I guess that I've had my head buried in the sand for the past while ... I've hardly even heard of most of the products and services written about in the links from the "how not to to talk about vaginas" post below. I find this quote from the first article quite compelling, in a good way ...

"Yet Nancy Jarecki, founder of pubic hair dye producer Bettybeauty Inc., insists her company is doing women a favor. "When I came out with it, there was this kind of burst of 'Oh my god, you solved our problem. I didn't realize how much gray hair was down there,'" Jarecki said.

"Jarecki didn't solve our problem—she created it. Before vaginal hair dye, these women hadn't previously considered potential flaws in the color profile of their pubic hair. That's a good thing"

This brings me back to our reading from the first chapter of the feminine mystique, especially where Friedan talks about the ridiculous content of media aimed at women. With the female body it seems as though no area of it is sacred, as every square inch has some special product or service that can be bought to 'enhance' it, or better yet, to 'correct' it.

And so, products are invented, and suddenly the problems follow, conjured out of thin air.

The video above is pulled from the second link mentioned from the same post below. The commercial is for some sort of soap or perfume, though even that isn't immediately clear. The ad looks like a promo for an upcoming movie or video game, targeted at young adults, but it is not. While the men battle it out, the women passively look on as though they are trophies to be won. In this I see some of what Luce Irigaray is talking about in This Sex Which is Not One where she writes, "Woman ... is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies. That she may find pleasure there in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain. But such a pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own". This commercial looks as though it speaks right to that.