AUDASE

　

Great! Another Thing to Hate About Ourselves

From Sports Illustrated, the Latest Body Part for Women to Fix

By JENNIFER WEINER NY TIMES

 

A few years ago I got a Groupon for laser hair removal.

Sitting in the waiting room, I saw a couple: a pretty girl in the lap of an older, well-groomed, hair-gelled guy. When the nurse called the young woman’s name they both stood up, the guy asking, shyly, if it would be O.K. if he came in, too.

I couldn’t figure it out. Was watching your beloved get her chin or upper lip zapped some kind of erotic experience beyond the range of my imagination?

"What else do you guys do here?" I asked a nurse, who whispered, "Vaginal reconstruction."

Oh.

At 44, I am old enough to remember when reconstruction was something you read about in history class, when a muffin top was something delicious you ate at the bakery, a six-pack was how you bought your beer, camel toe was something one might glimpse at the zoo, a Brazilian was someone from the largest country in South America and terms like thigh gap and bikini bridge would be met with blank looks.

Now, each year brings a new term for an unruly bit of body that women are expected to subdue through diet and exercise.

This year, the hot new body part is the formerly unnoticed span of flesh between the top of one’s panties and the labia majora, currently displayed on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition by the model Hannah Davis.

In the shot, Ms. Davis stands, thumbs hooked into the sides of her bikini bottom, pulling it down to reveal more of her tanned, toned, hairless on-ramp than you would typically see outside of a gynecologist’s office. "It’s the year of the torso," Ms. Davis told Matt Lauer on "Today," in a transparent attempt to win the award for Best Use of a Euphemism on Morning TV. Seriously, when you look at her picture, you do not think "torso," any more than viewers of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl nipple reveal thought "pecs."

It’s shocking, and it’s meant to be. With hard-core pornography available to anyone with a laptop and a credit card, Sports Illustrated has to raise the stakes if it wants to stay relevant. (Disclosure: my gentleman caller edits books for Sports Illustrated and is the author of the oral history of the swimsuit issue that appears in "50 Years of Beautiful," a coffee-table book of swimsuit shots. #Awkward.)

Some critics want merchants to cover the cover. Ms. Davis’s picture "borders obscenity, as the focus is specifically on the exposed pubic area," said Dawn Hawkins, executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.

Obscene or not, I’m concerned that the shot has left women and girls with another raft of insecurities.

Women have always had plenty to worry about: stretch marks and eye bags, age spots and wrinkles, belly rolls and cellulite, butts and boobs that were too big, too small, too droopy, mismatched or asymmetrical or just plain wrong.

Feeling bad about your neck is practically a cliché.

But your ladyplace?

For a while, you could feel O.K. about it. At least, that’s what I’ve gleaned from 1980s-era novels and porn, back when the films had plots, the men were men and the women had pubic hair. These days, "Bush" might be ubiquitous in politics, but in pornography, and in real life, it’s increasingly hard to find: a special category on X-rated websites that index by fetish, listed alongside "spanking" and "pony play."

Then there’s the matter of the mons pubis.

Back in the day, nobody worried what her m.p. looked like because nobody was seeing anyone else’s. One could go hours — days, even — without glimpsing another lady’s ladybusiness.

Now it’s all out there, right next to Good Housekeeping on the newsstands and the latest on Brian Williams on the Internet. Formerly among the most private of private parts, the mons pubis is now just another area to be pruned and policed; examined and improved, weighed in the balance and found wanting. It’s obvious, but, perhaps, worth pointing out that what regular, everyday women have in their panties does not much resemble what Ms. Davis so boldly displays. For starters, there’s occasionally hair. For another, there’s frequently a bit of padding.

There’s probably a biological reason for that. Imagine heterosexual intercourse, in the missionary position. Do men really want to thrust against something as firm and sculpted as a clenched fist?

Maybe not. But of course, there’s no profit in leaving things as they are.

Show me a body part, I’ll show you someone who’s making money by telling women that theirs looks wrong and they need to fix it. Tone it, work it out, tan it, bleach it, tattoo it, lipo it, remove all the hair, lose every bit of jiggle.

As surely as there’s a Butts and Guts class at your local gym, probably right this moment some enterprising fitness guru is coming up with techniques to improve this new area of focus. Plastic surgeons are figuring out how to do in the operating room whatever can’t be accomplished in the gym. And, somewhere, in a photographer’s studio, a far-off beach or a nearby editing suite, a model and photographer and editor are colluding, purposefully or not, on what we’ll be worrying about at this time next year. Trust me, there will be something else to obsess over; some new place that you never even noticed that you’ll end up worried about.

Before you commence fretting, some questions:

Do you think Eleanor Roosevelt spent a lot of time worrying about her undercarriage?

Did your mom?

We all have to draw a line in the sand, and mine is underneath the waistband of my Hanes cotton boy shorts.

Girls’ and women’s lives matter. Their safety and health and their rights matter. Whether every inch of them looks like a magazine cover?

That, my sisters, does not matter at all.