How Porn is Driving Women to Surgically Alter Their Vaginas to Look Like Barbie’s

So I was sitting around the pool with my husband and another couple yesterday afternoon and broached the subject of labiaplasties to the boys, wanting to hear their thoughts:

• Do guys care what a real-life woman’s vaginal area looks like?
• How much time would you actually spend even looking at your partner’s?
• Would uneven, lopsided or protruding inner labia ever stop you from wanting to be with a woman?

were some of the questions I asked.

These are two, mature (most of the time), grown men. Manly men. They both love women, love looking at them, love talking to them, love being with them, and respect them (and have been known to look at their fair share of porn) and they were absolutely appalled at the number of women putting themselves through this expensive, painful and unnecessary procedure in order to gain what is increasingly becoming known as a “Barbie Vagina” (which makes zero sense as it’s plastic, with no access) and one would assume was originally designed by Mattel to be as UN-sexual as possible for the little hands that play with them.

My husband pointed out that the variation between male genitals is just as, if not greater than the variation in female genitals and there is no such thing as normal for either sex. Dicks are long, short, skinny, thick, veiny, smooth, with different bends and leans and skin textures and no man would ever consider their man-hood to be abnormal and in need of “fixing”. Yet women, as usual, are being made to feel that what they have is just not good enough.

This article in the Daily Mail says that in 2015, nearly 100,000 women across the world underwent a labiaplasty, which involves trimming back the inner ‘lips’ to give them the look of a pre-pubescent teenager. And they are blaming this trend on internet porn – becoming accustomed to what looks ‘normal’ as a result of the abundance of x-rated images online.

Why would any woman, note I underlined woman, want her genitals to look pre-pubescent? After all, we don’t want pre-pubescent breasts so to me, that is just plain creepy.

A further 50,000 had vaginal rejuvenation – the tightening of the canal, figures from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS) showed.

Both procedures to give women a designer vagina come with health risks, including bleeding, infections and scarring.

Dorothy Shaw, former head of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada said the increasing popularity of the procedures are concerning. She said “they have no hair and they’re very flat, so you just see sort of a slit”.

Much of what men and women see, on the internet, does not in any way resemble the variety of shapes and sizes in which the female genitalia exist. A study published in 2005 found that out of 50 women studied, labia minora length varied from 2 to 10cm and width from 0.7 to 5cm.

So how does any surgeon feel confident that surgery can create a “normal” female genital appearance?

There is little evidence of it helping to improve sexual satisfaction or self image.

Of course there are instances where women have a genuine abnormality and can suffer pain and discomfort from inner labia chafing but this is not why the majority of women are having this procedure.

And saddest of all is that teenagers, teenagers who aren’t even fully finished developing are opting for this procedure. I find that incredibly disturbing that a surgeon would allow it and incredibly sad that they think this will make them more attractive to their current or future potential partners.

This topic was discussed just last week on a radio talk-back show. One young 16 year old listener called into the program and said that she had been dumped by her boyfriend when he saw her nude for the first time and he told her that she should get surgery to look ‘normal’. How the HELL would a 16 year old boy know about normal or abnormal genitals? Apart from the ones he came out of, it’s likely the only ones he has seen were on the internet.

My husband, spoke with all sincerity and said that as far as he was concerned (and he believed he was speaking on behalf of all men) “that a man is first attracted to a woman’s looks, then he falls in love with her personality and that when it comes time to going to bed with her, the very LAST thing on his mind is how perfectly tidy her labia is and that he sure as hell wouldn’t be wasting time staring at it and debating whether it was good enough”.

Isn’t it bad enough that we already put ourselves through the agony of a brazillian wax to also appear pre-pubescent but now we have to cut and mutilate the most sacred parts that we hold dear in order to somehow compete with the unrealistic and fake images on-line?

ENOUGH already.