It was on that night that I first heard,from the pornographer,about what the government was doing to women’s vaginas. The outrage came rushing back to me when Women’s Health Victoria recently released a report which finds that – a procedure that removes some of the labia (the inner and outer lips of the vagina) – because they believe theirs are ugly,unusual or “disgusting”.
Nearly a quarter of Gen Z women are anxious,ashamed or embarrassed by how their labia look.Getty Images
Nearly a quarter of Gen Z women (those surveyed for this study were aged 18 to 24) are anxious,ashamed or embarrassed by how their labia look,according to the report. And almost a third of them associate their labia with negative words. One in five were obtaining their information on what labia “should look like” from porn and 30 per cent from social media.
Which recalled something the pornographer told me that left me incensed (and cemented our friendship forever):women’s vaginas all look very different but they were not allowed to reflect that in their porn.
The government censor had required thatPeople Magazine,where he worked,and its competitors available on news stands,photo-edit vaginas to remove visible labia. The term in the industry was “healing to a single crease”. He and his team didn’t want to do it – they found the practice as offensive as I hope you do. As he put it when I called him to chat for this column,the team atPeople (which included many women who weren’t in front of the camera) knew they could be considered sexist “but we loved women,we were never misogynist”.
It killed them that they were required to treat women as imperfect. But one issue a year had to be submitted to the government censor,chosen by the censor at random,and if the vagina in that issue was not “healed” the entire issue could be pulled from sale. So the industry applied a heightened standard of editing to all issues.
This is how beauty standards are set. Fashion magazines airbrush away bumps,curves,dents and kilos. Pornography mutilates women’s genitalia by scrubbing away pixels with Photoshop’s Magic Eraser. And the next thing you know,this is how men and women start expecting bodies and vaginas to look,driving the demand for surgery.
Of course,it’s nothing new. There is the tale of the. Ruskin was a devotee of the pre-Raphaelite school of painting,in which female nudes had marvellous hair cascading from their heads and no muff on their tucked stuff. When Ruskin married the beautiful Euphemia Gray,he left the marriage unconsummated because,as she wrote to her father,he “had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was” and so “did not make me his Wife because he was disgusted with my person the first evening”. This has led to the popular theory that,as one scholar has written,“John,familiar only with the smooth (marble) vulvas of classical art,was shocked and repulsed by the sight ofpubic hairon his bride and could not desire his new wife”.
Boys today,having grown up seeing only vaginas which have,in the hateful terminology,been “healed”,might be more likely to do a Ruskin,rejecting girls who then find themselves defective. That,in turn,may be what’s leading to the increase in cosmetic labiaplasty. This is essentially female genital mutilation,to my mind – a practice rightly outlawed in all civilised countries.
The worst thing is,it’s so appallingly unnecessary. The grown-up heterosexual men I spoke to in the course of preparing this piece spoke fondly of the many varieties of vagina. The Women’s Health report also found that,as women get older,they became more comfortable,even joyous,about their whole kit and caboodle. Understandably. As the report notes,“they’re full of nerve endings that play an important role in sex and pleasure”.
It was early in the morning when I first heard about the new Women’s Health report on ABC Radio National,and there’s another point to be made here. Switching on half-way through an interview with a doctor speaking about young women getting unnecessary surgery as a result of social media misinformation,my first thought was that the discussion was on the,an independent report of gender identity services for children recently completed in the UK. The review found that “for the majority of young people,a medical pathway may not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress”,a statement which could as well apply to cosmetic labiaplasty.
Surgery is being used when we should be finding better ways to make young people feel loved and loveable,in all their diversity,exactly the way they are.
At least with labiaplasty,the solution to this sad state of affairs seems clear to me:we need more and better pornography. Women’s Health Victoria has created a,bless their hearts,and it might well be a useful resource for some. But the truth is young women and men need to see the different types of vagina in a sexy setting.
I’m not necessarily saying the government needs to get into the pornography game,though its censors created the damage. I’m just saying that,were it to choose to,I know the perfect pornographer to call.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.