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 Do you know what your vagina looks like? Could you describe its colors and contours? How do you feel when someone's down there staring at it? I've never really scrutinized my own. No one else is going to see it in the unaroused state I glimpse when I'm squatting awkwardly over my blush mirror; it can't be an accurate picture. My vagina is like an emotion something others can see and judge, but that I can't really look at clearly or objectively.
The first time I witnessed someone else's vagina up close was in a club bathroom at one a.m. It dared me from under raised skirt curtains. But I didn't get a good hard look then either. It seemed prudent to stick my tongue out and attempt to satisfy the strange, perhaps dangerous beast, and then get it back into the unders where it belonged.
I don't fear the cock I know I can master it. I can see it get hard or soft and gauge the efficacy of whatever new technique I'm working on. It's right there. With the more reserved vagina, there's always the feeling that maybe it's judging me, and might talk behind my back.
Other owners of pussies seem to feel equally mystified by and estranged from their own genitals. We don't know how it's supposed to look; we take a secret peek and figure that that wrinkly, oddly shaded thing must be wrong. "It's ugly," is how one of my friends describes hers. "It's scary and grayish-pink." "It's a nightmare," admits another. "I'm pretty much convinced that I've got the ugliest vag ever! My inner labia are big and floppy and stick out way past my outer labia. And everything is purple. Ugh."
If you don't like the way your lips look, there are men and women who will cut them off for you, remove some or most of the inner labia (a procedure called labiaplasty) and stitch you up so tight afterwards  (that's vaginal rejuvenation) that you'll bleed on the sheets all over again next time you have sex.
I've had my breasts done, so I took this assignment open to the idea of remaking oneself in a vision other than God's. I don't have anything against plastic surgery, any more than I do against someone traveling to the Middle East in the middle of a war (it'd certainly be interesting!), eating chocolate all day long or decorating the entire downstairs in magenta. Even if those are big mistakes, I prefer lives and bodies that have a lot to talk about.
My assignment? Go undercover as Lisa Stoddard, model and seeker of rejuvenation, and find out who's getting this done and why. I was also curious what judgment on my vagina would be made by the men and women who'd seen them all?
I scheduled my first visit with Dr. Gary Alter of where else? Beverly Hills. Security cameras swayed back and forth in the corners; the receptionists looked like James Bond femmes fatales. One led me to Dr. Alter. He wore a white coat and a friendly expression, but his teeth seemed too big for his face. I wondered if he'd had a lot of work done and if his face was now trimmed to half its original size while the teeth remained unchanged.
Maybe not. I jerked my eyes from the teeth to the "before" and "after" vagina portraits he'd handed me. The first "before" looked like a one-winged bird in flight. Another labia had a dark spot, which its owner wished to have removed. "What's wrong with the shape of your labia?" Dr. Alter asked me.
"Nothing!" I cried. Then I thought, "Oops." Had a security camera registered my slip?
I've always thought of labia the way I think of death and babies they just are. You don't say someone's death "should have been neater" or a baby "could be cuter." Do some people go around saying these things about vaginas? (I checked with my male friends afterward, and discovered that indeed, terms like "roast beef sandwich" or "the Hanging Garden" are used by certain men to describe long lips.) Why was I there again? "I want to look like a doll," I blurted out.
This seemed reasonable to the doctor. He assured me I'd look like I did at twelve. Then he had me go into another room and take off my pants and underwear so he could examine the offending item. One of the bespectacled Bond nemeses stayed in the room while Dr. Alter squeezed his hands into rubber gloves. Probably to make me feel more comfortable, Dr. Alter chatted with me about Howard Stern he has appeared on his show several times. He handed half-naked me reprints of articles in Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan, in which women whose names have been changed describe praying no one looked down there during the act, and long labia getting sucked up into the vaginal canal with each thrust of the penis (causing irritation), or falling out of one's bathing suit (causing embarrassment).
It seemed like the same two anonymous women were quoted in each article, yet thousands of these operations have been performed. Who is having it done? My friends in the porn industry say there is pressure not to be "bagged out" for your close-ups. But the post-operative women in the articles and the ones I spoke to myself all said it was they who wanted their private parts to look different, not men or society.  "I felt droopy and funny-looking," one mother of two told me. "No one complained, but I was inhibited. Now I feel fabulous! I look like a Playboy centerfold! There's no more pigmentation. It's plump and all the same color pink. It looks like it's never been touched." To me, the "before" vaginal photos in the album looked fine. But the bubbly woman on the other end of the car phone wasn't satisfied with "fine." She'd wanted . . . not something more; she'd wanted something less. I, however, still had my lips and Dr. Alter was yanking on them, saying, "Yes, we'll get rid of all this."
All this? He had me hold a mirror so I could see the area proposed for excommunication. I realized I didn't even know the proper names for the parts and I write about sex for my career. Psychologically, I'd done the same thing to my puss that artists and photographers do kept it in the shadows, put something over it, blurred it . . . for thirty-one years. And now, under flourescent lights and in the doctor's fierce grip, at last I looked it over, and it was good. It looked complicated. I didn't even know it had all those colors.
Dr. Alter "pioneered" what he refers to as the butterfly technique in 1994. He takes a V-shaped slice out of each labia minor, then sews the edges together, thus preserving the original pigmentation darker at the edges and fading to pink inside and the natural ruffled effect. He referred to what other surgeons do as "amputation." (Dr. Matlock, a cross-town rival who did the bubbly mother of two I interviewed, does not employ the butterfly technique, preferring to cut all the dark and wrinkly stuff off, leaving you seashell pink and smooth and tiny.) The surgery takes less than two hours. It is simple, performed with anesthetic or a mere epidural. The risk is the same as there is with any surgery infection. You wear an ice pack in your pants for forty-eight hours and abstain from sex or tight pants for six weeks. The cost? $4,900.
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