Now you too can have that
Playboy look - in shape and in color! That's right, first you can get laser
vaginal rejuvenation and labiaplasty to shape things up down there and then,
when that's not enough, for a mere $29.95 you can get "My New
Pink Button Genital Cosmetic Colorant" - basically, long-wearing lipstick for a woman's
"other" lips.
Q. “Help! I've noticed
I am turning a more brown color down there on my inside lips, is this
normal”?
A. Yes, it’s perfectly normal and there are many factors
that can contribute to this. Ethnicity is a big factor, also age, hormone
change, surgeries, childbirth, sickness, health, diet and medications
can all contribute to a change from “Pink” to “Brown” in a woman's genital
area.
Q. “I used to be so
“Pink” and healthy looking on my inside Labia Lip area. Now I am losing
that fresh look. Is there anything I can do”?
A. Yes, now there is a solution! “My New Pink
Button” is a Cosmetic Dye especially for the woman's genital area, to help
restore that healthy vibrant Rosy color. Until now there has never been a
solution for restoring natural pigment. This is a concern with many women
and more than you can even imagine, and a frequent question that Physicians are
asked. Check out the blogs on the Internet. You are not
alone! This is a common problem and we now have a simple and safe
solution, restoring sexual confidence to Women everywhere!
Apparently, this product is selling so well, after being
featured on The Doctors, that some of
the available colors are out of stock. It comes in four different shades
of pink and has been developed by a woman who says that she works in
conjunction with plastic surgeons and dermatologists in developing products
specific for the needs of pre- and post-operative patients.Specifically, her bio says that she’s
developed a line of makeup specifically for the needs of post-op breast cancer
patients, admittedly an admirable endeavor.It’s hard to see though how the genital colorant being
sold isn’t just one more way to foster and then profit from women’s
insecurity.It creates yet another
ideal (i.e. the four “appropriate” shades of labial pink) which women’s bodies
are supposed to live up to and then offers the means to attain that ideal (or
“restore” it) against which most of us never knew we fell short – until now.
In addition, the stereotypical Westernizing/Eurocentric
nature of this product is obvious. In the FAQs, the first culprit listed as the source of the problematic
brown labia is ethnicity, thus identifying one’s ethnicity as the source of the
“problem” from the get-go.Secondly is the simple fact that “brown” is listed as an unacceptable
color, the marker of unattractiveness and ill health, versus the “healthy” pink
skin associated with Caucasians; indeed all the available colors are associated
with the labia of famous white women – i.e. Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, Audrey
Hepburn and Ginger Rogers.
It should be noted that this product hasn’t been FDA
approved; the website FAQs split hairs on this question by noting that the
individual ingredients in the product have all been FDA-approved.However, what’s implicit in that answer
is that this particular combination of ingredients for this particular use has
not been approved.
Because historically – and contemporarily – so much
“ickiness,” embarrassment, shame and mystery have surrounded women’s monthly
periods, Elissa Stein and Susan Kim have written a book with an admirable
purpose.Flow:The
Cultural History of Menstruation aims to demystify the one common
experience that all women have but few celebrate. The book’s high production
values clearly reflect Stein and Kim’s ethos; packed with pin-up girls and
examples of feminine product advertising, it’s kitschy, colorful, cute – coffee
table material, something to display rather than hide.All of which is their point – women
shouldn’t feel like we have to hide during our periods, nor should reliable
information about them be hidden from us.
Stein and Kim’s first chapter, on “Language,”
highlights the way that gendered norms regarding feminine passivity versus male
activity are embedded in the language we use to describe even the most basic of
biological processes, with “depressing, loser-ish” verbs that imply
deterioration used to describe menstruation while “sexy, empowered, action-hero
verbs” are used to describe ejaculation.This type of language leaves us, they note, “with the impression that
the sad-sack uterus… has once again not been asked to the pregnancy prom, so it
just stays home and lets it all go – that menstruation is, essentially, a lame
combination of inertia and failure,” even though that’s an inaccurate portrayal
of the complex and dynamic menstrual process (8).(Karen Houppert is cited in this particular section; Emily
Martin’s 1991 article “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a
Romance Based on Stereotypical Gender Roles” is an even earlier source of
similar material.) Stein and Kim
urge us to question the language of disgust, embarrassment, weakness, sickness,
etc. that is taken for granted as the way one describes the menstruation,
because not doing so grants those words the power to shape not only our perceptions
of that monthly process but our experiences of it.
As narrators, Stein and Kim take on the authorial personas of chatty
big sisters or cooler, wiser friends. While this is clearly by design,
the gossipy, ingratiating tone does grate on one’s nerves after a while.Eventually, one wishes they would just present the facts without all the editorializing and exclamation points. Oddly enough, I found this sentiment also applied to their deep affection for the introductory adverb.
At
the heart of my concern with this rhetorical approach, and more
importantly, is an issue that goes beyond simple irritation at its
contrived intimacy.One of the authors’ oft repeated phrases in Flow is some variation of “Take it from us…” or “Trust us…,” which is inevitably followed by some assertion, e.g.:“While
fibroids aren’t caused by the menstrual cycle, their growth is
stimulated by estrogen… and take it from us, boy, can they grow!” (208) This
imperious assumption of authority contravenes the authors' message by
coming across as another form of the very behavior by the vested
interests that they criticize.Stein and Kim’s salient
point is that for years women have been encouraged to trust (often
unreliable, dangerous, misinformed, ignorant and/or biased) sources for
information regarding their biological processes.The
best way to encourage critical thinking about this information is not
then to continually proclaim one’s own trustworthiness, which implies
that we can’t interpret the evidence for ourselves. It’s unfortunate that with every “trust us,” one hears the chatty cheerleader narrators morph into Joe Isuzu.I
found myself wishing that Stein and Kim's editor would have been a bit
more heavy-handed with the red pen when it came to the avowals of
integrity. It's a classic case of show vs. tell. Rather than
telling the reader how trustworthy they are, the authors would better
serve readers by simply demonstrating that integrity - which Stein and
Kim do; they simply needn't trumpet it, as that's a rhetorical strategy
which undermines their credibility rather than strengthens it.
While
this is a book clearly not written for the academic or the feminist who
is already well-versed in women’s studies, at times Stein and Kim
curiously omit certain items from their narrative that seem basic to a
study of feminine cultural history.For instance, I was
surprised that the section on the lore of destructive female deities
omits any mention of the Hebrew demon Lilith, an incubus who also
caused harm to infants.Somewhere between the eighth and
the tenth century, Lilith’s legend was augmented to cast her as the
first of the Biblical Adam’s wives; because she was made out of clay
along with Adam she was equal to him and refused to submit,
particularly sexually (as opposed to the later Eve, made of Adam’s rib
and thus his subordinate).Stein and Kim tell us that Adam’s name means “bloody clay,” the connotations of which now survive contemporarily as “red earth.”Lilith’s role is an important part of the context of this information, yet it remains mentioned.
Flow’s fourth chapter, “Hysteria,” leads us to an interesting
conclusion: that the “discovery” of PMS, first so-called in 1953,
closely following the American Pyschiatric Association’s removal of
hysteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1952, suggests
that hysteria has simply been renamed and rebranded as “pre-menstrual
syndrome,” a condition as difficult to diagnose and define as hysteria
once was.Certainly, Stein and Kim present compelling evidence to support such an idea, and I think it’s worth considering.In
this chapter my quibbles are not with the conclusion, but again with
some of the information left out in the lead up to that conclusion. Just
before presenting the conclusion I’ve noted, Stein and Kim tell us that
“The 1950s may not have been a feminist mecca, but women had more
rights than ever before in history.”As Susan Faludi discusses at length in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women,
what’s also true about the 1950s is that it saw a backlash against the
gains in women’s freedoms engendered by the peculiar needs of wartime.Now
that the men had come home from war, they needed to go back to work,
and the prevailing thought was that the women who had gone to work in
their stead now needed to be gotten out of the way to make room for the
returning men.Thus women were actively encouraged to get
back into the home and guilted into becoming the perfect housewives,
stereotypical gender roles (re)enforced with a vengeance. Surely,
making the connection between this particular social circumstance and
the addition of PMS to the lexicon would be useful in strengthening
Stein and Kim’s argument.
In the lead up to the conclusion of Chapter 4, Stein and Kim ask,
“…can we get both political and conspiracy-theorish for a moment?Could
what was historically called hysteria – widespread instances of
clinical depression, unhappiness, anxiety, anger – have been a simple
product not so much of sexual or maternal frustration, but of actual
systematized oppression?After all, throughout history,
women had no rights or autonomy, and were routinely barred from higher
education, property ownership, the right to vote, careers.Could
it be that when anyone is faced with such fundamental obstacles to
happiness and self-actualization, even a whiz-bang orgasm isn’t enough
to make things all better again?”(62)
Conspiracy theories are associated with paranoia, delusion and a lack of objectivity. Yet the
notion of hysteria as bodily protest against the conscripted feminine
gender roles conferred on upper middle-class women of the nineteenth
century is well-established. This argument has already been cogently made by a number of
feminist scholars over the years, notably by Susan Bordo in her 1993
book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, but whom aren’t cited here.To
cast the idea of the sociological origins of hysteria as
“conspiracy-theorish,” as the authors do, is to confer hysterical
properties upon that idea, thus Stein and Kim unfortunately contradict
themselves via the dint of their own rhetoric.
It may sound as if I mean to be entirely critical of this text; I don’t.Overall,
as I mentioned in the introduction, Stein and Kim have written a book
with an admirable purpose; their work addresses a subject far too often
left in the dark and does so in a way that’s to be welcomed for its
positivity.Academic criticisms aside, this cheeky book
in all its quintessential Third Wave sex-positive girliness is the sort
of thing I would gladly give to my (hypothetical) pre-teen or teenaged
daughter when she hit puberty.It provides an attractive
and nonthreatening source of information for girls. Points of
disagreement with the text could become useful entry points for
discussion and teachable moments in critical thinking and encouragement
for further research.
*Flow: The Cultural History of Menstruation is published by St. Martin's Griffin, an imprint of Macmillan. The video below features an interview with author Elissa Stein.
