Plastic makes perfect? Even the emergence of the vagina as pop-culture phenomenon did not prepare me for the vaginoplasty BY SARAH GREEN

A COUPLE OF years ago, I walked into the middle of a conversation on body piercing. My boyfriend’s ex was recounting a complicated story involving Spain and too much sangria. To get up to speed, I asked what she’d had pierced. There was a loaded pause. Then she looked me straight in the eye. "My vagina."

Since then, Christina Aguilera has gotten her own such piercing, blabbed about it to Rolling Stone, and had it removed. But I am not any more comfortable now than I was then with discussing female genitalia in mixed company. Not that I didn’t enjoy The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler’s barnstorming, award-winning one-woman show. Nonetheless, at the gym a couple of weeks ago, I almost fell off my treadmill when I saw a woman in a T-shirt with a line from the play — MY VAGINA IS ANGRY — happily bobbing up and down on an elliptical trainer.

No one, not even the redoubtable Ensler, would argue that a vagina — irate or otherwise — is going to win any body-part beauty pageants. So perhaps it should be no surprise that the final frontier of our appearance-obsessed culture is the one bit women can’t see without a hand mirror.

Who can forget the meteoric rise of the Brazilian bikini wax? (Forever immortalized by Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, who described her experience in a 2000 episode: "I got mugged — she took everything I got!") I pretty much gave up on that sort of thing after I paid 30 bucks to an "esthetician" to do things to me that would seem more at home in Guantánamo Bay.

Yet even the emergence of the vagina as pop-culture phenomenon did not prepare me for the vaginoplasty.

It was seven o’clock on a wintry morning and I was going through my morning routine. I opened my e-mail and there it was — an update from Women’s eNews bearing a headline that was definitely not for the faint-hearted or the pre-caffeinated: MORE WOMEN SEEK VAGINAL PLASTIC SURGERY.

A couple weeks later, there were vaginoplasties in the New York Times. Other newspapers chimed in, rolling their eyes at perfectionist women for whom no detail is too trifling. Then it went global: Canadian and British papers ran with it as yet another example of their "kooky America" reportage.

One surgeon said his business has quadrupled this year; he now performs five vaginoplasties a day. Another told a reporter she’d been "avalanched" with phone calls in the past two years. The granddaddy of vaginal cosmetic surgery, Beverly Hills gynecologist Dr. David Matlock, rakes in more than a quarter of a million dollars a month for his services. And the American Society of Plastic Surgeons believes that vaginoplasties and labiaplasties make up the fastest growing trend in cosmetic surgery.

Each story contains an element of the surreal. Just when Botox is beginning to seem de rigueur, along comes "vaginal rejuvenation." Some surgeons report that many women request this "tightening" of the vaginal walls because of a negative comment by the men in their lives. As if new mothers don’t have enough to worry about already, now they have to worry about being "baggy" for the father of their children? And many patients bring pornography with them, exhorting doctors to "make me look like her," as if labiaplasty were akin to a haircut.

Male-genital surgery, by contrast, seems preponderantly functional, if spam subject headings are a reliable indicator: "They’ll call you tripod." But as a press release from Dr. Joseph Berenholz, of the Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute in Southfield, Michigan, makes clear, any functional benefits of female-genital surgery are largely incidental.

Berenholz, touting "the ultimate sexual makeover," compares it to breast implants and liposuction. For decades, surgeons have operated to correct incontinence and fix problems caused by complicated births. Some will also perform hymenoplasties to "re-virginize" worried brides. But the cash cow is, as usual, women’s insecurities.

One procedure advertised by Berenholz calls for "trimming oversized labia minora, a condition that can be embarrassing and uncomfortable." Would a man be embarrassed about his "oversized" shaft? The labia minora are among the most sensitive of vaginal parts — and as with any surgery, there is scar tissue, bleeding, nerve damage. Do you really want to take chances with some of the body’s best nerve endings?

Really, now, hasn’t our passion for plastic surgery gone far enough? In another context, many of these surgeries would be considered genital mutilation and banned under Western law. In places where a woman’s chastity is her prized possession, genital surgery is justified because it’s supposed to keep a woman virtuous. In America, it seems, genital surgery is justified by our culture’s own holy grail — physical perfection under the guise of sexual fulfillment.

I didn’t even know what another woman’s non-Hollywood, un-implanted breast looked like before I joined a gym. Nude women look a lot different in real life, I discovered, without the spray-on tans and contouring makeup. Even Goldie Hawn — the paragon of quinquagenarian hotness — used a body double for her bedroom scene in The Banger Sisters. No one can convince me those thighs were a day over 30.

If we succumb to the labia lift, we’ll just be raising beauty standards to new heights — or lows — and creating yet another way for us to feel substandard. Genitals — female or male — aren’t made for ogling. Instead of wondering if ours look "normal," why don’t we wonder when surgically enhanced became run-of-the-mill? The Times called labiaplasties "the most private of makeovers." But therein lies the rub — this isn’t just another example of plastic surgery run amok. Vaginoplasties aren’t exactly as plain as the nose job on your face. Cosmetic surgery is how you present yourself to the world. The world is callous, judgmental, and cruel; ideally, your lover is not.

Who knows what a "perfect" vagina is supposed to look like, anyway? Maybe that explains why, when they hit the surgeon’s office, so many vaginoplastees bring along a dog-eared copy of Hustler.

Sarah Green can be reached at sgreen@gmail.com