cosmetic genital surgery is often considered to increase the woman’s self-esteem. However, if the problem is not physical, but psychological, physical change will hardly be an effective solution. A girl has got an image of herself inside her brain, and there will be just a conflict between what she is seeing and what the reality is (Gilman, 2005, p. 207). What is more, there is not much outcome data which means each genital surgery means risk and danger. Certainly, there are thousands of women satisfied with the visible results of what they have gone through, but this practice is rather young and long-term outcomes have not been studied yet. As for short-time negative effects, they often include scarring, chronic pain, obstetric risks or reduced sexual pleasure (Fenton, 2011).
Besides, to a great extent the outcome depends on the qualification of a genital plastic surgeon. It is hardly enough to complete a special course. Profound knowledge and experience is needed not to do harm, whereas patients with sexual dysfunction, mental impairment, or body dysmorphic disorder, for instance, should be withheld from procedures of that kind (Hill, 2012, p. 55).
The twenty first century has essentially changed the way intimate relationships, females and males are perceived. “Welcome to the strange new world of female genital cosmetic surgery, where body insecurity issues are fueling a small but growing Western market for such procedures as labiaplasty, clitoral un-hooding, G-spot augmentation and hymen reconstruction, a.k.a. “revirginization,” James (2012) replies bitterly. This is the age when even sex is medicalized. Actually, promotion of the way female genitals should look like hurts even those women who do not want to go through surgery and are absolutely satisfied with their organs and tissues. After all, this highly profitable business cannot be annihilated, but there are certain steps that should be taken to set this cultural phenomenon in a proper frame. In particular, new regulations for advertisements and media testimonials are required.
Examine the saturation of visual images of violence and suffering and discuss critically in relation to the perceived demise of empathic feeling.
Today visual images of violence and suffering are haunting us everywhere. Various media are oversaturated with scenes of fighting, rape, murder, and perversion. These images have become a norm for the contemporary society, and at the same time they have already become a wide-spread concern for parents as well as researchers including sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and so on. Children and youth are considered to be the most vulnerable group because their brain and psyche are only in the process of forming and are extremely compliant to the outer influences. In turn, the welfare of younger generations is confirmed as one of the highest values of the society. Hence dangerous affects of violent images is a society-wide concern worth of careful attention, research and solution. A lot of methodological and theoretical issues have been already presented and scrutinized by social scientists, but findings in this area are considered to have limited interpretation in the existing literature (Freedman, 2002, p. 113). Although the effects of violence in media are sometimes regarded as exaggerated (Ybarra, 2008, p. 930), the focus needs to be shifted to a certain extent. There is plenty of data on how violent images and violent behaviour are linked, but the nature of this link is critically understudied. According to some of the studies in this field, violent behaviour becomes the result of desensitization and empathy reduction. This research is thus undertaken to follow this train of thought and analyze the data discovered through observation.