direct result of liking one's sexual organs and accepting them the way they are. 

The need to self-infantilize remains so strong because it liberates one from adult responsibilities. A grown woman pretends that she doesn't have a grown vagina but, rather, a little girl's vajayjay. By sticking flashy crystals onto it, she convinces herself that she has managed to escape adulthood for good.

P.S. I just forced myself to look at the pictures of this atrocity and realized that this procedure must make having sex quite uncomfortable, if not painful. In this sense, this must also be some sort of a self-castration practice that helps one avoid confronting one's adult sexuality. 

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