Vaginal rejuvenation, feminism, dog whistle, dog whistle

The first time I heard about vaginal rejuvenation surgery was at a brunch when I was in my late 30s. I love brunch because it feels Jewish. After I typed this I googled it to make sure I wasn’t crazy. And it turns out that while there is no causation, there is correlation: the more Jews there are in location in the US, the more brunches there are.

Maybe Jews do brunch on Sunday like we do Chinese food on Christmas: we need to entertain ourselves while the Christians are in church.  Maybe we like brunch because so many Jewish foods are breakfast foods, so there’s no point in straying too far from that meal.

Of course along with loads of lox and blintzes there are always loads of doctors and lawyers. So I was not surprised to meet a plastic surgeon who asked me how many children I have. I was surprised when he asked me, “Do you have vaginal leakage?”

Thoughts raced through my head: He is insane. Maybe so what. Should I fight with him? Would everyone hate me? Should I be his friend to learn something? Do I have vaginal leakage?

“Yeah, I do,” I said, “Does everyone?”

“Yes. I do surgery to fix that. I don’t think women should suffer in silence any longer.”

Thoughts: Oh. He’s marketing to me. The lox need more capers. He’s still talking. Are there blintzes. Talking. Rugelach is going fast. Must walk away.

My next close encounter with vaginal rejuvenation was today. There’s an ad on my blog for vaginal rejuvenation which I would normally just squash in spam, but lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with sex trafficking, so this ad stood out to me.

Sex traffickers frequently use feminist language as a way to lure women. Crafty use of phrases like taking power back or female oppression tend to attract women who feel like they are victims. And using dog whistle tactics makes women feel like they can be part of a group because they use the same language.

The place where this is a major problem is human trafficking on college campuses. I tell you this from deep knowledge. No link here. Just a lot of hours of pain. I’m not saying the company that spammed my site is trafficking, but I’m saying this is how insidious it is. If one person clicks, and calls up to get the surgery, it’s likely the person has low self-esteem. The ad that person left on my site is at the top of their human trafficking funnel. They sort for:

a. someone who needs feminism to help themselves feel their power
b. someone who wants external validation about their vagina
c. someone susceptible to being pushed one step further

There is way more money in trafficking than vaginal rejuvenation. Most trafficking operations work in teams. The first person gets a photo of the woman’s vagina. They pass the woman to someone who gets her a clear estimate of costs. This person has her send pictures doing a lot of different things, and moves talk about the vagina from clinical to intimate. They pass the woman to someone who tells her she’s pathetic for all the things she revealed to them and they blackmail her. This person is the one who controls her.

It’s an expensive business to run. But she’s worth tens of thousands of dollars because they can take special orders for porn and she’ll do it. She’ll even edit the pictures herself. She’s being trafficked without ever leaving her house.

Gen Z will not be surprised that traffickers have co-opted feminist language.  Gen Z sees “choice feminism” as having outlived its purpose. Women have lots of choices now, which narrows the application of “choice,” and for Gen Z choice and sex have become too fused for comfort. Many in Gen Z question placing licentious pleasure over empathy. As they see it, feminism made vanilla sex antiquated, and porn made sex violent. Together choice feminism in the age of porn makes all choices support the patriarchy. So Gen Z has put the breaks on sex.

I have written before about how as women gain more equality they want more difference between men and women. Amazing as this may sound, women who have power do not want to act out male sex fantasies. But it’s more than that. Choice feminism applies to brunch as well.

There’s a great study about women who kill. We know women don’t kill as often as men do, but when women do kill, they kill people they live with and men kill people they don’t live with. Even when it comes to domestic violence. Men kill female partners when the women have kicked them out or tried to leave. And women do not kill more often when they are married, they kill more often when they are living in a family, because they kill family members.

The conclusion is that women are only passionate enough about issues of home life that they would kill. And men are only passionate enough to kill when it comes to issues outside the home. The more equality women have the more likely they are to spend more time at home, where they have more passion. My conversation with Mr. Vagina is a microcosm of this. I am thinking about food and what works best at a Jewish brunch and what I would like to make and how the party is going, while he is looking for a way to make money.