You know the one with the ups and downs about how we feel about ourselves. On one side the ride is uplifting. We are inspired to be all that we can be--taking up more intense fitness routines, keeping informed of the most current health data for ensuring longevity, or investing in a rejuvenating and optimizing injection or procedure. On the other side the ride isn’t so pleasant. We get down on ourselves for not doing enough about our appearance, shaming ourselves with character indictments such as “I’m just such a sloth” or “I must be a weak willed person.” We vacillate between “Great! I have a chance to improve myself!” and “Ugh, I hate [this] about myself.” That is the upside/downside of never fully accepting life as it is or ourselves as we are.
Just when you thought the hopeful-hateful teeter-totter was at it’s worst, along comes a more dizzying version. A recent New York Times article (July 3, 2008) entitled “A Spa for Those Women concerned About ‘Pelvic Fitness’” announces that Manhattan will have the first spa for ‘pelvic health integrated techniques,’ otherwise known as Phit. The spa’s website (www.theperfectphit.com) says “Phit opens the door of feminine fitness to any woman looking to restore her core to its best condition. At Phit, patients choose from individually tailored vaginal rejuvenation regimens along with cosmetic gynecologic procedures such as labiaplasty, vaginal tightening and proprietary, laser and radiofrequency-based non-surgical vulvar recontouring for women in need of supplementary therapies.”
The hopeful side of this is that women are being offered possible (though non yet proven) ways to improve their sexual satisfaction or bladder control, sometimes an issue for postmenopausal women. (For more non-surgical remedies to these problems checkout the website for The North American Menopausal Society at www.regardinghealth.com. The Society has posted an excellent article entitled “The Vagina Dialogues: Managing Postmenopausal Changes.”)
But, my concern isn’t about the uplifting side of this new trend. It has to do with the surgical and laser procedures that have the potential, as the Times article notes, for “taking body fixation to an entirely new level, furthering the idea that there is no female body part that cannot be tightened, plumped, trimmed or pruned.”
What would make women buy into a vaginal surgical/procedure for nonmedical reasons? As Dan Ariely observes in Predictably Irrational, “most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context.” In other words (a) we find out what we want by seeing it and (b) by comparing it to other options. So imagine this: You are walking through a shopping mall and notice a “Phit Spa” storefront. Every time you walk by you get more curious and before long you are thinking, “Gee, I wonder how my “yoni” compares to the beauty standard they are selling. Maybe I should see what other women are having done.” Or you are shopping with your granddaughter and she asks, “What do they sell in there, Nana?” How do you answer her? “Well, Jenny, as a girl you want to make sure your vagina’s as pretty as the next girls so that’s the place you go for a remodel.”
This latest trend provides rich new material for Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologue’s and The Good Body and further proves the point that a woman’s relationship to her vagina can be burdened by judgments stealthily taking up residence via comparison. It’s hard to feel good about who we are when our value becomes dependent on spending more and more time and money obsessing about improving our outsides in order to match a culturally determined ideal.
Rereading the first line of the ad (“Phit opens the door of feminine fitness to any woman looking to restore her core to its best condition”) I wonder “How in the world do we confuse the look of our vagina with the core of our being?” Clearly, as wise women and sages, we must empower younger women to know the nature of their true core. We can be the counter balance to outwardly imposed, highly profitable, well-marketed values that confuse and misdirect our true being. We must move into our older years with the grace and assurance that our true power is sourced from within.
I’m not saying we need to jump off the teeter-totter, giving up on self-improvement altogether. The Serenity Prayer gives us some guidance:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
We now live in times where there are plenty of things we can change. But, should we? Do we give ourselves the time to ask “What is really motivating me to do this diet, procedure, or surgery? Sometimes we can honestly answer, “It feels good to be my best self.” And sometimes the truth is we are inducted into a preoccupation with an imagined defect, caught in the mire of comparisons, or we are just plain avoiding addressing internal blocks to true confidence and self-worth.
When I was a child on a playground and there was no one to sit on the other side of the teeter-totter with me, I would carefully climb up one end to the center. Once there, I would attempt to find my balance and stand, one foot on either side. When I got good at it, I could lean to either side, making the teeter-totter rock up and down while I stayed balanced in the middle. We can still do that, standing tall on this modern day teeter-totter, finding equanimity, moment-to-moment, situation-by-situation. We can look both inside and out, using hope to inspire us to new levels of being and achieving as well as letting the “down feelings” show us where we need to cultivate surrender, kindness, and acceptance.