Like my Labia

"Muff March, London, 2011"

Call me old fashioned...

... but I like my labia.

Okay, so I don't really, because I'm a woman and if I did actually like any single part of my body there would be something seriously wrong with me, which there is not, well not in that respect anyway; I am as body-insecure as the next woman. In fact, as a former dancer I am probably more insecure than most, except perhaps not in the labia department, which is not exactly front and central of the ballerina's body insecurities. No ballet master ever instructed me to lose labia. Still.

Labia department? I like the sound of that. The department of labia. I think we should have a department of labia. It could investigate the recent "radical rise" in labiaplasty operations and consider the wider social ramifications of women cutting off another part of their genitalia, as well as their pubic hair and clitoris. Otherwise okay? as Basil Faulty might have said had he considered the issue of women's problematic genitalia, which he didn't. Labiaplasty was not around in Basil Fawlty's day, safe to say.

Indeed this is the age of labiaplasty. Some transgender people get the operation for reasons other than vanity/insecurity, sure, and some women do have actual abnormalities in that department, at least according to medical opinion and records. But the recent (last five years) rapid rise in labiaplasty surgery can only be put down to women thinking they have something abnormal in that department and being so self-conscious of it that to feel good about themselves they want it changed, lessened, despite so few people ever seeing it.

Boobs bigger, bum bigger, labia smaller, feet and waists smaller, everything less hairy, what's next? Legs lengthened? or perhaps shortened, so we are less able to run from rapists, especially since hauling less labia around we will probably be able to run faster?

Who knows. But whatever happens at least we can rest assured that the plastic surgeons are making a good honest living.