The Art of the Essay and Thinking About Labiaplasty

I have been feeling significantly unwriterly recently. (Actually, I've been feeling a lot of 'un-'s recently, but we'll talk about those later.) This morning during the commute, I pulled up my 'topics' list, which includes both things I want to write blog entries about, and ideas that might spark a story.

The topic I stumbled upon was 'Labiaplasty': surgical modification of the labia to meet a popular ideal of beauty.

Now, here's the funny thing: I'm not sure how I feel about the topic. I'm just not shrill enough on the topic, one way or the other. The Atlantic Monthly magazine had a great article recently entitled First Person Plural, about the multiplicity of personalities each one of us carries in our heads, and how those personas interact through time. Read it if you have time; I'll be recommending it several times in the next couple of months, I'm sure.

On the subject of labiaplasty, though: the civil libertarian in me thinks that people ought to be able to modify their bodies in whatever way they choose. The hound-dog bioconservative (but not bioluddite) me is shocked and horrified, experiencing a Kassian 'Wisdom of Repugnance' moment, mostly because I happen to think that the generic photoshopped, hacked-back labia of most porn starlets is pretty boring and uninteresting compared to what I've encountered "in the wild." The biolibertarian thinks that the practice ought to be legal everywhere, because attempting to limit it while continuing to permit transsexual reassignment surgery would be a legislative and judicial nightmare. The father in my wants my daughters to never, ever have to even think about this kind of thing. The humanitarian in me sees a difference between the deep identity issues of sexual identity and the fashion-driven loathe-your-body memes that encourage labiaplasty.

Unfortunately, "I think it's an unnecessary mutilation of a body part that unsder no circumstances deserves the attention of the knife for purely aesthetic purposes, the popularity of which is driven by a vicious fashionability that dislikes the natural variance of the female body, but I don't think it ought to be illegal," really kind of falls apart there at the end with its lack of vehemence. It gets the crowd all riled up about a problem and then at the end says, "But nothing should be done. Go about your business as normal."

Which is to say that writing an essay about labiaplasty means, essentially, trying to figure out how I feel about it. My feelings are too mixed up to do so effectively. I'm apalled by labiaplasty; I'm also driven by principle not to interfere with those women who want it for aesthetic reasons. I want desperately to convince them that their ladyparts are just fine, even gorgeous, in their natural diversity, and I want to convince myself that my loathing isn't merely a feeling, the consequences of acting on which would be tragic-- which is how I understand the Kassian moral universe.

Petri Dish, Fixed

Several people pointed out to me that the most recent story, Petri Dish, seemed to be cut short, and so it was.  By one word, “drink,” which I have added, along with the correct punctuation.

I knew there was a reason I kept the actual stories in plain text.  Makes fixing these kinds of mistakes so much easier.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Saturday weekendishness

It was a runaround day here at the Villa Sternberg. Started out making waffles in my new Belgian wafflemaker. Those things are much larger than what the old wafflemaker used to make, so it's probably a good thing that there were only four of them when we were done.

Buying the Jül tree

Then it was off to the races. We first drove off to Ikea, where we tried to pick out a Jül tree without actually seeing it, mostly because the trees were tied up and they didn't have a way to bind the tree back up after you'd unwrapped it, so we've basically got a tree that's as tall as we want it, but we don't know anything else about it.

For some reason, we got into a conversation about being tall, I think because I noticed how tall Yamaraashi-chan was getting, and how sometimes she looked like her next elder sister. The conversation came around to who had inherited what. "Yeah, I totally inherited your armhair, daddy!" Kouryou-chan said.

Hey, I'm furry. I can't help that.

Yamaraashi-chan confessed that she was unhappy with her arm hair, and wore long-sleeve shirts at school. Omaha and I aren't sure what to do about that. It's not like she could shave it.

Post-haircut

Then it was time to race back to town to get the kids haircuts. They spent ten minutes looking through those catalogs of cuts, looking for the exact one that they wanted and then showing it to the hairdresser. Kouryou-chan's hair was a mess, too dry, apparently because she completely ignores her mother's advice and waves the shampoo bottle over her head rather than actually washing it, and she never uses conditioner.

Afterward, we hit Arby's, because it was between the salon and Kouryou-chan's dance studio, which is where we went next. There was a moment of frenzied running around as I dropped Omaha and Kouryou-chan at the dance studio, then back to the drugstore to pick up hair supplies, then back to the dance studio for the final binding of Kouryou-chan's new haircut so she could spend the next two hours in rehearsal.

The library was next. Yamaraashi-chan had a book to take back. Remember my little paragraph about Twilight? Guess what book she checked out. I, on the other hand, picked up Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World, which looks to be a fabuloso book about the battle for who would control the Mediterranean ocean in the 16th century. Unfortunately, it came at the day after I picked up At Day's Close: Night In Times Past, which is a "history of life at nighttime." The latter book isn't as good as it promises: the author's time period is narrow, about 1500 through 1850, and he vacillates between blatant praise for the Christian influence over people's fears of the dark and a strange interest in the toilet habits of the pre-modern, post-Medieval world.

Still, there's a chapter in the book about "The Miasma of Night," which documents how some people thought night was not merely darkness, but a physical presences the descended as the sun went down, absorbing more light than the mere absences of the sun would allow. It made me think of how the Church in Moon, Sun, Dragons could excuse their harsh oversight of the magic-users even while needing their services against the cthulhoid beasts coming down from the North.

After all that, I dropped Omaha and Yamaraashi-chan at home, then ran back to the dance studio to pick up Kouryou-chan. On the way home, I stopped at the grocery store and picked up some milk and a bottle of my favorite stout. I relayed to the very lovely Nye, who's worked there as long as I've been going there, that the other day I'd been carded by someone on the night staff. She was surprised and said, "Oh, like they haven't seen you coming in since your girls were two."

I went home and cooked dinner. Omaha had pulled out some salmon from the deep freeze, so I tossed together a dinner of broiled salmon, rice pilaf with shallots and saffron, and steamed carrots. It took half an hour, was quick and simple, and everything was done on time. It was also the first meal made with the stock from the Thanksgiving turkey (in the pilaf) and it was amazing.