designer vaginas
by Jenny Bryan
Rose was quite happy with her body before she had her baby, and regular work-outs in the gym soon restored her enviable pre-pregnancy figure. But they couldn't help a much more personal problem which drained her self-confidence and threatened her sex life – slackness inside her vagina and drooping of the labial folds around the opening to her vagina.
© stockbyte
'After the birth of my 10lb baby, I wasn't quite as tight as I was and I didn't feel as confident with my body. I understand that women come in different shapes and sizes but that's not how my body was made and I didn't feel comfortable with the change,' Rose explains.
'A lot of women think, "I've had a child and this is how it is now." But I didn't feel that it was something that I wanted to live with for the rest of my life,' she adds.
Lori also wanted to do something about the sexual, bladder and bowel problems she was left with after a difficult childbirth and episiotomy, and checked out a number of US centres offering so-called designer vagina surgery on their websites. Having found a sensitive surgeon, she almost changed her mind when he showed her photographs from men's porn magazines to help her choose 'the look' she would like.
'I consider myself a feminist and I felt I was giving in to false standards. But I felt it was worthwhile if it made me feel less self conscious so I could relax and enjoy my sex life more,' says Lori.
what size would you like?
Rose and Lori are just two of a growing number of women who are prepared to undergo painful and potentially risky surgery to restore their youthful vaginas or trim their labia.
Over the past two years vaginal surgery has become the fastest growing form of plastic surgery with a 149% increase in NHS approved operations. The exact numbers are unknown (as many of the procedures are carried out privately or even abroad) but in 2004-05 800 labial reductions were carried out on the NHS more than a doubling of the figure of six years earlier. Labia reduction requested purely for cosmetic reasons and carried out in the private sector have increased by 300%.
So why do people do it? Some do it because childbirth has rearranged their genital anatomy, others because they have never been happy with what nature gave them. But, worryingly, experts suggest increasing numbers of women have unrealistic expectations of what they are supposed to look like fuelled by media reports, pictures in porn magazines, and by the wide publicity given to celebrities who go public about going under the knife. Only last year, glamour model and TV personality Katie Price (Jordan) told a Sunday magazine: 'I'm thinking of having my vagina tightened. After having three kids, I'd really notice the difference.'
And in May 2007 London gynaecologist Sarah Creighton and clinical psychologist Lih Mei Liao, conducted their own small-scale probe into why women sought this surgery. They published their findings in the British Medical Journal, noting that patients who sought genitoplasty 'uniformly' wanted their vulvas to be flat and with no protrusion, similar to the prepubescent look of girls in Western fashion ads.
'Not unlike presenting for a haircut at a salon, women often brought along images to illustrate the desired appearance,' explained Creighton and Liao. 'The illustrations, usually from advertisements or pornography, are always selective and possibly digitally altered.'
But Los Angeles surgeon, Dr David Matlock, who offers a full range of designer surgery to nip and tuck, sculpt or enhance the tissues between a woman's legs, believes he has responded to rather than created a medical need. His patients have ranged from 16 to 73 years of age and, before they go into theatre, he asks them what size they would like their vagina to be when they come out.
'What we're doing is tightening the muscles of the vagina – the upper and lower portions – and the outside, and we're making the vaginal canal and the opening smaller,' he explains.
(February 2002, updated August 2008)
