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Los Angeles — Women from around the world flock to David Matlock's marble waiting room carrying purses stuffed with porn. The magazines are revealed only in the privacy of his office, where doctor and patient debate the finer points of each glossy photo.
The enterprising gynecologist sees countless images of naked women, but none are more popular than Playboy's fresh-faced playmates. They represent, he says with a knowing smile, the perceived ideal.
“Some women will say, ‘Hey, you take this picture and hang it up in the operating room and refer back to it when you're sculpturing me,'” he said in an interview in his clinic overlooking hazy Los Angeles. “I say, ‘Okay, all right, fine.'”
Dr. Matlock is a colourful pioneer in a controversial — and growing — frontier of plastic surgery: nipping and tucking vaginas. Patients from the United States and more than 30 other countries pay thousands of dollars for his “designer vagina,” a purely esthetic procedure that includes shortening or plumping up the labia, or vaginal lips. He attracts even more women for an operation he claims improves sex by tightening, or “rejuvenating,” the vagina.
“There's a need for this,” he said. “Women are driving this. I didn't create this market, the market was there.”
While doctors have long known how to enhance women's genitals, demand for vaginal surgery has mushroomed in recent years because physicians — led by Dr. Matlock — market it as enhancing sexual satisfaction.
The trend has even reached girls as young as 15. In the past 18 months, the number of teens — and in one case an adolescent and her mother — who come to Dr. Matlock for designer vaginas has doubled.
“They're mature. Breasts, body, everything. I mean the clothing that they're wearing, the whole thing. These are not little girls. They're mature young ladies.”
Plastic surgery's spread to women's nether regions alarms those who see it as a manifestation of society's air-brushed standards of the female form that exploits women's deep-seated insecurities.
Not all procedures are even surgical. On the recommendation of a friend, Katia Neves came to Dr. Matlock for the doctor's so-called G-shot, an $1,800 collagen-based injection in her G-spot that he says amplifies orgasms and lasts for about four months.
He creates designer vaginas by surgically enhancing the external genitalia, including labia majora and minora, vaginal opening and perineum, which, his website says, creates a “youthful and aesthetically appealing vulva.” Trimming elongated or unequal labia is most common; some women get fat transplants to plump up their outer labia. (Some doctors also restore hymens for women, often from the Middle East, who want to appear to be virgins when they get married.) To tighten a woman's vagina, which Dr. Matlock calls laser vaginal rejuvenation, he decreases the vaginal opening by drawing muscles and support tissue together with an absorbable stitch. He also builds up the perineum, which is between the vagina and anus.
“It makes a tremendous difference for sexual gratification for the women. That's what the procedure is all about,” he said.
But gynecological experts say there is no proof that vaginal tightening improves sex and warn the procedure risks harmful side effects, including infection, hemorrhaging, loss of sensation, nerve injury, formation of scar tissue as well as becoming too tight. (Dr. Matlock says he has been reluctant to submit studies for publication in medical journals because he does not want to reveal his techniques.) “There are definite potential downsides to this,” said Dr. Young, adding that any possible benefits of tightening are not permanent.
He hones new techniques on animal parts — chicken thighs, turkey legs and pig's ears — until he is ready to work on women.
“It's basically all about art. I'm an artist.”
Am I the only one who finds this creepy? I guess I've never been with a woman who's given birth before, so maybe sex gets wack after that, but man...I'm already turned off by fake breasts, but now this whole plastic surgery thing has gone a bit far.