My Week 270: Words You Can Say On (British) Television

There are a lot of TV shows that we watch in North America that are actually based on British shows. The Office is one of the better known examples, but there’s also House of Cards, Veep, and even Three’s Company, which was a TERRIBLE show in both venues. Sometimes the British version is better, and sometimes the American version is, depending on your taste, but the biggest difference between the U.S. and the U.K. is that British shows tend to be more racy when it comes to sexuality. Or at least more graphic, if my experience this week is any indication, and fair warning, if you’re uncomfortable hearing the word ‘nipple’ or ‘vagina’, then back away slowly and miss all the fun.

For a couple of years while I was living in Toronto, I loved watching a show called Botched, where a couple of well-known California plastic surgeons fix cosmetic surgeries gone wrong. It was a fascinating show, but also very frustrating at times due to the strange prudishness American television has about the human body. They don’t mind showing you a person being blown up or eaten by zombies, but if the person’s nipple is showing while they’re being ripped apart, then it’s an R rating for sure. So on Botched, they were always fixing boob jobs gone wrong, but they would blur out the nipple so you could never actually see the new result. One time, a woman had completely lost her nipple due to a botched surgery, so the surgeons got a tattoo artist to give her a new, 3D tattoo of one. I was so excited about how realistic it would look, but they BLURRED IT OUT! It’s a f*cking tattoo, for goodness sake! And it was the same thing every time someone had to have surgery on any part of the body that had to do with boobies or butts or genitalia—everything was censored. But still, it was a great show—the only problem was that when I moved home, I couldn’t get the channel anymore, so no more Botched for me, even if it was needlessly rated G.

But then I was scrolling through Netflix and I discovered another show called Botched Up Bodies and it was the exact same premise, only it was British. I immediately started watching it and if its American counterpart was rated G, this one is outrageously XXX. Not only are there nipples galore, but there are butts and balls all over the place. And vaginas—SO MANY VAGINAS. I had NO F*CKING IDEA that people were doing surgery on their lady parts. WHY???!!! The episode I just watched focused on a woman, I think her name was Sherry, who had had a botched “designer vagina” surgery. But the narrator is this really posh English lady so she said it like “designa” so that it rhymed:

Narrator: Sherry wanted the perfect vagina, but instead of getting the designa vagina she’d hoped for, all she got was a botched-up vagina.
Sherry: My vagina was lopsided. I was always so afraid of being judged for it so I had surgery to make it look more socially acceptable, more like all the other vaginas, but now my vagina is a nightmare.
Narrator: Let’s watch as Dr. Bob tries to give Sherry a nicer vagina. Ooh, that’s not good. Sherry’s vagina is a bloody minefield!
Dr. Bob: This vagina is an extreme fixer-upper.

The narrator legit said “Sherry’s vagina is a bloody landmine” and the analogy left me even more confused. So here are a couple of the questions that I have:

1) Who is judging people for their vaginas? I mean, who the hell is looking at them? Are people flashing them in the supermarket and then the other shoppers are all like, “Damn girl, that vagina looks asymmetrical—you need to get surgery”?

2) Who in their right mind would let someone put industrial grade silicone filler in their privates in an attempt to ‘even them up’? How do you even know it’s “lopsided”? Like how the hell are you seeing it? The only way I could actually see mine would be through a series of contortions that would most likely cripple me and there would be several mirrors involved. ANYTHING looks lopsided when you’re trying to look at it upside down and backwards.

3) What does “all the other vaginas” even mean? Where do you see THEM? Is there a gallery somewhere that I’m unaware of? I tried Google images and they’re all just cartoon vaginas, so is she trying to get one that looks like an artist’s rendering?

It’s a Fendi scarf.

4) What exactly is a designer vagina? Something from the Lagerfeld collection? Chanel Couture perhaps? Or that weird Fendi scarf as seen above? Is it like taking a picture of a hairstyle you like to your hairdresser and saying, “Do it like that?” or does the surgeon come up with the concept? And what if he’s really avant-garde or wants to make it all whirly like Seneca Crane’s beard in The Hunger Games?

Make it look like this.

And not only did they keep saying the word ‘vagina’ over and over and OVER AGAIN, they kept showing it. Like really close up. Which is when I realized that this show is perpetuating an anatomical myth. Sherry didn’t have surgery on her vagina, she had it on her LABIA, and I was like, “When did the word ‘vagina’ become an acceptable synonym for any part of a lady’s private area? Is this like how we say Kleenex when we mean tissue? But you wouldn’t say Kleenex if you wanted a sandwich, so can we just get the terminology correct and STOP SAYING VAGINA WHEN WE MEAN LABIA?! No wonder Brits are so confused—while I was googling “Gallery of Vaginas” an article came up with the headline “Half of Brits don’t have a CLUE where the vagina is… and it’s not just men!” and it’s probably because they watched this show. At any rate, the surgeons were able to remove the filler and reconstruct poor Sherry’s labia so that she didn’t have to worry about being judged any more. Well, we’re not judging her for her THAT, but…

Two other random thoughts:

First, Designa Vagina would be a fantastic name for a drag queen.

Second, I haven’t seen this show do any penis surgeries but I’m just waiting for the narrator to say something like “Stan’s penis is a bloody Gatling gun!”

75 thoughts on “My Week 270: Words You Can Say On (British) Television”

  1. We also have a tv show called “Embarrassing Bodies” in which members of the public get their privates out to a medical person & camera crew and say “is this normal?”
    Lots of willies, knobs and dicks on there. But due to the fact that there might be puss & scabs on everything, I tend to keep well away. Not my idea of entertainment 🙄

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  3. I admit I like medical shows but just the thought of watching actual surgery makes me tense up! I don’t even like bloody stuff on regular shows. I agree with you about the who’s looking and the contortion bit etc. Hilarious. When I had uterine cancer and went in for the biopsy, the gynocologist oncologist said, they really messed you up down here didn’t they?

    Huh? What’s messed up? How was I to know? And who was she talking about? I had three babies without anesthesia so if anyone had been messing around I would have known.😳 I do know the oncologist surgeon who did the bladder removal for cancer a few years ago told me that my vagina would be smaller after surgery. Huh? Now that was really messy surgery with long recovery, but at least I was warned. I was 69 and widowed so not a big deal.

    I have to laugh when thinking of all this. I get to a point and think, okay what’s next? Maybe I should just have my lower half removed.

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  4. Ive seen that Netflix show, and some of the horrible surgeries they try to fix are, well more horrible than what their lady parts must have looked like to begin with! I work with a lot (I do mean a lot) of physicians and they always say no ones body is symmetrical. We, EVERYONE will have something that isn’t matching. Women will always have one boob higher than the other. And on that note, I’m going to go look at myself in the mirror to make sure I’m not too lopsided! Lol 🤣😂😝

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  5. This is one of the more entertaining posts I’ve read in a while! I’m a pushover for crude humor. Designa Vagina! I can’t think of a good rhyming word to pair with labia, so I think they’ll have to keep calling it a vagina…

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  7. Sad, but true….why?
    LOL I like your humorous take on the topic.

    American Society is big on shaming how people look. Hollywood images generate a lot of this bizarre desire for plastic surgery. Sex is an absolute no-no, but you are so right about the maim, murder and destroy TV shows. Sets my nerves on edge to see the palate of newer and worse ways to commit mayhem on TV. I ask myself: Don’t they realize that these images give people crazy ideas?

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  8. That’s sounds like Serbian movies from the 60s and 70s where everybody was naked, swearing, and fucking all the time, which means we were kinda ‘forced’ to feel very comfortable hearing words like ‘nipple’ or ‘vagina’ or fucking or whatever. Besides, our swear words are bad bad bad. You cannot even imagine how bad.

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  10. The legacy of America’s Puritan roots, a thing that infected and spread like the plague, will haunt this country’s future for centuries. This single affectation produces dozens of pathological behaviors, the least of which being that SEXUALITY = TABOO. And if a thing is taboo, it is both coveted and shunned (sometimes legally) to blown-out proportions. To me it’s just one more example of humanity dreaming shit up—just because they can.

    Funny post, had me chuckling out loud. (COL?)

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  11. Linda: “Is your penis alright?” Gene: “Mine’s a nightmare, if anyone’s wondering.”
    Fun Fact: The UK version of Three’s Company was called “Man About The House”, lending an air of sophistication to the dumbest sitcom ever conceived.

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  15. Porn has really messed up peoples’ perceptions. I didn’t understand the full implications of that until now, in spite of doing a long paper on the Marquis de Sade in college and reading a lot of his work.
    He wrote about a woman whose clitoris was so large she used it like a penis, and this was considered a good thing. Now she’d go for unnecessary plastic surgery even though it could qualify her to be the drag queen Designa Vagina.
    I know drag queens are men but they’d make an exception for her. At least I would, under my drag name Tiffany Lamp.

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  16. I’m pretty certain that anyone who’s actually seen Sherry’s vagina is just grateful to be there.

    Also, I hate when the world vagina is thrown around when people really mean vulva.

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  17. My country is fascinating. We have no problem showing young women wearing pretty much nothing in a beer commercial but if Janet Jackson shows her nipple for one second we go completely nukes-vill. Yes, we’re a tad disturbed over here.

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  19. Lmao @ “gatling gun”! 🤣🤣🤣

    Now, I can’t tell you I’ve ever seen a show like that but I can tell you that Mrs C has long-since learned when she can tell me I can look. I can’t watch surgeries or child birthin’s or stuff like that, it’s not for me. I did not, come to think of it, enjoy “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” either. Somehow I could watch the zombie stuff, but I don’t know why.

    I never could understand why boobies are pornographic. Or why Japanese porn blurs out the male genitalia. I mean, that’s what I’ve heard, anyway.

    Say, speaking of Netflix, we just subscribed to Disney+ and love “The Mandalorian”!

    Not to change the subject or anything. 😁

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  20. Maybe she couldn’t get a job as a porn star because her vulva wasn’t star material and she had to work as an uncredited background actor instead because she didn’t have those gorgeous, full lips that women of Hollywood made into a big deal some years back. Of course, we’re talking about a different set of lips, but vagina/vaginer, that’s my theory. Also, if she’s a swinger, maybe no one was wanting to uhm…

    She just wanted to fit in with all the other women. Bless her first world problemed, little heart! 🙂

    Now I want to see this show give a guy a ball lift or take a few inches off because no woman can comfortably have sex with him because he’s too big! Can you see the tears in this guy’s eyes and his significant other after the fix, because now they can enjoy the kind of sex life they were meant to have all along…uhm maybe a”long” isn’t quite the right word, but you get what I mean.

    Netfilx, huh?

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  23. Oh you had me laughing at this, I didn’t know the US were prudes, I think here they show more depending on context. A medical program is fine but if itwa sex… oh boy. But I can’t watch these, I’ve seen bits of them but it’s too daft just like you say why do you want surgery on something you can’t see and yes…. we are confused lol

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  24. WTF? This is totally nuts. The laughter tears are streaming. I am personally a huge fan of British tv; we watch mostly British tv, with the exception of the news (Joe) and a guilty American tv pleasure which shall not be named(me). Thank you for the laughter, as ever, Suzanne!

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  25. OMG! Bah Ahaha! Too funny! Americans are prudes! Vagina! I know women who won’t say the word… hence lady parts was born! How are you? I’ve been transposing and am moved into my RV. Me and 5he hubby… 24/7. Boobs and balls everywhere. Changed my name to ‘Deloris’ 🙄 Just kidding! This gives me an idea for a blog post. There is no way I can compete.😆Are you interested in a summary about a clinical trial where men watched passion vs. porn? Hmmm… oh god. I just can’t. What would my parents think? 😉 I missed reading your posts. I’m heading back to check on the rest I’ve missed! Great post! 😊💜

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  26. I’m dying🤣. So funny. Sending this one to my daughter because she uses the word vagina so often to embarrass her five brothers that I think they’ve become immune. Labia might be a good (and more correct) word for her during the Christmas holiday.🤣

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