One of my favourite Tribunes this year was The Body Issue. Yes, there has been better writing, and more research, and more funny shit, but Body Image and all it means has become something of a hobby horse for me.

Having turned 40 this year I’m becoming a little more attuned to keeping in shape, and realising that it’s harder now than it was when I was 25.

A few things have happened recently that have made me angry, and I feel the need to revisit Women And Their Bodies (no pun intended). I have a beautiful wife who has a way-too-long list of Things She Hates About Her Body. I have a six year old daughter and a ten year old step-daughter, and I work in an office that’s half-female and has a greater than usual ratio of female bosses. I’m surrounded by gorgeous women and girls of all ages, and I look around at billboards and magazines and TV and I’m fucking appalled at what they’re being told they should look like.

There’s the Kayser Whatever Shape You Are campaign about which I shouted a few months ago, and there’s the hysterically-funny-if-it-weren’t-so-disgusting photoshopping of already bizarrely-thin models and celebrities, and then there’s this:

Out Christmas shopping with the six year old, wandering through Target, I came across these charming little numbers, aimed at exactly my daughter’s age group. As I snapped a quick photo with the phone, a couple of eight year old girls pranced up with one each, then went one rack over and searched for the matching low-low-low cut hipster briefs. I know it’s old news, but seriously, What The Fuck???

I’m just lost for words on this stuff; they’re selling “sexy” to LITTLE GIRLS. It’s wrong. It’s sick.

Girls are hitting puberty and having sex younger and younger every year, and where young teenage girls used to swoon with as-yet-unrealised-or-understood desire for cute, virtually asexual boy bands, they now idolise shiny whorelets like Britney Spears and that Aguilera thing. The Spice Girls, with their fun, silly “Let’s the four of us grab this cute guy and dance with him and have fun ‘cause we’re cool chicks” have been replaced by “Yeah, I look like a manga-bondage whore, check this out I can get my legs behind my ears and I love that all these male dancers in this clip with me look like they’re about to gang-bang me that’s what we all want, right, girls??”.

At least sexually-explicit female artists like Missy Higgins (“is it worth it, lemme work it, if you’ve got a big {beep} lemme search it”) and Lil’ Kim (“ain’t gonna fuck tonight, you gotta eat my pussy right”) are targeted at adults, because their music is too complex for your average child to enjoy. Britney, on the other hand, performs simple music with simple beats and simple hooks, aimed directly at the young market, and writhes around in hotpants moaning If You Seek Amy, and pre-pubescent girls are lapping it up.

I know my girls are going to grow up, and much as it terrifies me, I know they’re going to have sex. Accepting this, painful as it is, is just part of being a father, or a step-father, or a brother. I just wish the music industry and the fashion industry and the retail chains could give them a few years in between Dora The Explorer and their Year Ten Formal to Just Be Little Girls.

As if they don’t have enough horrors awaiting them as they hit their twenties and beyond (nineteen year olds getting Botox and boob-jobs is more and more common), there’s been a recent explosion in the field of labioplasty. Yes, that’s right, the Designer Vagina is now available to every woman with a couple of grand and the need to deal surgically with yet another media-created insecurity.

Now there’s always been a need for the occasional reconstruction or repair. Childbirth can damage the bajingo, or it could just not quite work properly in the first place. However, the Holy of Holies is now apparently ripe for the tweaking, along the same lines as breasts.

Despite my personal opinion that fake boobs are No Good, I can see the argument that there is at least some kind of loose standard applicable when it comes to “good” or “bad” boobs, and so enhancements can be made along those lines.

However, who the hell is able to say what is a good-looking, let alone a perfect vagina? Let’s be honest, if you got home and found a vagina sitting on its own on your doorstep you’d kick it into the garden and hope it didn’t slither back and terrify the cat. Attached to a woman, however, it’s a thing of beauty.

Over the years I’ve seen thousands, possibly tens of thousands of vaginas, some of them (ok, only a few) in the flesh, and any man with similar internet access has to agree that they’re all different. There’s a basic layout of outer bits, then you get to the internal workspace such as the clitoris, the vagina, and so on. Some are “neater” than others, some bigger, some smaller, some have a bit more of the internal workings showing than others, some clits are Out There screaming to be tickled, others seem to require a magnifying glass and dedication.

Perhaps the trend for Brazilians has meant women spending more time actually looking at their gear than they used to, and (broad generalisation coming up) as women tend to do, discovering something else “wrong” with themselves. Maybe it’s because porn is more readily available these days, and women (and their stupid boyfriends) are measuring themselves against those bizarre standards. Who knows?

The question for me isn’t so much Why is there a perceived need to improve one’s vagina, it’s more How the hell can you improve on it? Vaginas are awesome!

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