Dr. Leonore Tiefer

Last night I attended Dr. Leonore Tiefer's presentation. Prior to attending this I was completely unaware of the surgical procedures women were going through for genital reconstruction. The whole concept of all of these procedures seemed a little outrageous in my opinion. Though I am not really passionate about this particular topic I found that Dr. Leonore Tiefer presented it in a way that drew in an audience and definitely caught my attention to the issues at hand. I really liked how her and the other activists of this used comedy as a way to spread concousness of the issues of genital reconstruction etc. They used short skits, knitted vaginas and had a group called the muffia, that all were used in a humourous way to raise awareness. To me this was another example of how comedy is used as an outlet to discuss serious issues while gaining a larger audience. Much like Margret Cho used comdey to talk about many issues such as physical apperence, I felt that Dr. Leonore Tiefer and the people she works with also used comedy as one of their many ways to stress the issues placed on physical apperence. Women and men are being told that the physical apperence of their genitalia determines their quality of sex, so they go through these procedures in attempt to improve themselves. If the trend of genital reconstruction continues to grow, I feel that there needs to be more research done on the procedures and its long term effects. All in all I thought the presentation was definitely an eye opener and caught my attention on these issues.
-Ryan Fleming blog#13