I have to grudgingly hand it to Lena Dunham and her newsletter, Lenny. Compared to several other celebrity newsletters (Goop, I’m thinking of Goop) she’s picking excellent contributing authors and the content is genuinely interesting, smart and fresh. It’s not all about diet, exercise and quakery, although she gets points off for including a segment from fraud trainer Tracy Anderson in this week’s edition.

Last week, Lenny had a column by Jennifer Lawrence in which she commented on the pay disparity in her industry. This personally affects Lawrence and was revealed in detail during the Sony hack. This week, the opening essay is from comedian Jenny Slate, who waxes poetic about a vajacial she received. Now, this isn’t the same as a ‘gina steam, something that Gwyneth Paltrow recently touted. This is a facial for the external bits, the mons pubis, and Slate is decidedly more skeptical of the entire process. I found her column funny and clever. We’ve heard all about the treatments that women can receive on their lady parts, and I appreciate a more negative view of the necessity of this and the message it gives us about our private parts. Here’s part of Slate’s essay, and subscribe to Lenny for more:

I’ve always been afraid that someone will tell someone else that I have a bad smell. This stems from overhearing those high school boys who want both to have sex with a vagina but also to disparage one…

The Vajacial is billed as a facial, but for your pussy. I wasn’t sure how major it was going to be. I enjoy getting my face cleaned, and I like the idea of deep, weird dirts getting taken out of my face skin so that I can have a clean face to show everyone. But my vagina is, well, not a face.

The fact that The Vajacial exists seems to insist that we need it. And although nobody can intimidate me about my vagina anymore like that 17-year-old boy did in the ’90s, I started to feel intimidated by the creeping unknown of: “What if there is something off about me and my body and I don’t know about it? And my happiness is about to be ruined?”…

I shyly explained to [the esthetician] that I had volunteered to get “The Vajacial” and asked her some questions about it that I thought I should ask. “Why do people do this?” Answer: to get rid of ingrowns; to decrease pigmentation; to make themselves feel good; out of curiosity. “Will this hurt?” Answer: ha ha. No, but if you need tweezing, I will do some tweezing. “Is stuff going to go inside of my vagina?” Answer: no. (And then a little laugh, which I appreciated…)

Jessica came back in, and we proceeded with The Vajacial. First, she powdered me like a baby, which made me want to leave. Then she applied a cleanser. She wore gloves and really kept away from any vagina parts of my vagina. The whole thing was only “frontal.” What a gross sentence! Next came an exfoliant peel that was supposed to soften the skin on the bikini line and help with any bumps. Then she toned my bikini line. I chatted with her throughout this first part, which took maybe a total of seven minutes.

Then she pulled out the tweezers and tweezed two ingrown hairs on my bikini line. I was deadly silent except for a lot of deep breaths, tiny little poodle yelps, and, after a minute, a truly anxious and dumb statement of “I’m really quiet right now.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “This is the part when people usually stop talking.” “Oh, really?” I stress-whispered, as she finally took the tweezers away. Tweezers even near my vagina is a really big “No, thank you” for me, but I volunteered for this, and I was going to do it completely. After the silent tweezing, she toned again. Then she gave my vagina a “modeling mask.” It was a white, clay-like mask; she put it on and then said, “Just lie here and relax. I’ll be back in 5 minutes.”

[From Lenny newsletter, received via email]

After that the mask hardened and was removed without pain and then the esthetician applied a “lightening cream,” which Slate said was unnecessary but allowed herself to be talked into regardless. She described it as “a bland experience,” and said that the “treatment would be helpful if you have frequent and bothersome ingrown hairs.” Overall she did not recommend a $70 facial for your crotch and said that “It’s more trouble than it’s worth. I could have done all of that stuff to myself.” What I really appreciated though, were her thoughts on the fact that a facial even exists for that area and what that says about us as a society. “The Vajacial is harmless compared to the tons of bullsh*t that is peddled around by people looking to make money off the fact that we live in a society that tells us that we, in our natural form, are not enough, that our form is not naturally easy to understand or connect to. I don’t recommend the Vajacial because I simply don’t think we need to spend our time in that marketplace.”

Compare Slate’s self aware and critical vajacial essay to Gwyneth Paltrow calling the V-Steam “an energetic release… if you’re in LA, you have to do it.” Jennifer Love Hewitt similarly described her bejewled lady parts as making her feel “full of good energy.” Slate realizes that these vag treatments are meant to sell us something that, if we need it, tell us we’re dirty and inadequate. Plus, you can apply a mask to your mons yourself and save $70 bucks. Now I feel like I need to do this. These bizarre body treatments are like looking in the Skymall catalog. I need this thing I didn’t know existed to solve a problem I didn’t know I had.

photo credit: WENN.com and FameFlynet