Is Your Muff Buff?
Spotted on aldaily.com, this article by Jill Mahoney about the doctor behind the designer cooch:
Los Angeles — 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.
“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.
...“I think it's appalling and frightening and one more way in which perfectly normal, beautiful women are terrorized by the possibility of being less than a perfect 10,” said Joy Davidson, a certified sex therapist and author in Seattle.
Michael Atkinson, a sociology professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, says the increasing popularity of cosmetic vaginal reconstruction is partly the outcome of the West's obsession with plastic surgery.
“This is essentially a cultural problem that we fix medically,” said Prof. Atkinson, who studies cosmetic surgery. “We have this notion the body's a problem to be worked and if you slightly deviate from a supposed norm you should do something about it, which is really a market logic. That's how we make a lot of money in our culture, to plant these cultural ideals in people's heads and then try to enforce them.”
However, women who have had their genitals surgically enhanced say it has transformed their lives. While some patients have genuine health problems, such as incontinence, many also ask their doctors to perform additional procedures while they are on the operating table. Others are solely driven by cosmetic or sexual reasons.
...But gynecological experts say there is no proof that vaginal tightening improves sex and warn the procedure risks harmful side effects, including infection, hemorrhaging, loss of sensation, nerve injury, formation of scar tissue as well as becoming too tight. (Dr. Matlock says he has been reluctant to submit studies for publication in medical journals because he does not want to reveal his techniques.) “There are definite potential downsides to this,” said Dr. Young, adding that any possible benefits of tightening are not permanent.
There is no textbook outlining the ways and means that doctors can beautify the vagina. So Dr. Matlock, as he likes to say, gets all of his ideas by listening to women.
If they repeatedly make the same request, the man who has been called the Picasso of vaginas will attempt to turn wish into reality. He is currently developing what he calls a “lip tuck,” a facelift of sorts that would shrink sagging skin around the vulva and create a more “youthful appearance.”
He hones new techniques on animal parts — chicken thighs, turkey legs and pig's ears — until he is ready to work on women.
I can just hear the guy at dinner: "Another labia, uh...leg, dear?"
"Dr. Matlock says he has been reluctant to submit studies for publication in medical journals because he does not want to reveal his techniques."
And if that teensy-weensy admission doesn't make women run for the hills, it's another part of their anatomy they urgently need an operation on.
Jody Tresidder at August 16, 2005 9:16 AM
If a man runs for the hills at the sight of your girly bits, perhaps he's not the sort of gent you want to be having sex with him in the first place.
"Does this thong make my vagina lpok fat?"
Egads.
slackmistress at August 16, 2005 11:51 AM
Erm..."look."
Carry on.
slackmistress at August 16, 2005 11:52 AM
Interesting. I use pig's ears for when my wife's mad at me, too.
JK
Stu "El Inglés" Harris at August 16, 2005 11:54 AM
As someone posted on another blog on this topic, "if I'm allowing someone close enough to get a look at my vagina, they should consider themselves lucky regardless of whether it looks like the ones in Penthouse."
deja pseu at August 16, 2005 12:49 PM
Good fucking God. I can't believe this.
diana at August 16, 2005 9:20 PM
I think Alvin Toffler was somewhat referring to this way back when he wrote "Future Shock." Scary stuff, indeed.
Dmac at August 17, 2005 7:13 AM
I am pretty hard to shock but, wow.
As is trimming one's labia will tangentially build one's sense of worth.
nancy at August 18, 2005 9:36 AM
If the doctor transplants the excised labial flesh directly to the egos of the women, then criminy, it just might work.
nancy at August 18, 2005 9:39 AM
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