Has Porn Influenced Our View of the Vulva?

The vulva consists of the labia minora and the labia majora. It is the outer appearance of the vagina. Many confuse this with the inner passage of the genitalia, that is the vagina. 

With such easy access to porn online nowadays, women are constantly subjected to close up shots of pornstars with hairless, smooth and often cosmetic surgically enhanced vulvas – known in LA as “the barbie”. With this ideal being portrayed soon enough came the labiaplasty, described as “a cosmetic genital surgical procedure that reduces the size or changes the shape of the labia minora.” 

Final year midwifery student, Sophie Mercer feels like porn has opened up a world of insecurities for her when it comes to her vulva. 

“Because I’m bigger and curvier than most of the girls I’m friends with I had the impression they all had vulvas like pornstars,” she said. “When in actual fact, my friend has a very similar looking vulva.” 

Mercer admitted she didn’t realise how many different vulvas there are out there until she started her placement as a trainee midwife. 

“I didn’t realise how different everyone was until I took on my training in midwifery and I still probably haven’t seen every body or vulva out there,” she said. 

But is labiaplasty popular in Ireland? Aisling Holly of The Hospital Group which has clinics in Dublin, Galway, Cork and Belfast told The Irish Examiner that in 2012 alone they saw 50 patients for labiaplasties. Other companies offering labiaplasties in Ireland include River Medical, Auralia and the Aesthetic Institute Dublin.  

Considering the 50 people who visited The Hospital Group for the surgery were numbers for just one of those clinics, it’s likely the number of women who were seeking this procedure in Ireland in 2012 was a lot higher. 

A lot of these insecurities from women about their vulvas can often stem from feeling like their significant others want the complete image of what they’re seeing when they write porn. Which is mostly untrue.  

It has become common recently to see men on websites such as Twitter and Reddit criticising women’s labia for being too big, too long. Natural is an easy way to put it. But the misconception that the average woman has a pornstar vulva is a wrong assumption to make and if a man ever criticises a woman for the way she looks naturally, it can probably be safely assumed he has never seen a vulva outside of porn anyway. 

But women in relationships still worry about how their vulva looks to their partner. McKenna Morgan explained she feels like her insecurities in relation to her vulva affect her in the bedroom. 

“Essentially it affects how my thought process is played out,” she said, “like I’ll get too into my head and focus on that and take way longer to cum or something like that.” 

Some people have long labia – others have short ones. Some people have ones of equal length and others have two that are different lengths. The vulva that you constantly see in porn, hairless, smooth and all-put-together isn’t one that most women have naturally and that’s absolutely fine. As people, most of us constantly have a long list of things about ourselves that we think we need to worry about. Having a unique, natural vulva shouldn’t be on that list. 

• sex ed; sexual education