The Perfect Vagina
I was absolutely horrified, shocked and utterly confused while watching the documentary The Perfect Vagina presented by Lisa Rogers. The film follows Lisa around while she investigates the phenomena of women who have plastic surgery on their vaginas. I was left feeling sad and wondering what is wrong with the world today.
Lisa seemed just as confused as me in the movie, she doesn’t understand why people would want to have vaginal surgery and I don’t think she comes any closer to understanding why. For instance, she follows a teenager that has surgery on her vagina because friends make fun of her. The thing that I was wondering about was why she would be showing all those people her vagina or why she would tell them about her own issues with her vagina? Your vagina is private, it’s yours and no one else’s. That women are self-conscious about their breasts or butt, I can understand, but being this self-conscious about your vagina? It just doesn’t register with me. The girl had the surgery, she was extremely painful afterwards and felt loads better about herself.
I’ve always been comfortable with my own body, I love, adore and embrace it! And I’ve noticed that I keep getting more comfortable in my own skin over the years. I eat what I want, when I want it and I simply don’t care what other people think of me. I do want to be healthy. I’m a vegetarian, I do yoga, horse riding, hiking and swimming, yet I’ve never wanted to lose weight, be skinny or HAVE VAGINAL SURGERY! I love my round tummy, my big butt and my crazy no-depth-perception-eyes. All my imperfections make me unique, they make me me and that creates that special body I call home. Lisa refers many times to the fact that girls should learn to embrace their body, to consider their imperfections as beauty marks, instead of areas they need to fix, although she wasn’t able to convince the girl to not go through with the surgery.
Lisa did manage to boost one woman’s confidence in her own vagina by taking her to Jamie McCartney who creates vagina sculptures. This showed her that she wasn’t that abnormal and that her body image of her vagina was all wrong. Then there was a class by holistic sexual educator Rachel Foux who taught women to learn to love their vagina by holding a mirror in front of it and talking about it. I quite liked her concept, yet it was a bit strange having women in groups talking and looking at their vaginas.
In the video below you can get an overview of some main elements of the film. You can view Lisa getting a Brazilian wax, creating a plaster cast of her vagina, getting an inspection by a gynaecologist and a fragment of the course by Rachel Foux and, of course, lots of talk about vaginas (no explicit images are shown):
I understand that some people need the surgery. They showed pictures of terribly mutated vaginas that were enormous and were obviously very uncomfortable. I don’t get that people who have slightly larger lips, uneven lips or any other minor imperfection would risk surgery for something that is clearly between their ears, as we call something like this back home. Surgery can go horribly wrong, there is always a risk attached to it and you could damage your private parts permanently. Why would someone in the right mind risk something like that? No one should.
Lisa talked with several people about this issue, including a painter, who made the most horrible remark. He said he didn’t like women with a big vagina and he would reject someone on how their vagina looks. Which just made me wanna kick his ass. I have trouble understanding why people reject other people on their looks, since I find everybody beautiful in their own way, let alone understanding how you can reject a woman because of her vagina!
Still, the most upsetting thing about this whole documentary is the fact that a vagina is private, it’s for you and you alone. It’s for enjoyment with yourself or with your partner. And it’s meant for the beautiful process of birth. It’s a beautiful and precious part of our body, we should be proud of it and we should not try to change it because of someone else’s views. We should learn to accept each other for who we are, instead of rejecting and judging ourselves on these kinds of superficial ground. I almost view this as a psychotic phenomena of modern society, where we strive for perfection even if it costs us our health, spiritually and physically. It is very very sad.