Petting a snake? Reflections on feminist critique,media engagement and ‘making a difference’

In New Zealand, academics are chartered to act as ‘critic and conscience of society’. I love that this is in my ‘job description’, is something I am expected to report on during annual performance appraisals. As a feminist academic, in particular, I feel it not only validates but also rewards the social critique aspect of the work I feel compelled to do. Feminist academics come in many different forms, driven by many different purposes, but what unites many – if not all – of us is a vision of a better future, and thus a social change agenda. Whether that gets played out through a direct integration of scholarship and activism, as in (participatory) action research (e.g. Torre and Fine, 2005) and liberation psychology (e.g. Lykes and Moane, 2009), or more through a micro-focus on interrogating and thus problematising taken for granted organisations and structures of knowledge and power which perpetuate inequalities and harm to certain groups (e.g. Gavey, 2005) while privileging others, the idea of and hope or push for change is surely what unites us as scholars and activists.

My work primarily falls into the latter category: it tends to be theoretical and ‘critical’ of knowledge and practices. For the last decade I have been researching, writing and critiquing the emergent field of female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS) (see Braun, 2010, for an overview). My research (and indeed the surgery) stems from a sociocultural context in which the meanings of women’s genitalia are often, but not exclusively, embued with negative associations, creating experiences threaded through with shame and anxiety (Braun and Wilkinson, 2001, 2003; Ensler, 1998). My scholarly work has examined the ‘selling’ of FGCS through promises of sexual pleasure (Braun, 2005, 2009a), exploring how the rhetoric of choice is deployed in relation to FGCS (Braun, 2009b) and the pathologisation of normal genital diversity that has occurred (Braun and Tiefer, 2010). More recently, I have been involved with the New View Campaign’s ongoing activism in response to/against FGCS (see http://newviewcampaign.org/fgcs.asp). The New View Campaign was established in 2000, in response to the development of sexuopharmaceuticals. A network of scholars, educators and activists, its remit is broad: to challenge the medicalization of sex, particularly female sexuality, and to offer a positive alternative in its place (Tiefer, 2008b). Primarily focused around challenging the products and practices of Big Pharma, 2008 saw the New View’s focus shift to include FGCS. Every year has involved an annual event to ‘challenge’ FGCS:

2008: a street protest outside a Manhattan genital cosmetic surgeon’s office (resulting in an article in Time magazine, Fitzpatrick, 2008)

Until recently, I viewed my New View involvement – albeit often limited by my location in New Zealand when the New View ‘HQ’ is based in New York City – as the key way I could translate my academic critique into ‘making a difference’ socially. However, a run of events in 2010 led me to rethink this. In January 2010, the International Society for Cosmetogynecology (ISCG) held the 1^st global symposium on cosmetic vaginal surgery, a one-day event in Orlando, Florida, preceding the Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery. In September 2010, the ISCG held their 2nd Global Symposium on Cosmetic Vaginal Surgery, a three-day stand-alone event in Las Vegas. I attended both, and presented at the second. The differences between these two events left me reflecting on serendipity, my relationship with the media and the potential impact of critical work even in the absence of direct activism. I will not claim that my scholarship has stopped surgeries, or that the impacts I will discuss are, indeed, mine alone, or that I radically altered surgeons’ minds (indeed, see Lee 2011). But my work seems, indirectly, to have ‘made a difference’ in some ways that surprised and pleased but also worried me.

At the first conference I was an invisible outsider. I registered, attended, listened, did not ask questions and did not interact with any surgeons. My aim in going was ethnographic: to understand how these procedures are talked about by surgeons when they are talking ‘among themselves’, rather than to the media or to critics like me. The tone of the conference was celebratory and uncritical. The day-long event was not without the occasional more cautious voice, but overall it was full of certainty and celebration, interwoven with sexist humour. (I engaged in passive – subtle and virtually unnoticed – resistance: not laughing at the ‘jokes’; not clapping the presentations.) What surprised me most during the day, however, was the way surgeons presented themselves as marginalised by the broader field of gynaecology: evidence of this included the 2007 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG) opinion piece ‘against’ FGCS (The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 2007) and the claim that scholarly journals would not publish their work. I had always positioned the surgeons as powerful but their self-story, told semi-publicly at this conference, was not of power but of marginalisation. Surprisingly, their position resonated with me. As a psychologist who is critical, feminist and typically qualitative in my work, I know that journals can indeed be gatekeepers of knowledge, and determine the very shape of the field. However, the surgeons’ frustration was not accompanied by any questioning of the quality of the work they sought to publish (that quality has been critiqued, e.g. Braun, 2010; Liao et al., 2010; Tiefer, 2008a); instead, it was interpreted solely in terms of keeping FGCS out of those journals.

I would estimate that about 10% of the 200 strong audience (the room was overfull!) was women, and I sat next to a relatively young woman for the entire day. I noticed a media pass, and on asking learned she was from Cosmopolitan (Cosmo). By the end of the day, she had commented to me on the lack of women presenting and joined my ‘passive resistance’. Before leaving, I gave her my card and told her I did critical work on this topic, and to contact me if she was doing a story. Some months later she did and we did a long phone interview. That July, Cosmo (USA) published a cover story, Vaginas under Attack (Triffin, 2010), in which the conference, the surgeons and their views, attitudes and practices were subject to a blistering critique, and the field was taken to task for self-promotion, disease mongering, sexism and one-sided bias amongst other things. ² Had I not serendipitously sat next to the journalist and asked about her media pass I may not have ended up interviewed or quoted in the story she wrote. Although I cannot speculate on what direction her story would have taken had that not happened, serendipity, such as my chance meeting with the Cosmo journalist, has been noted as a feature of ‘positive’ media coverage of counter-normative messages in other contexts (e.g. Kensicki, 2001).

I planned to attend the second conference again in ‘undercover’ mode but in August I was invited by the organisers to present. I was assured that concerns about the first conference, including balance (regarding both gender and perspective) and outright self-promotion were being addressed. I had no doubt that my invitation to present – and the assurance of a different conference – was a result of the Cosmo article, and that I was there at least in part to insulate against the very critique that the first conference had been subject to. But as much as my presence might have been token or rhetorical, it also offered an opportunity to speak directly to those whose practice I had spent years critiquing. Terrifying though the thought was – talking to a room of surgeons who would likely hate every word I had to say was not on my ‘bucket list’ – but I nonetheless had to do it. So, ‘power-dress’ in suitcase, off I went.

The second conference was different to the first in many ways, the most relevant here being that a number of speakers discussed critiques of FGCS – though I was the only one presenting these critiques as inherently valid. Others noted them, dismissed them or considered them with the aim of asking ‘how can we [surgeons] ensure we aren’t subject to this critique?’ The New View Campaign and a Huffington Post review of the first conference (Bonavoglia, 2010) were mentioned, as was the work of Lih-Mei Liao and Sarah Creighton (e.g. Liao and Creighton, 2007; Liao et al., 2010). But most frequently cited was the Cosmo article. Its analysis seemed to have genuinely shocked some of the surgeons. Media like Cosmo might be seen more by surgeons as allies in the effort to create a market (Sullivan, 2001); certainly Cosmo (internationally) had published much more positive items about FGCS in the past (e.g. Cosmopolitan, 2008; Havranek, 1998). ³ The Cosmo article seemed to touch a nerve in a way other critiques did not. Since it is read by a target audience, an article as critical as this potentially hurts. While the surgeons’ response may have reflected the recency of the article, I do not think it was just that. Considerable critical mainstream media had appeared before the first conference, but those were mostly either dismissed or ignored. ACOG’s 2007 critique did feature, but it was not engaged with in the way the Cosmo article was (although see Ostrzenski, 2011). Cosmo’s critique appeared to make the surgeons pause, take notice and in some cases think differently. The surgeons were not advising stopping FGCS; they were not advising – for the most part – stopping advertising; but they were asking how what they do could be ‘misconstrued’ in this way. Although this response may reflect the field’s newness and the surgeons’ expressed sense of marginalisation and apparent desire for medical legitimacy, the sense I got was that the Cosmo article had ‘hurt’. Their response suggests that surgeons see a powerful role for certain mainstream media to inform and some would argue seduce potential customers with the idea of surgery (see Sullivan, 2001). Such mainstream media appear therefore to be a crucial venue for imparting the critique of and challenge to FGCS.

However, for feminist academics the mainstream media are not necessarily ‘our friend’ (Beck, 1998; Rhode, 1995). There is a recognised history of ‘anti-feminist’ (Johnson, 1995; van Zoonen, 1992) media representation, and ‘women’s’ media like Cosmo have been legitimately critiqued by many feminist scholars for the numerous and complex ways they promote very problematic, traditionally gendered constructions of femininity, female bodies and (hetero)sexuality (e.g. see Bordo, 1993; Gill, 2007). I have published critical analyses of the content of Cosmo itself (Farvid and Braun, 2006). And, although the relationship between feminism and the media is not singular (Hollows and Moseley, 2006), prior to my recent experience, I had had a very cautious approach to media. This was not only because I worried that they might write negatively about my work (the critique of ‘choice’, for instance [Braun, 2009b], is a hard sell!), but because I felt complex analyses were difficult to express simply through nice and tidy definitive ‘soundbites’. I did not seek out the media; I was selective who I responded to (I still think this is generally good advice). But my experience of seeing the difference one Cosmo article made to the surgeons’ discourse (at that moment in time) has made me rethink this position. Now, I see potential value in being proactive in seeking media collaborations to ‘tell critical stories’ as part of a strategy for social change (Johnson, 1995, similarly suggests the importance of engaging and being part of the media dialogue). I would now (cautiously) argue that we should recognise that they may be a useful ally and perhaps the most important vehicle to try to change ‘the hearts and minds’ of many people through the critical work we do. As an example of how this can happen, around the time of the 2010 FDA hearing to approve the ‘female sexual dysfunction’ drug, flibanserin, the media took up a framing (as articulated by the New View Campaign) based in a ‘disease-mongering’ (Moynihan and Cassels, 2005) discourse; ultimately flibanserin was not approved (Rachel Liebert, personal communication, 2010; http://newviewcampaign.org/flibanserin.asp).

I am happy if I convince my colleagues of the validity of my analysis; I am delighted and satisfied if, through my critique appearing in a source like Cosmo, some women might rethink genital distress and reconsider their interest in FGCS. I do not want to dismiss the distress and anxiety that some women do feel about their genitalia; it is very real and not at all surprising in a world where ‘pudendal disgust is a social reality’ (Tiefer, 2008a: 475). But we have to be cautious of inadvertently essentialising women’s distress about their genitalia; have to be cautious about assuming that this distress is difficult or impossible to shift without surgery. ⁴ If we understand distress as resulting not from a natural response to physiology, but as socioculturally learned, then the sociocultural is the key level at which intervention is needed. And this means that media engagement is important not just to tell the story of our critique, but also to tell what might be considered the alternative version of what women’s genitals are about (diversity, normality, pleasure and even beauty). Recently, for example, at least in part in response to genital anxiety, and desire for FGCS, Germany’s largest teen magazine Bravo produced an online vulva-gallery, to provide information about the diversity of real women’s genitalia (http://www.bravo.de/dr-sommer/koerper-gesundheit/scheide/vulva-galerie/ex/page/overview). I am not the first critical scholar of sexuality to suggest such a role for the media; some, like Petra Boynton in the UK, have been proactive in pursuing an alternative articulation through ‘Agony Aunt’ type roles (http://www.drpetra.co.uk/blog/).

I am not naïve to the extent that the media are not always ‘my friend’ and an informed, reflexive and critical, interrogative and deliberative approach is needed (and [feminist] media ‘training’ might be important). But, realising this is a potentially double-edged sword, I think the possibility that mainstream (‘women’s’) media might offer a useful venue to ‘make a difference’ can and should be explored – alongside other avenues for intervention. (And if you’re in a university like mine, where public ‘profile’ is important, they will love you for this.) My critique and intervention is aimed at culture. Ultimately, I would like to see a world in which women do not experience distress about genital appearance (or indeed any other body element), especially to the extent that they seek surgery. For this reason, if cautiously approached, the media may indeed provide an important ally in our role as ‘critic and conscience of society’.