Cutting Below the Belt: Female Genital Plastic Surgery
March 20th, 2009. Published under Women's Issues. No Comments.
We all look different. Male or female, we’ve all got different personalities, different faces, different bodies… and of course we’ve all got different genitals. In reality, there’s no such thing as a perfect anything– much less perfect private parts. Unfortunately, though, it seems we don’t all live in reality.
According to pornographic movies and magazines like Playboy, there’s is a set ideal that “perfect” women need to achieve. Breasts should be just-so, legs should be slim, and vaginas… well, vaginas have to be “perfect”, too. At least, they do if they want to be featured in a spread.
Seeing these “perfect” women with their “perfect” genitalia can be a little painful for some women. All women look different “down there.” And when they see that “beautiful” genitals all look the same, it makes them begin to wonder about their own. Is their clitoris too big? Are their labia minora (the inner labia) too long? Is their vagina the picture of perfection that, according to Playboy, all men crave?
Many women are answering these questions with plastic surgery. Though genital plastic surgery is still one of the less common cosmetic procedures done today, it grows in popularity every year, seeing a 30% increase over the last several years. More and more women are opting for “designer vaginas.” And an even greater number are flocking to the internet to commiserate about their “ugly” or even “disgusting” private parts.
Designer Vaginas: The Good
For some women, concern about the appearance of their genitalia gets in the way of their sex lives. For others, the genitalia itself is the problem. While most doctors consider female genital plastic surgery to be a strictly cosmetic in nature, for some patients it has medical benefits, as well. For women with long labia, sex and even working out can pull and stretch the labia, causing pain and swelling and making intercourse uncomfortable. Labiaplasty –a quick outpatient procedure with a short healing time– can often help with this problem.
Most women who opt for genital cosmetic surgery report great results, as well. In studies done of women a few years after their surgery, a huge majority of patients reported that the surgery made an improvement in their sex lives.
Designer Vaginas: The Bad
Medically, there are some problems with genital cosmetic surgery, just as there are with any other surgeries. Women who opt for this kind of surgery need to be aware of the risk of unplanned side effects. Some women experience scarring, reduced sexual pleasure, and a few have even experienced unexplained chronic pain that, for all appearances, they will continue to suffer for the rest of their lives.
In some places, obstetricians and gynecologists are worrying that not enough research has been done into the long term effects of female genital cosmetic surgery. Marketing for this kind of procedure has exploded in recent years, and there are concerns that this marketing isn’t being monitored– and isn’t providing potential patients with enough information to make an educated decision about surgery.
Designer Vaginas: The Ugly
In a world where “true beauty” is an unreachable airbrushed image of perfection, the whole concept of genital cosmetic surgery sets an impossible –and some say unhealthy– standard for women. On websites and in magazines advertising these procedures, you’ll often see normal, healthy female genitalia compared against surgically altered one. The implication? Variations in the appearance of the vagina are abnormal and should be corrected. The reality? Nothing could be further from the truth.
Have you ever run across an internet dating profile where a man talked about what vaginal features he required in a mate? Probably not. Why? Because most men don’t spend much time thinking about how a vagina should be, much less writing about it on an internet dating site. Vaginas are all different, and each one is –for most men– a turn-on in and of itself.
Women have a perfect right to do what they please with their bodies. If a part of their anatomy is making them unhappy or especially physically uncomfortable, they can and should do something about it if they want to. But when “perfect” is an arbitrary trait found on just one body type, how many women would need to opt for surgery in order to achieve it? 80%? 95%?
How many more parts of our bodies are we going to let magazines and movies dictate? When a need to achieve the impossible goes so far below the belt, when do we decide to let our bodies just be what they are?
The truth is, our vaginas are perfect just as they are. And the men in our lives probably think so, too.
This article was written by Shawn Wilson, a member of the customer support team at Datepad, where we always offer free internet dating. Datepad has a massive directory of informative free dating articles along with a great list of dating site reviews on our dating blog.