From “Intimate Makeover,” by Melissa Healy in the March 13 edition of the Los Angeles Times (warning, the whole story is not for the faint of heart):

Even as the small but growing group of genital plastic surgeons devise new and better surgical techniques, they acknowledge the standards women hope to achieve are set mostly by adult film actresses, strippers and nude denizens of the Internet.

“I know what women want,” says Dr. David L. Matlock of Los Angeles, an obstetrician turned plastic surgeon who has been a pioneer in devising and popularizing the procedures. He knows, he says, because so many of his patients tote their husband’s or boyfriend’s magazines into his office and point to photos almost as explicit as the before-and-after ones posted on many surgeons’ websites….

Sharon Mitchell, executive director of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation in Sherman Oaks and Woodland Hills, says few of today’s adult film actresses are having the surgery because so many are already very young. But Mitchell, an adult film actress for 25 years before she earned a doctorate in human sexuality, says the adult film industry’s emphasis on youth, as well as its growing audience among beauty-conscious women, is almost certainly driving the upsurge in the surgery.

And many women take the standards set by sex workers very much to heart, say doctors performing the surgeries.

“I hear it time and time again,” says Dr. Gary Alter, a urologist-turned-plastic-surgeon who operates out of offices in Beverly Hills and New York City. “The woman says, ‘I thought I was normal and I watch these movies with my boyfriends and now I feel like I must be a freak.’ They feel they’re the only ones in the world.”

I know stories like this one have been receiving more attention lately. It disturbs me that a growing number of women are undergoing expensive surgery to restore their hymens or alter other parts of their sexual organs. To date, however, many of the stories have not emphasized the point made in the quotation above, that is, much of the demand for these surgeries stems from the unrealistic standards set by women’s bodies involved in pornographic industries—many of whom have gone under the knife themselves to “improve” their bodies. But who creates the demand for both the porn industry and subsequently these cosmetic surgeries? Men.

This isn’t a male-bashing post, don’t worry. Rather, I find this story sobering. While these surgeries are the choices of the women who seek them out, I cannot help but think that except for the cases in which the surgeries occur “to repair childbirth-related injuries, and by urologists and reconstructive surgeons who repair birth defects,” that the demand for these surgeries stem from women noticing the men in their lives being more attracted to the fantasy world (and, let’s face it, fantasy women) in the porn industry. I for one cannot claim that the pornography has not enticed me, so I do not speak as a clean person above the sin, but as one who has sadly swam into the deep end of its cesspool. When I read this story, I couldn’t stop thinking of the women in my life and how heartbroken I would be if they sought after similar surgeries because they thought they could steal back their husbands’ or boyfriends’ attention from the porn actresses. How is it that those women who have undergone radical plastic surgery to be porn actresses or strippers have set the standard of normalcy? Why is it that women who have not had surgery, who live with the bodies they were given, feel as if, in the words of Dr. Alter (a ripe choice of a name considering this story), they are “freaks”? (By the way, Dr. Alter’s comments throughout the story become more and more disturbing.) The porn industry and the promiscuous lifestyle it presents are far from the standard of public health and I strongly disagree that pornography should set the standard of body image. I think that it is already sad that so many women in the sex industry undergo surgery in order to be more desirable in that market—it is even sadder, however, that such a picture of physical beauty and further commodification of sex is becoming more mainstream.

Men, many of us have to repent of our buying into the lies of the pornographic world, and I am most definitely including myself here. The pain and evil that pornography wreaks does not only affect our lives and our minds. It affects our loved ones, specifically the women in our lives. It anguishes me to hear how my feeding of that industry has played a part in women seeking expensive alterations to their bodies.