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Intimate surgery is still undercover

Artikel on the topic of aesthetic surgery
(published in Focus Magazine, August 2024)

Stefan Gress is often faced with a “very demanding group of patients”. One patient wanted to look like Brad Pitt, another came to the practice in a Spiderman costume. Gress sent them both away. “Am I Jesus?”, he replied to those who think their body is a “piece of clay” from which anything can be molded.

The Munich-based plastic surgeon specializes in the new, booming field of intimate surgery. Anyone who talks to him soon learns that this – in addition to his voluntary work for Ukrainian soldiers injured and disfigured by war – is indeed a matter close to his heart. “You can only do this,” says Gress, “if you love women.”

He is bothered by the fact that intimate surgery, which includes labia reduction and vaginal tightening, still has a sexist connotation. As if it’s all about pleasing men.” Women do it almost exclusively for themselves,” emphasizes the doctor. “So that they can enjoy sex again, have orgasms more easily or have orgasms at all.”

Nevertheless, the “genital thing is still undercover”. Many women come to him via the internet. Many also come to him to correct what Gress calls a “botched” labia reduction. There are many of these, a quarter of his intimate surgical procedures are second operations with results that sometimes shock Gress. “Mutilations, frayed wound edges, holes in the labia”, he has had it all on the table. “The biggest risk is a doctor who can’t do it,” says Gress, who has published a textbook on intimate surgery. “Something like this has to be operated on with dedication and care,” he emphasizes. “For me, an operation like this takes two hours, 150 fine stitches, only then does it become beautiful.”

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