Just when you thought that there was nothing more you could do to make your genitals more acceptable to the opposite sex, along came “vajazzling”. The term refers to the burgeoning celebrity craze for shaving, denuding and perfuming one’s intimate area before applying gemstones in a variety of approved girly patterns. The end result resembles a raw chicken breast covered in glitter. As the name implies, this one is just for the girls – nobody, so far, has suggested that men’s sexual equipment is unacceptable if it doesn’t taste like cake and sparkle like a disco ball.
Surely it can’t catch on. Surely, no matter how ludicrous, painful and expensive consumer culture’s intervention in our sex lives becomes, nobody is disgusted enough by their own normal genitals that they would rather look like they’ve just been prepped for surgery by Dr Bling. Or are they?
Suddenly, my teenage friends are popping off to get vajazzled. During the biggest shake-up of higher education in generations, someone at the University of Liverpool advertised a vajazzling evening for female members of the student body who really want their STDs to sparkle. All of this is sold as a fun, pseudo-feminist “confidence boost”, as if what women really need to empower themselves is not education and meaningful work, but genitals that resemble a traumatic, intimate accident in a Claire’s accessories shop.
The beauty industry is constantly raising its already absurd standards for what constitutes an acceptable female body. Thirty years ago, plastic surgery was seen as the preserve of porn stars, actresses and the ultra-rich. Today, middle-class mums get their facial muscles frozen with botulinum toxin as casually as one might pick up a pint of milk on the school run; businesswomen take out loans for nose jobs and liposuction; and I can hardly turn around on public transport without seeing beaming adverts telling me how much happier and more confident I could be if only I paid a private surgeon to chop away at my healthy, living flesh.
All that glitters
Despite the downturn, 2010 was a record year for cosmetic surgery in Britain, including surgeries to help women’s labia more closely resemble the plucked, blasted and sexless genitals of porn stars. Like vajazzling, labiaplasty is supposed to make one feel sexy but is a part of a creeping consumer war on sexual satisfaction.
What’s most interesting about vajazzling is that it doesn’t even pretend to have anything to do with pleasure. Most of the people I’ve spoken to who are attracted to women are bewildered by the idea of a vagina that looks like it’s off to the Golden Globes without you. Vajazzling has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the cruel logic of identikit, production-line womanhood, in which “fun” means slavish adherence to the joyless motifs of corporate pornography and “confidence” means submission to a species of surveillance whereby your nether regions are forcibly reshaped into a smile.
It’s all about making us feel that women’s bodies – which are supposed to smell, leak and grow hair – are shameful and need fixing. As long as the beauty and surgery industries remain profitable, female sexual shame will remain big business.
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