And all that vajazz!

So vajazzling is apparently a thing now. Vajazzling, for those of you who aren’t aware, is the practice of affixing small shiny things, usually crystals, to your otherwise bare vulva. It first entered the lexicon a few months ago when actress Jennifer Love Hewitt revealed on late night TV that she had coped with a particularly bad breakup by having one of her friends bedazzle her “precious lady” until it looked like a “disco ball.”

When I first heard about vajazzling, I thought that it was totally absurd. Little did I know, the disco-themed pubis party was just getting started.

Last week, The Frisky noted that there is a new totally absurd pube region trend in town. It is called “penazzling” and it is exactly what it sounds like. As Frisky blogger Jessica Wakeman noted, that penazzling isn’t entirely comparable to vajazzling because the crystals are applied to a man’s lower pelvis, far from his actual genitalia. While I would hardly argue that this is the kind of gender equality we should be shooting for – a world where, regardless of your gender, you are allowed and expected to have sparkly privates – I think that the invention of penazzling has actually done us a great service. Thanks to penazzling, any lingering doubts about how totally ridiculous vajazzling is should be well and truly done away with.

In a recent episode of her reality show The Price of Beauty, Jessica Simpson visited a “fattening hut” in a village in Uganda. There, she met a young woman, a bride-to-be, who had spent almost three months in the hut trying to gain weight. The young woman explained that her culture values plump women, seeing fat as a sign of health and wealth, and that she wanted to look good for her future husband. So, she had spent months in the hut, isolated from her friends and family, eating as much as possible and moving as little as possible. And she was miserable. You could almost see the light bulb go on above Simpson’s head as she listened. You could practically see the thought bubble form: “Holy crap. I’ve also spent months of my life isolated from my friends and family, adhering to a strict and unnatural regimen, making myself miserable trying to achieve the body shape that my culture has taught me is indicative of health, wealth and beauty.” Except Simpson, of course, was trying to get thin.

Watching Warner Herzog’s documentary Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun, about a nomadic tribe in Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central Africa Republic, inspires similar light bulbs. In Wodaabe culture, men compete for access to women by enhancing their features so that they better adhere to the culture’s standard of male beauty: white teeth, white whites of the eyes and height. In the opening moments of Herzog’s documentary, we see the Wodaabe men lined up, their faces and lips painted to make their teeth and eyes seem whiter, bobbing up and down on their toes to appear taller. It’s just like lipstick and eyeliner and high heels, except it’s being done by men. For those of us living in a culture where the women are the ones who are expected to paint their faces and alter the appearance of their bodies, be it through footwear, cunningly engineered underwear or surgery, what the Wodaabe men – and the Ugandan women – are doing looks at once familiar and alien.

It’s familiar because we understand the motivation and the practice of trying to adhere to a cultural beauty standard. But what the Ugandan woman is doing is alien because most Americans, and especially American women, will spend their lives trying to be thinner, not fatter. What the Wodaabe men are doing is alien because while we do live in a culture where members of one gender are encouraged to spend a good deal of time and energy manipulating their appearance to achieve a narrow standard of beauty, we’re used to those members being women, not men.

Which brings us to penazzling. As both Simpson and Herzog demonstrate, sometimes you have to turn things upside down to realize just how ridiculous they look right side up. Sometimes you have to look at the practice of gluing crystals onto a dude’s junk region to realize just how absurd it is that Jennifer Love Hewitt devoted an entire chapter of her new book to encouraging women to gluing crystals onto theirs. It’s worth asking ourselves, next time we’re giggling at penazzling or makeup for men or man Spanx why we find these products so amusing or absurd. Chances are, it’s not because of what they are, but because of who they’re aimed at. It’s not the practice of bedazzling one’s private parts that makes us realize that, come on, this is ridiculous, it’s the fact that the practice is now being marketed to men.

Accustomed as we are to the idea that women should pluck and wax and landscape their “precious ladies,” it’s easy to see vajazzling as silly, but only slightly sillier than all the other vulva-riffic procedures on offer for women. Penazzling, on the other hand, crosses the line from silly into “are you fucking kidding me?” And it should also make us stop and wonder why we’re so willing to accept increasingly absurd pubic grooming practices for women, from Brazilian waxes to stencils and now, vajazzling. Like I said, sometimes when you turn things upside down, when you imagine a situation with the genders reversed, it can help you to realize that the way things are right side up doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either.