Rose Bud

Why didn't you tell me there was something wrong with my vagina?" I said with a sigh when my fiancé called. I'd just come from the office of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who has become famous for his work with problematic pussies, and I'd been barraged with countless before-and-after photos. Protruding labia minora sliced down to size. Asymmetrical labia majora made to measure. Slimmed-down montes pubis. Trimmed clitoral hoods. It was enough to send a girl straight home to squat over a mirror. To be brutally honest, not until I flipped through the file of Dr. David Matlock's vulvic oeuvre did I have any clue what my pussy looked like in comparison with others. And because most women can't even tell their labia minora from their majora, I knew I wasn't alone.

Even in the days of Adam, Eve, serpents and apples, the vagina was one of the world's great mysteries–a perfect void, the murky secret of life. The men I've been with were grateful just to be in the presence of mine and didn't make a habit of strapping on a headlamp to look between my legs. Their investigative urges seemed exhausted in the delicate, tantalizing hunt for my clitoris. Until I visited Dr. Matlock and browsed his catalog of winking wonders, I'd been delighted to strip down and flaunt my Brazilian waxes. It never occurred to me that my sex organ may be flawed. It works quite nicely, thank you. What more can a woman ask of her pussy?

The answer seems to be "a lot." Which explains why erotic explorers are now venturing into areas where no man, woman or doctor has gone before. Surgeons and other medical professionals of all kinds are carving a new niche in the field of human cosmetic enhancement. It is a quest to create the perfect pussy. The list of procedures available to women today includes clitoral-hood removal, G-spot collagen injection, laser lip reduction and rejuvenation, and hymenoplasty, an operation that can render the most sexually experienced 50-year-old a veritable virgin again, ready to be deflowered. There are even new artificial pussies out there, crafted from silicone used by NASA, that their creators call works of art.

A few months before my wedding I set out in search of America's foremost vaginal visionaries, intent on finding some meaning in it all. What will women's vaginas look and feel like a hundred years from now? I wondered. Who decides what is perfect and what is not? Let us take a closer look.

Doctors performed 793 vaginal cosmetic procedures in 2005, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Some industry players believe that number will double this year. The frenzy for fine-tuning our most private parts can be traced to surgical innovations pioneered by my new friend Matlock, who turns out on closer inspection to be an especially business-savvy impresario, a regular Ray Kroc of cooch. As the founder of the Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute of Los Angeles, Matlock trademarked the techniques of what he calls designer laser vaginoplasty (aesthetic surgical enhancement) and laser vaginal rejuvenation (tightening vaginal muscles that have gone slack from age, childbirth or just plain overuse). And while Matlock himself rarely performs more than 10 surgeries a week, he says his entire operation–including income from trademarks and patents–brings in $12 million a year.

Business, Matlock can't stop telling you, is booming.

Other plastic surgeons I spoke with called Matlock "something of a character"–a view many of his Beverly Hills colleagues seem to share. A trim, handsome, perfectly coiffed African American who dresses from head to toe in Versace or Armani, the good doctor dates a Brazilian samba dancer, dines at the Mondrian Hotel's chic Asia de Cuba restaurant and commutes from Bel Air Crest to Beverly Hills in a CL 55 AMG Mercedes-Benz. He reserves his twin-turbo Porsche for Friday and Saturday nights and keeps a Hummer handy for errands "because with a Hummer you don't have to worry about the valet banging it up." He is the kind of man who's not afraid of going to great lengths to present himself as far more of a dandy than your stodgy, white-coated surgeon.

Matlock's office is, unsurprisingly, an extension of his personal style. The first thing I see when entering the institute, located on Sunset Boulevard down the road from the Chateau Marmont, is the bursting cleavage of the institute's administrator, Griselda. Looking like a young Salma Hayek in a plunging yellow camisole, Griselda is hard to miss. If anything, she looks like a walking advertisement for the perfectibility of the body. The office's color scheme and decor are luxe and vagina-friendly. There are peach sofas and nude walls, and framed magazine profiles of the doctor line the halls. Smiles and fingernails gleam. Buxom nurses nod. When Griselda ushers me into Matlock's personal office, I feel as if I've stepped into the headquarters of a high-tech sex cult.

Sitting behind a desk with a commanding view of downtown Los Angeles, Matlock launches right into his sales pitch. Phrases like "sexual gratification" and "female empowerment" figure prominently in the rather one-sided conversation. I detect an almost religious fervor for this strangest of callings.

"Is there really such a thing as a perfect pussy?" I interject. "And if so, what does it look like?"

"It's the idea of beauty, the idea–do you understand?" Matlock says. "The image. Women come in here, and they want to look like the Centerfolds you see in Playboy." Although feeling swept along by Matlock's enthusiasm, I try to point out that Playboy never features full-on beaver shots.

Matlock's selfless crusade on behalf of America's poor, neglected pussies brings to mind the pharmaceutical industry's knack for inventing new diagnostic names for diseases that don't exist. If America's business is business, it seems one way of going about that business is to create a demand for things we never knew we needed.

Nonetheless, Matlock claims perfect pussies do exist, and he swears he has encountered a few. "I see women with a perfect slitlike introitus, labia minora that come back at the midline," he says, putting his hands together as if in prayer and showing me his perfectly aligned index fingers. "Let's say the index fingers represent the labia minora. Women don't want them gaping apart. The same goes for the labia majora. Women don't want those lips hanging loose. They want them pert, firm and close together. So that's rejuvenation. And our next-biggest-selling procedure is laser reduction labiaplasty, because women don't want their labia minora projecting beyond the labia majora."

"Don't most women's labia minora naturally project beyond their labia majora?" I ask as I stare down at my own lap.

"Probably."

This is a brilliant business, I think to myself.

"So the laser reduction labiaplasty is for, like, when there's too much meat in the taco?"

"Yes," Matlock says briskly. "Of course, I did not create the market. The need was there all along. I discovered the market. And believe me, I know what women want. I've treated princesses, porn stars, presidents' daughters, actresses and celebrities from 50 states and 30-some countries."

Sitting in Matlock's office, I wonder if it has occurred to him that women may really just want to be left alone.

Or do they? After our interview Matlock arranges for me to meet several of his recent patients. I'm introduced to a parade of fantastically bodacious, immaculately feminine creatures, each more suggestively dressed than the last. First a 33-year-old Panamanian hairstylist from Marina del Rey, who received laser rejuvenation five months earlier, tells me, "I wasn't sure (continued on page 128)Rosebud(continued from page 84) I needed it, but I've had two children. I didn't want to feel insecure around the younger women who haven't had kids." A 29-year-old Nicaraguan bartender has been renovated top to bottom: Her tits, now a size 36D, could provide refuge for a small marsupial, and her taut, liposuctioned thighs gleam under her miniskirt. Before her labiaplasty, she says, one of her lips was a little larger than the other. This made her feel insecure. "I always had to leave the lights out when I had sex," she says, because she didn't want men to zero in on her lopsided labia.

A divorced 34-year-old bookkeeper from Sacramento had the skin around her clitoris trimmed. "Dr. Matlock brought my vagina down to the size of a 16-year-old's," she tells me. "You can get small, medium or large." One woman reports that after she'd had a few kids, her husband told her that having sex with her was like tossing a hot dog down a hallway. And every one of these factory-refurbished beauties insists that while they may have felt guilty or nervous before getting their muffs surgically re-buffed, they would recommend the procedures to their friends. I am left wondering how long it will be before they'll be back in the office for a tune-up. Surely their skin-deep contentment has a shelf life. If so, Matlock is happy to comply.

•

Not that he is the only doctor fulfilling women's vaginal-enhancement needs. Physicians in major cities all over the U.S. now offer these surgeries. A doctor in Connecticut markets vacations for women living abroad to come to America. The $11,400 package includes a vaginal makeover along with a plane ticket, a limo to and from the airport and a hotel stay. Many women learned about vaginal cosmetic surgery from Dr. Gary Alter, who is featured on the E! network's reality show Dr. 90210. Alter says he performs about 20 labia operations a month. A New York gynecologist who does labiaplasties recently told the Chicago Tribune, "We're saving a lot of couples' sex lives." Meanwhile critics of the trend nationwide have compared it to everything from Pandora's box to a Restoration comedy to Pimp My Ride.

Perhaps the strangest new phenomenon is hymenoplasty. For a mere $1,800 to $5,000 women can surgically restore their hymen, giving second-string first loves a fresh chance to redeflower them. A Texas woman who had the operation done by a Manhattan doctor gushed to the London Times this past winter about how worthwhile the experience was. "Now my sister is thinking of becoming a virgin again for her 45th birthday to surprise her husband," the woman said.

Who pioneered hymenoplasty? From whose fertile mind did it hatch? You guessed it: Dr. David Matlock.

•

Matlock's latest project is called G-spot amplificationmdash;or, more colloquially, the G-Shot. The procedure provides increased sexual arousal and sensitivity, he claims. Simply finding the G-spot isn't enough for some women, apparently. Why not supersize it with a collagen injection?

Matlock trumpets the procedure in a self-published book dubbed Dr. Spot and on his website, theGShot.com. Ecstatic testimonials abound. "All I have to do is think about sex and I can feel my G-spot react," a woman who has had the procedure writes. And "My toes actually curl." And "Even during my spinning class I can feel the bike seat pressing on it and I have to pretend I'm just enjoying the workout." A happy 27-year-old recipient named Rosemary burbles, "I felt aroused when I was driving and when I was in yoga class. I was able to pinpoint the exact spot after the injection. I was able to position my partner to hit the exact spot. I would love to get it again, and I would totally recommend this to other women."

Not quite ready for my own G-Shot, I ask Matlock to give me a step-by-step run-through of this admittedly weird "medical" procedure. First he instructs his patients to find their G-spot, which they do by conducting a self-exam alone in a consulting room. (Does Griselda provide candles and vibrators? I wonder.) Next Matlock inserts a speculum and performs an examination to verify the location. He takes a digital measurement, transfers it to a special speculum that indicates the G-spot, reinserts the speculum, numbs the area and injects the collagen into the vagina. The entire procedure takes minutes and costs $1,800. "A small price to pay for such a bundle of joy," the doctor says. Sexual relations can resume in as little as four hours, and the effects last four months. Safety concerns? Since the FDA has approved collagen injections in the vagina for urinary incontinence and sphincter deficiencies, Matlock believes they've been done for 40 years with no serious side effects other than urinary-tract infection and urinary retention.

How did Matlock come up with such an idea? I ask. A lightbulb went on in his head after a three A.M. phone call from his girlfriend. It must have been quite a conversation. "I couldn't get back to sleep after we got off the phone," he says. "My mind is fertile for all this stuff. Why can't I take the woman and educate her on the G-spot, help her identify it? I started wondering if I could inject it with a collagen base."

Matlock confesses that his dancer friend participated in the testing phase of G-spot amplification. "She helped a tremendous amount, talking about it, exploring it," he explains. "She helped me get firsthand research information intimately."

The doctor has already devised an elaborate business plan—"I have an MBA, you know. This is medicine as business!"—which involves patenting the G-Shot, licensing it to a company called InnoGyn and franchising the enterprise by training doctors in 18 countries so that women all over the world can run into a doctor's office on their lunch hour for a quick G-Shot.

Listen to Matlock long enough and it wouldn't surprise you if the smog over Los Angeles should part to reveal a giant holographic pussy hanging in the sky, the words David Matlock, Cooter King! wafting from its glistening lips.

•

Given all this, it makes sense that we should get used to looking past the limitations of the human vagina as we've (so to speak) come to know it. Who knows? The future may bring something warmer, wetter, tighter and more welcoming than anything nature can provide.

Picture, if you will, an entirely artificial pussy designed with a polymer used by NASA and attached to a life-size sex doll that has more in common with Marilyn Monroe than your run-of-the-mill, oval-mouthed oversize Barbie.

A San Marcos, California company called Abyss Creations claims to have made just that. Founder Matt McMullen picked the company's name strategically: The A and b in Abyss would assure him the lead stall at trade shows. The company itself is tucked away on a frontage road between a storage business and a soundproofer, smack in the middle of the suburban sprawl that runs from Los Angeles to San Diego. The only feature on the otherwise nondescript building is a sticker that reads Cod Bless America. Yet hidden inside is the most scientifically advanced sex-doll operation in the world.

Abyss cornered the market on high-end dolls with anatomically correct asses, pussies and mouths in 1997. The company has been featured on two episodes of HBO's Real Sexmdash;one of which was the series's highest-rated. The dolls sell for more than $6,000; Abyss sells one almost every day.

When I drop by for an informational interview McMullen greets me at the door. He has multiple piercings, and seven silver rings adorn his fingers. Tattoos of matching devils and angels (complete with horns and wings, respectively) cover his upper arms. He tells me right off that he gets regular Botox treatments on his forehead and in the corners of his eyes. "I don't mind being old," he says. "I just don't want to look old." He's 37, by the way.

McMullen is fascinated by what he calls anti-aging research, and he shows an abiding faith in technology's ability to compensate for the inevitable organic decay of the human body. Which is also to say that he's a natural heir to the long line of Utopian Californians who believe the body is a poor home for the human spirit. "We have the computational power to download a person into a computer," he says excitedly as he whisks me down a long hallway and into the warehouse. Interesting—though I have no idea what he means.

Twelve years ago McMullen started building dolls in his garage. He conceived of them as sculptures—objects of pornographic art—and to a certain extent he still does. "Just because people use them for sex doesn't mean they're not a piece of art," he explains. The dolls developed as McMullen's creative and pornographic instincts merged. "I've always been really into naked chicks," he says.

The company now carries 10 dolls: Ten different types of bodies accompanied by 15 removable faces, which Velcro on and off. Each doll consists of 70 to 100 pounds of silicone and is constructed around a skeleton that can be pushed into anatomically correct positions: Arms raise and embrace, mouths open and envelop, legs spread and enfold, tongues pull in and out. McMullen's website describes the dolls as possessing "the poise and relaxed state of a sleeping girl," and McMullen tells me that, to make the sexual experience even more lifelike, some customers wrap their doll in an electric blanket for half an hour before they play with it.

McMullen is especially proud of his dolls' vaginas. Each one is perfectly shaped, with no blemishes or oddities—unless, of course, they are requested. As it happens, customers request all kinds of specifications, from fantastically pronounced labia to petite prepubescent ones. They can be made to order according to the customer's specific idea of the perfect pussy. "We had a guy who wanted an exaggerated clit, kind of like a small penis," McMullen says. "He was into the hermaphrodite look, so I customized a special something just for him."

The vaginas come complete with "speed bumps" to enhance sensation. They are also self-lubricating: McMullen built a reservoir inside the doll's cavity that releases liquid into the vaginal canal when pressure is applied. McMullen is always seeking innovations for his artificial vaginas, and today he's eager to show me a new material for vaginal insertsmdash;a gel the dental industry uses to make artificial gums. He also likes a non-silicone polymer used in the aerospace industry; it feels like slime that keeps its shape—something like the green goo my four-year-old nephew plays with. "There are as many beautiful vaginas as there are beautiful women," McMullen says. "I want to have all these different vaginas people can pick from. It's like food; I don't think there can be one perfect type, only base rules like symmetry and color."

Scanning the warehouse, with its rows of mannequins hanging on meat hooks like so many cow carcasses and its shelves of wigs, heads and eyeballs, I can't help but ask McMullen about his customers. He waves me off. "Believe it or not," he says, "they're just divorced normal guys who don't want to deal with dating and are intrigued by the idea of an artificial sex partner. Instead of putting a down payment on a new car, they buy a new doll. What's appealing about the artificial vaginas is in part the convenience they offer."

•

After all my research into the fantastically improbable things people are doing with vaginas these days, I find myself asking the question, Would I consider lasering off a chunk of my labia? The answer: Hell, no! The thought of pushing a baby through those lips is freaky enough, thank you.

The biggest change I'm willing to make is the Bare With a Flair job at the Completely Bare waxing salon. For a gal who yearns for a little decorative touchup now and then but doesn't want to dice and splice, there's always good old-fashioned waxing. It's a relatively tame procedure. All you have to do is lie still and grit your teeth while an attractive young woman tears your pubic hair out with strips of hot wax. Normally I stick with having the shape of Vermont, my home state, traced on my pubis. But after hours spent with Matlock and McMullen, I'm willing to experiment, to remove a bit more—everything, in fact, every last little hair—and replace it all with Swarovski crystals glued onto my pubis in the shape of a heart.

Duly crystallized, I go home for the final test. Is it hot, I ask. My fiancé takes a deep breath. "Oh, I loved your muff, your flavor saver. I'm sorry, honey, but I liked your pussy just as it was."

And Matlock? My last question to him as I leave the Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute concerns his girlfriend. Did he...does she...?

"Get the surgery, you mean?" He shakes his head. "I won't let her. Once you start, you know, it never stops."