Journey of a Swingle guy

This is a story I heard on a podcast many years ago..

And I think it directly reflects one of the many issues surrounding body-image issues that exist in our culture…

So – in the early 2000’s there were magazines in Australia that catered for “Blokes”… Boofy, boozy, bogan Bloke’s… “People”, “Picture” & later “Zoo” all walked the line between porn & good taste…

Hell – good taste be dammed!! Topless, big-breasted beauties were the name of the game… often blonde, always wasp-waisted & never burdened with too many pesky “thoughts” – you get the idea…

One of the favourite section of the magazine (which I only read for the articles, I swear!!) was the Home Girls/Reader’s Wives  section where, wives & girlfriends of readers would send in topless or fully nude pictures of themselves to win like $50…

Now here’s were it gets’ interesting…

Under the Australian censorship laws at the time – to maintain their R rating as a magazine & not get pushed into an X rating – they were forbidden to show “Excessive labia”…

I don’t know if it was ever described what was or what wasn’t excessive – but as a result of this the nude photos of WAGS would often have to be retouched with early Photoshop techniques…

So now we have a situation where a large percentage of women aren’t watching porn…

They’re not watching DVDs or reading porn magazines..

But – they’ll happily browse through hubby’s copy of Zoo while on the loo (pre- smart phone days)…

And they see these pictures of naked women,  and they look – as one does….

And some of them look at the pictures & think “Well, MY bits don’t look like that… my bits don’t look like any of these women!”

Then, because we all (but especially women) have been conditioned to believe that they can’t fit the extremely narrow beauty standards set by ‘society’ – they worry…

The worry that THEY are not normal – whatever normal is anyway…

As a result of this – plastic surgery rates increased markedly…

Women underwent surgery to reduce the size of their labias – Labiaplasty…

So – women paid for someone to cut off bits of their sexual organs to look more like the women in the magazines – WHO DIDN’T LOOK LIKE THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE!

And we wonder why body dysmorphia is so prevalent these days…