What is happening in our culture when the following two stories break on the same day? First, over at the Washington Post, "Christopher A. Warner says he considers himself something of a maverick, a caring physician willing to challenge medical orthodoxy in order to help women … he is building a business as the first area physician to perform controversial procedures that use a laser to enhance sexual gratification by repairing tissue damaged by childbirth, to give women a ‘youthful aesthetic look' or to make those who are not appear to be virgins." Meanwhile, over at the San Francisco Chronicle, "A public high school has suspended three students who disobeyed officials by saying the word ‘vagina' during a reading from a well-known feminist play."

I won't break down the Washington Post piece in detail, since it's definitely worth reading the whole thing—though not before bed. Feministing has also provided excellent coverage of the accelerating American horror that is labiaplasty. Suffice to say that more and more American women are subjecting themselves to dubiously titled "vaginal rejuvenation surgery" every year, thanks to aggressive marketing tactics employed by a bunch of opportunistic, unethical doctors whose penises, if there is any justice in this world, will soon shrivel up and fall off. There, I said it.

Of course, making women feel bad about even the most intimate nooks of their bodies is a no-brainer in a culture that obsessively extols youth and barely tolerates age (particularly in women), and that glorifies pregnancy and childbirth yet implicitly or explicitly condemns all the things that naturally go along with them (weight gain, breastfeeding, maternity leave, children in need of healthcare, and of course, stretched-out vaginas). Perhaps that's why the most disturbing element of the whole designer vagina phenomenon is that it's being marketed to women as a form of empowerment—the Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute of New York even dared to slap the following headline on their November 2005 press release: "Women Now Have Equal Sexuality Rights." Way to appropriate the language of women's rights to promote "designer vaginal labiaplasty" as a cure for the "silent suffering" brought on by "multiple pregnancies, aging, and trauma," since everyone knows that those things are all women's responsibility to correct.

The radical notion that a woman's husband might want to just get over his loss of attraction to a wife whose body is experiencing the natural consequences of giving birth to his children has no place in the world of designer vaginas. Instead, we get women who are encouraged to undergo risky, scientifically questionable, often-ineffective surgeries not only "for themselves," but also for the sake of their "foundering" marriages. To wit (emphasis mine):

Thirty-two-year-old Lisseth Figueroa, an office manager in Los Angeles … said she suffered from stress incontinence after four pregnancies and felt she was being rejected sexually. Two years ago, after hearing a friend extol the virtues of surgery, she borrowed from her mother and her boss to help pay Matlock's $15,000 fee; her husband gave her $8,000. "I did it for both of us," said Figueroa, adding that their marriage has improved as a result of laser rejuvenation and a procedure she said Matlock suggested to beautify her genitals. "Before the surgery I felt really old … and ugly. Since the surgery that's changed. I'm very happy with it—and so is my husband.

…And just as long as she can afford to go back for annual tightening and beautification sessions, her husband might—just might—deign to keep having sex with her! Sounds like Empowerment 101.

Of course, when American women actually do act empowered enough to own their vaginas, they get punished—-which brings me to our second March 6 vagina story. On the night of Friday, March 2, three female students from John Jay High School in Cross River, New York dared to utter the word "vagina" (in unison, no less) during a reading sponsored by the school's literary magazine (they were reading an excerpt from "The Vagina Monologues"). Specifically, they read: "My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women's army. I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina's country."

Their punishment? Suspension, of course, since (according to Principal Richard Leprine), "The event was open to the community, including children, and the word was not appropriate." Yes, children should not be subjected to anything involving vaginas, even though most of them emerged from one a few short years ago.

Principal Leprine claims that his issue was not with the word "vagina," it was with the fact that the girls insisted on saying it even after he forbade it. Which, of course, belies his assumption that women's body parts are inherently pornographic. I don't think so. In fact, in a culture where women are encouraged to seek invasive surgery when their vaginas do exactly what they're supposed to, I think the ladies of John Jay High School deserve a standing ovation. There's hope for our culture yet …