Designer Vagina

I’m not the type of girl to shy away from talking about my punani. I’ve always been comfortable baring all, be it for a wax or smear test, because the way I see it I’ve nothing to hide. Little did I know that not all girls feel this way… and little did I know how different we all look down there.

On Sunday night my girlfriend begged and pleaded for me to watch Channel 4’s advertised TV-special The Perfect Vagina, a documentary presented by Welsh elfin-minx Lisa Rogers that focussed on Britain and America’s growing trend for ‘designer vaginas’. NHS stats show that vaginal cosmetic surgery or labiplasty, has doubled in the UK over the past five years with the private sector seeing a 300 per cent increase in these elective surgeries. The fashion (or madness) is being driven by commercial and media pressure that has broadened women’s insecurities from our boobs, bums, tums and faces and turned us against our insides as well.

Rogers follows the stories of five women ranging from nineteen to thirty-eight years, who have all considered some form of labiplasty and even one young Muslim girl desperate to undergo surgery to restore her hymen for fear of disgracing her family on her impending wedding night. To a modern, Western world her distress seems unwarranted and her suggestion that her parents would kill her and then themselves should they find out she is no longer a virgin seem archaic. But Rogers questions the benefit of our so-called ‘liberation’ if at the other extreme Western women are chopping off their flaps for fear they’re too big!

Not for the faint-hearted, graphic images of surgery on Rosie – a stunning twenty-one-year-old whose years of being bullied by her girlfriends and even her sister had kept her from having relationships with boys – showed her labia being snipped, sewn and later gushing blood (apparently this is normal as the body heals). Suddenly my biggest dilemma, “Hollywood or Brazilian?” seemed totally superficial… These girls are trimming their skin and all so their vaginas look like the ones in men’s mags and porn films, which resemble prepubescent girls and have likely been digitally retouched.

I remember when I was eighteen I went to see The Vagina Monologues an off-Broadway, Obie Award-winning play written by Eve Ensler and performed by a varied threesome of celebrity monologists. Based on true stories chronicled by Ensler as she travelled the world in search of ‘The Vagina’ each monologue expresses different experiences of a woman’s Mary. Be it through sex, love, rape, menstruation, mutilation, masturbation, birth, orgasm or simply as a physical aspect of the female body. Ensler empowers the vagina as the ultimate embodiment of individuality. And halfway through the play as we in the audience were calling out the variety of names for our punanis I truly did feel empowered. Me and my vagina could take on anything!

So maybe that’s why I’ve not squirmed or run away when faced with being naked in gym changerooms or going all-the-way with a boy – because I believe in the beauty of my own froufrou. Or maybe it’s because I think mine not too dissimilar to the ones I’ve glimpsed in the pages of Playboy.

To be honest, some of the coochies filmed certainly looked very different to those I’ve seen among family and friends. But is a bit of extra skin really as disconcerting to the average male as these girls seem to think? For some men, sadly yes. But mostly Rogers found that guys were shocked to think women worried about it that much. While the amount of hair down there was a point of concern, most men answered that they were happy when they were granted access at all!

The thought that there are girls as young at fourteen seeking surgery disturbs me. This Channel 4 documentary, that began as, “a wander through the wacky world of genital plastic surgery,” became a personal and passionate quest for Rogers to encourage women to love the skin they’re in…

So ladies… do you love your lips?