YONI SPEAK

Sexual healing as a profession is a fairly recent phenomenon beginning with Sex Therapy and over the past 15 years, broadening to include trained and certified sexual healers, also known as Sacred Intimates, Sexological Bodyworkers, Dakas, and Dakinis. For decades these courageous women and men have offered their services to women who have bravely sought them out for a deeper awakening to their sexuality. For hundreds of years, women have hardly been allowed to have any sexual libido at all and if they did they were classified as hysterical. The medical profession gave this name to the symptoms of women who had too much pent-up sexual energy in the Victorian Age and treated it with hands-on therapy provided by a physician. This doctor would stimulate the clitoris of the patient until she had an orgasm or paroxysm (release of tension). Of course, they also thought that a lobotomy would calm the woman down and so many hundreds if not thousands of women were literally made into zombies

Has the beauty myth gone too far?  In today's culture, I think it has. After recently reading about female genital mutilation practices in Africa and other Muslin countries, it seems that women in our own culture are doing something that is not far akin to mutilating themselves voluntarily. Of course, the FGM practices are far more extensive and the repercussions far more harmful to the woman but that does not mean that when a young woman feels her genitalia does not look normal and decides to have her labia lips essentially cut off that it is not as serious. It seems that way to me. I have recently become aware of the growing fad of what is commonly called, labiaplasty and vaginoplasty.  Since 2016 there has been a  39%  increase in labiaplasty surgeries. which can roughly be estimated at more than 12,000 women. This fact still astonishes me and saddens me at the same time. Recent research done by Refinery 29 who took a poll of 3,670 women stated that 43% of them were concerned a