I...um...WHAT!?!?!? I'm so mad I can't even see straight.

Genitals and genitals. It's ridiculous to say that some are more "discrete" than others.

Also, "tidy"? My ladybits are plenty tidy, thank-you. Because, you know, I shower.

Can we please, please stop painting natural female body shapes as dirty, obscene, or disgusting? Please?

Better yet, could we stop assigning moral value to body shapes at all?

*er "Genitals are genitals." I'm also so mad I apparently can't type.

I don't think you can blame the aussi board on this one. Australia isn't the only place where porn is like this. It happens regardless of censorship.

Besides, censorship boards are enforcing idealistic social norms. Laden with all the prejudice, perfectionist and bigoted faults that each group has.

Like it or not, this is an issue with pop culture, not censorship.

Yep, shooting... Always the best way to effect positive social change.

Your outrage is understandable. But will get you nowhere. This issue is a reflection of society. If you want to change the way things are done, then go FIX SOCIETY... certainly can't shoot /everyone/...

I'm really weirded-out by this trend towards hairless, little-girl vulvas. Shave if it gets you off, sure, but we're *mammals* and hair on the genitals is one of our secondary sexual characteristics. It smacks of "barely legal!!!" to me when grown women are shown consistently with hairless vulvas that really look indistinguishable from that of a pre-pubescent girl, and that makes me really uncomfortable :(

This reminds me of another way censorship standards have come to be interpreted differently in the last few decades. I can remember when there was a recognizable category of soft porn that didn't show pubic hair--not because the models didn't have it, but because it was concealed by clothing or the pose. Pornographers wanted models to shave, because it let them be a little more daring about poses without having censors come down on them for accidentally showing pubic hair. (And a little more daring than that, etc, etc, and so forth.) And the censors enforced the clear boundary of "don't show pubic hair," because it was *clear*, even when it was no longer defining a recognizable type of picture.

Labia minora become more visible when a woman is aroused. They also become more visible when her legs are apart. So there are a fair number of cases where visible labia minora are a clue that the pose is more hard-core sexual than cheesecake. The problem with using it as a censorship standard is that women are just shaped differently, and some women's inner lips are longer than their outer ones.

it's dreadful, truly. maybe cross your fingers that the only women this surgery would appeal to are those same women that recoil at the thought of an uncircumcised penis?

I almost cried when they cut the labia in the very beginning...this is madness!

I hate, hate, hate this trend, and the fact that women are shamed into it - and I don't even want to think about the effect it could have on sexual pleasure. On the other hand, at least this is only performed on consenting (if pressured) adults.

ok, having watched that it'll be a while till i eat chicken again. O_O

What does that kind of procedure do to a woman's sexual pleasure?

I thought it was interesting that the plastic surgeon was letting everyone know that having a differently shaped vulva is normal. There is no "normal" vulva.

You think that he would be selling his services not telling us it is not needed.

Wow, I didn't expect my comment to spark such excitement :) and to think I almost didn't post it! Also, love the term "crotch butcher"

We're getting closer and closer to "Barbie." Already to be "normal" you had to be really tall and thin, and now you can't even have genitalia!

I have never seen before women parts described in the same terms you use when you speak about furniture, clothes or some other kind of junk like that. Oh... wait, I have, this is the usual way women are described in mainstream media. Huuh.
It speaks volumes how women are perceived as walking combination of parts, instead of human beings, but it still makes me uncomfortable.

I don't understand what is "offensive" in having developed or wider labia, it's beyond me. I have this little nagging thing that sooner or later this will change and women with small labia would be deemed unfeminine (as is with boobs, hair, eyes, lips).

Natural pubic hair will obscure them for free!

This is an american invention, originally, is it not? Obviously due to the ridiculous sexualisation that american society has experienced of late.

Should there be a way to contain this filth in the country it belng so that the rest of the world should not suffer from it? I find this absolutely godsmacking revolting. Seriously, f*ck people who come up with things such as this!

That's freaking insane.

I didn't even need soft porn aesthetics to do this to me... a rather prudish environment and our biology books in grade six, when we had sexual education, were enough to convince 10year old (pre) pubescent me that what I was grwoing into was abnormal and gross. I was seriously convinced something was wrong with me. Our so called educational material showed nothing but women with tidy savings box slits, regardless of their age. If the school books suggested it had to be that way, it really had to be, right? It later turned out that several other girls who had protruding labia minora -before the other girls in the class even hit puberty- also thought they were vaginally disfigured. I never quite got over it, until I was a grown woman, and I'm still not quite convinced sometimes - there are some body images you can't bleach out of your brain anymore, even if you know better. It is such a shame. I am going to educate my daughters about the manifold possible looks of female genitalia AND the reasons why they won't find them in the media, even if it is going to be awkward at the time, in the hopes of sparing them so much shame and worry later on.

Go go institutionalised patriarchal violence against women's bodies! Nothing quite like social brainwashing via boyfriend-who-reads-porn-pressure to make the oppressed class line up like pigs to the slaughter to have their bodies barbarically sliced and diced to make them more attractive to male partners.

Oh heteronormativity. When will we learn...

I thoroughly detest this. In my opinion this trend is an inevitable extension of current plastic surgery. But it is worse, because it occurs more because we think normal features are abnormal and in need of correction. It's horrendous that sex education is so lacking (in my experience anyway) that children and teens are not even taught that there is variety in how vulvas look, and it's all normal. It's so important that we are taught how the body actually is. Otherwise girls and boys grow up getting this information from the single body image used in porn, and think they are abnormal or unattractive.

I also don't see how, with good conscience, we as a society can simultaneously allow this AND condemn female genital mutilation in other parts of the world (in cases when it has the woman's consent and is done to a comparable medical standard. Of course it is a different story when women have no option not to have it done, and it is done without proper medical care). Both are women undergoing mutilation of genitals due to social pressures.
For instance Egypt's Ministry of Health and Population has banned all forms of female genital cutting since 2007. The ministry's order declared it is 'prohibited for any doctors, nurses, or any other person to carry out any cut of, flattening or modification of any natural part of the female reproductive system' <- this sounds like what we saw in the video to me...

If you want to read some interesting stuff on the way that "we" look at our vaginas, check out Virgina Braun's research on the socio-cultural construction of the vagina, namely, the way in which it is coded as dirty, shameful, inferior to a penis, something which needs to be altereed and perfected, something that is violable, and so on, and the way that these sorts of surgical procedures employ (hetero)normativity and ideas about the female body as generic. And so on. Really good reading, often quite depressing though.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4005273 - The perfectable vagina - size matters
http://www.umt.edu/sociology/faculty_staff/ellestad/documents/275_Braun2005_Insearchofbettersex_s10.pdf - female genital cosmentic surgery
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713683051&db=all - sociocultural representations of the vagina

I couldn't find any mention of this in the discussion, but didn't something similar happen with breast size? http://jezebel.com/5458674/rumor-australia-bans-porn-with-small+breasted-women

Great post.

There was a comment in the video about how women don't usually see other women's genitals, so their idea of "normal" is formed largely based on what they see in porn, which makes them feel like they're abnormal, which drives them to surgery. That's an interesting theory and I can see it being a contributor to the rise in labiaplasty, but I think "normal" is the wrong word-- it's the *ideal* that these women are striving for.

Take breasts as an analog-- we can plainly see the varying sizes and shapes of womens' breasts in real life all day long. So we know that having small, large, firm, or drooping breasts are all perfectly normal. But what we see in magazines becomes our perception of ideal breasts. This raises two questions:

1. Even if labia were something we saw on a regular basis, would the rising rate of surgery be any different?

2. Why are some people so unsatisfied with normalcy, so driven to become "ideal" that they would take such extreme measures as surgery to achieve it?

While it doesn't go anywhere near labia, I thought it might be interesting to look at the results of a scientific study that GSRI did on American girls and their attitudes about healthy living, what they think it means to be "normal," and what their influences are:

http://www.girlscouts.org/research/publications/original/gs_study_summary.pdf

I want a labiaplasty. I am tired of hearing jokes about "meat curtains" and having to pretend to laugh while crying on the inside because I know I have them. I'm tired of having to apologize for the appearance of my vulva once I finally work up the courage to let a new significant other see me naked. I'm tired of feeling like I have to be appreciative of my boyfriend for the fact that he doesn't recoil at the sight of my vulva. Yes, I appreciate it, but why do I expect him to recoil? I'm tired of feeling as though I should question the veracity of his claims of liking my vulva. I'm tired of the implications that my vulva (which has been like this since I can remember, before I ever had sex) looks like this because it is "stretched out" or "over used" because of promiscuity (I am not promiscuous, though there is nothing wrong with being so).

This is not just an Australian thing. Open a Playboy in the US and you will find the same phenomenon - every woman in these magazines has a tiny slit for a vulva. There is nothing wrong with having a tiny slit of a vulva, but from these magazines you get the impression that everyone does or should. For years I thought I was deformed.

It may or may not be worth noting that I am a college educated feminist who grew up in a liberal big city who received sex-ed starting in 5th grade. Sometimes, no matter how much you know and learn about the issue, and how well you understand that the feelings you are having are illogical, unhealthy and socially imposed, and no matter how healthy and happy of a relationship you are in, you can still be victimized by the media and the patriarchy.

Reminds me of the work of an Australian sculptor, Greg Taylor, who portrayed almost 150 different vulvas in porcelain from all kinds of women. http://cuntsthemovie.com/meet-the-stars/ http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/private-matters/2008/02/26/1203788346904.html . They are beautiful and fascinating to watch, delicate from the porcelain medium like a collection of flowers, and truely educational for a woman, seeing such amazing diversity without it being associated with shaming. I met him, talked a long time with him, and he truely works in the direction of celebrating female bodies as they are and empowering women, and against the attitude of rejection, abuse and disgust toward it that exist in our current society. I'm proud now to be part of the collection.
But his work has been constantly censored as being degrading, pornographic, offensive. He was not able t export it to Ireland as it was deemed porn by the border control. It has been deemed vulgar and censored at the Adelaide fringe festival last year. http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/fringe-display-uproar/story-e6freo8c-1111118996889 It seems doubtful the effect would be the same if they represented only those kind of clean cut, aseptized genitals. I found the parallel striking

Sometimes I think we don't give our sexual partners enough credit, and that our own self-policing is as harmful as those influences around us. I was talking to my ex about this post and he was utterly shocked. His response was 'seriously? I don't know any of my friends who have ever cared what someone's vagina looked like. I know *I've* never met a c*nt I didn't like.'

It has become more and popular in recent years definitely due to the rise in womens standards and expectations that men have,. It is sad to see this occur but this is the way things are moving in Western civilizations

This is female body hatred. If vaginas are too rude then maybe there shoudn't be magazines that are devoted to scrutinizing female nudity FFS

Unbelievable. This actually makes so much sense. And if you think about it further, men get trained to find this attractive because they are more and more exposed to this type of labia, and that, in turn, puts more pressure on women in society to look like that. And even if I am aware of this problem, I still want to look good and appealing (it's like of like the question, "can a feminist diet?"). 

What a fucked up world we live in! Thanks for sharing! 

So even if the porn star is okay with her labia she's forced to pay for her own surgery just to enter into the soft core market? Sounds like this rule was invented for paedophiles.

I thought this was happening because yoga pants and other skin tight pants are so popular nowadays that without surgery some women aren't comfortable with what their private parts look like to strangers. It doesn't occur to them to just dress more modestly, as women have done for thousands of years of history prior to this strange moment in time.