Contextualizing Female Body In A Coercive, Patriarchal Environment
Tamogni Das for BeyondHeadlines
“Ruptured your hymen! Worry not. With the Grow-Hymen-Back Home Kit you’ll soon be able to stitch yourself a brand new hymen that’s even better than the old one”. The recent commercial advertisement on vaginal tightening creams has created a huge uproar in India. The vaginal tightening and rejuvenating gel promises women to bring them back their virgin glories and make them feel like “18 Again” (emphasis-mine). The gel has been launched by Feroze Khan’s erstwhile squeeze turned brand ambassador of the tightness, Celina Jeitly. The founder members claim that the new dermatological product has the potential of re-claiming and re-defining the meaning of “women empowerment” (emphasis-mine). This “revolutionary product” (emphasis-mine) guarantees to transform the monotonous-mundane sexual life of a woman into an exciting one by adding just a pinch of salt through this so-called advanced product “18 Again”.
This product particularly caters to the needs of the housewives with children and assertively claims to eradicate all the sexual anxieties and tensions of a dull married-sexual life by rejuvenating the long, lost virginal aesthetics. The advertisement is also framed, keeping in mind the tastes of the Indian audiences, a saree-clad Indian woman who twists and swings merrily on being “felt like a virgin”, cheerfully whispers into her husband’s ear that “it (it presumably being sex) feels like the very first time” and recommends it (to female audiences on the other side of the television) as a smart solution to the problems of a loose vagina post-delivery.
Through this paper my objective is not only to reflect upon how women’s bodies from time immemorial have been used as the site for rectification and perfection to motivate the masculine gaze and gratify their sense of pleasure, but also how women themselves have internalized their own bodies as imperfect and flawed and succumbed to the existing circumstances to qualify as desirable and acceptable beings in this patriarchal society.
The launching of this new product once again shifts our attention to the masculine obsession with the unused, untouched virgin vaginas. Virginity has been showcased as a priced possession of every young, girl to seek the masculine care and affection to ensure a secured, protected future. The blood stains after the first intercourse becomes the sole marker of a woman’s purity and chastity and women themselves also effortlessly endeavor to keep up to the set standards to feel empowered and privileged in this masculine world. Nonetheless, the tightness of the vaginas looses with penetration and child-birth. Further, the bio-medical construction of loosening vaginas as a defect or a problem has debilitated and aggravated women’s confidence and insecurities respectively. The constant fear of losing your beloved husband, on failing to extend adequate sexual love and pleasure to him post-delivery has been a growing concern for many married mothers. Capitalizing on these pervasive and prevalent insecurities “18 Again” has tried gaining currency among married women by promising them with tightened and empowered lives.
The ideal anatomy of small, dainty labia and tight vaginas has fascinatingly articulated the aesthetics of a beautiful woman. Clinically, larger vaginas are symbolized as less pleasurable or pleasureless to both men and women. It is popularly argued that tightness means better sex for both men and women as it contributes in more friction. Hence; it is popularly argued that “better” structure contributes in “better” aesthetics and all women should try and accomplish it to secure her married life.
Vagina has been conceptualized as a sacred object and the integrity that is a woman’s body has been pedestalized with this vaginal piousness. This sacredness is preserved through the maintenance of hymen-intactness and virginity. Thus, the woman’s body gets decorporealized and de-eroticized with its separateness from the virginal aesthetics and glories. Therefore, abstinence from sexual activity is advised to every woman until marriage to experience status and position in the marital-home, especially in her lord’s (pati) eyes. She is advised to treat him with utmost devotion (bhakti) and experience sexual love only within the domain of marriage. Insidiously, such preaching is transferred from mothers to their daughters who too are children of their culture and manipulates their daughters to accept this as the inescapable realities of their lives.
From childhood, “she” (emphasis-self) induces a state of consciousness where the virgin body gets interpreted as the ideal and the acceptable body type and she disciplines her body accordingly to fit into the prescribed social parameters. The clear standards of “beauty and normality” get deeply embedded in her mind and she practices various uncomfortable, austere regimes for correction and improvement.
This brings in the Foucauldian notion of disciplinary power where the female body whether clothed or not becomes the object of public gaze. Thus, the cultural obsession with improving or normalizing of the female body does not stop at the visible/public body. It goes beyond this demarcated situation, where the private parts of the body like the notion of “perfect and desirable vagina” (emphasis-mine) also come under public surveillance and it coerces women to adhere to the standardized norms and values to feel privileged and accepted in the male-dominated society.
When the brand ambassador of “18 Again”, Celina Jeitly proudly says in one of her interviews “yeh bahut empowering product hain” she precisely expresses the hidden fears all women undergoes through of being caught as non-virgins or of losing her husband as a failure to satisfy him adequately. This product claims to be the real key for happy and successful married life, where the flirtatious man fixes all his attention on one and only the “tightened vagina” of his wife and disregard the presence of other women to explore the newly stitched, bridal virgin- vagina which happens to be even better than the original one.
It is agonizing to see that women have also accepted the „loose vaginas as a problem and are seeking bio-medical assistance to rectify the existing problem. The pan-cultural incidence in hymen-fixation surgeries and labiaplasty actually brings forth the fact that women’s growing concern towards perfecting their own genitals as a viable site of beautification and normalization to save their marriage from breaking. 9The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons has recently reported that over five-thousand women from United States undergoes through vaginoplasty (a clinical procedure of tightening the birth-canal) annually to bring back the perfect/desirable vaginal size.
Dr. Edward Jacobson of the Greenwich Center for Restorative Vaginal Surgery finds these cosmetic surgeries as a way to „boost one’s confidence.. He narrates one of his patient’s experiences, where the girl refused to date her boyfriend as he ridiculed and insulted her enlarged labia. But with the correction surgery she earned back her lost self-esteem and confidence and positively transformed into a “different person”. Such success stories has appealingly triumph the rationale behind hymen-fixation and it is indeed interesting to find that remarkable numbers of women are fetching these services to give as “anniversary gifts to their husbands or to fool their new husbands into thinking that they never lost their virginity”.
Thus, the bio-medical constructions of tight vaginas as ideal vaginas have aggravated the vulnerability in women’s position. The medical body has been inscribing and deciphering a particular body as “ordered body type” (emphasis-mine) and thereby, stripped away the women’s agency and reduced her body to an object of clinical gaze and study. Nivedita Menon in a recent talk argued that all these are concrete attempts that simply prioritizes and acknowledges men’s pleasure through the conscious subjection of women under the newly, constructed materialistic demands. She further says that “the perversity of it all lies in the fact that (using the gel) will be sold as a health issue, as something women „should. do to take care of their bodies”.
This shows how medical knowledge in a formal, functionalist framework has contextualized the perfect female-anatomy in response to its penile narcissism. This phallocentric gaze has not only contributed in the labeling of a female body as a chaotic one but has also shaped its instability and sloppiness in relation to its visual vagueness. As pointed out by Michel Foucault that though “the gaze is not faithful to truth” but the phallocentric gaze has led to the construction of the visible “truth” into aesthetic truth by defining and re-defining female anatomy in opposition to the phallic values.
Thus, the presence of clitoris automatically gets defined as the absence of penis similarly the assumed irrationality of the vaginas gets articulated by the assumed rationality of the penises. This binary pattern of power exertion has not only manipulated the control over women’s bodies as mere medical cases or objects of study to fit into the masculine ethics of servitude, but has also led to the emergence of a new and unprecedented discipline directed against the body to achieve the appropriate standards of female beauty. Thus, Foucault’s sense of culture, exercising control over individuals through disciplinary practices gets intensified for females with the gendered fashioning of the power and knowledge. Therefore, the discourse on vaginal size is not neutral; it is a means to abuse women and to coerce them to adhere to the patriarchal, heterosexual norms.
This gets more beautifully explained when Michel Foucault (1975) in Discipline and Punish recognizes body as the primary site of social control and says that there “is no need for arms, physical violence, or material constraints” to restore body as the primary site of control. He says “just a gaze”, an inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that „he. (emphasis-self) is his own overseer, thus each individual exercises this surveillance over, and against himself” to secure the ascribed social normalcy.
Drawing from Sandra Lee Bartky, this reflects the Jeremey Bentham’s design for Panopticon model of prison where individuals attains a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that each automatically becomes his own jailer and supervises one’s own actions. Thus, this “state of consciousness and permanent visibility” induces a perpetual self-surveillance to discipline and fashion the body in response to the needs of the contemporary times. But simultaneously she also points out how Foucault has treated the body as a single, uniform entity throughout; he universalized the bodily experiences of men and women, as if men and women bore the same relationship to the characteristic institutions of modern life. She argues that Foucault’s blindness to the gendered order of functioning and disciplinary practices has neglected the vulnerability of women’s bodies. He has completely overlooked how certain disciplinary practice produce a peculiar, feminine model of beauty particular to women and forces them to achieve this through uninterrupted repertoire and practice of certain habits and behaviors.
In this context she talks about the dietary practices prevalent among the young women. She says that dieting disciplines monitors the body’s hunger in the pursuit of a body of the right size. Such disciplinary practices not only convince women that their bodies are defective but also create a “practiced and a subjected” body to which an inferior status has been inscribed. This unconfidence gets further aggravated with media’s portrayal of perfect female beauty images and women distressfully clings on to different technologies, methods and processes in a ritualistic fashion to conform to these portrayed images. Thus, the effort to shed the shame and the guilt of being obese or slightly over-weight has governed the dietary practices followed largely by women today.
Similarly the product “18 Again” capitalizes on the in-built women’s sexual insecurities and methodologically puts them under the remedial or correction therapies to obtain a suitable vagina to safeguard the married life from being disrupted. The suspicion and insecurity towards one’s body is so profound that women internalizes the patriarchal standards of perfectness and “structure the self” in an order where the self gets defined in association with a man, who is either visible or invisible. Thus, the sense of internalization is so strong that the male witness becomes the sole guardian of women’s consciousness of herself, as a bodily being. This precisely gets explained previously when the popularity of the hymen-fixation surgeries clearly manifests the ongoing tensions within women to bleed profusely in case of non-virgins or to get it tightened and fixed to buttress the irksome married-sexual life to guarantee a protected future.
Foucault has further argued that the transition from traditional to modern societies has been characterized by a profound transformation in exercise of power. Unlike in the older, authoritarian system where the power was embodied in the person of the monarch, power in the modern times gets channelized through invasive apparatuses that establish a ceaseless surveillance on the specific person. This policy of coercion which acts upon the body is a calculated manipulation of diverse elements, gestures and behaviors. Thus power is not an institution, nor a structure, nor a possession. It is a name given to a complex strategic situation in a particular society (Foucault 1980: 12). It is a complex network which runs through the social body and regulates the actions of the individuals.
It is indeed interesting to see how the modern, industrial societies change to re-create newer forms of patriarchal domination which constitutes the so-called modern, docile bodies of women. The image of normative femininity popularized and circulated by the visual-media has cultivated a new sense of engagement with beautification and empowerment. Women tirelessly perform the act over and over again to reach the standards. Further the negligence of the intersectional specificities in terms of class, race, caste etc has made the ideal feminine body an admirable pursuit. This is not to deny the many ways in which factors of race, class, locality, ethnicity, or personal taste can be expressed within the diverse kinds of practices practiced to attain the ideal-body type, but the overarching factor is that ultimately all aims to secure the same, general result.
Thus, the bodies are metaphorically are reduced to texts which can be written, un-written, again re-written to express the social phenomenon. Body as symbols thereby, becomes the real signifier of the social world around us and for a woman this same body as Balsamo notes become the site to which she consciously or unconsciously accept the meanings that circulate in popular culture about ideal beauty. This body communicates a message about the self and endeavors to display the cooperative participation in a culturally meaningful system of values.
This precisely defines the violence being inflicted upon women’s agency and choice through the introduction of such disempowering and panic-stricken products which instead of relieving women from the pervasive gendered discriminations are pushing them towards it. Like the way Bordo argues that the personal body management is intimately connected with the management of the larger “social body” through consumer culture it actually reflects how women in their personal lives tries and balances their desire as consumers to produce an ideal vagina to seek a good husband. Loose, sagacious vaginas thus, symbolize promiscuity for an unmarried girl and de-sexualization of a married woman. Such a cultural construction of femininity enslaves women’s bodies and drives them to purchase the best available creams or surgeries in market to come out of the ridiculed, flawed, imperfect body possessed to feel emancipated and empowered.
Thus, to conclude unless we begin considering our real selves beyond the sexualized dimensions
of patriarchy empowerment seems short-sighted and problematic.
