Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Genital Self Image Matters

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

In this Language of Love Bite, I’m talking about female genital self-image. Just like our bodies, women’s vaginas and vulvas come in all different shapes and sizes. And, we get caught up in how we think our vulvas should look based on images we see portraying them.  Did you know that I have researched genital self-image (and published results in a scientific journal)? How you feel about the shape and appearance of your genitals directly affects how willing you are to be sexual with someone! The truth is, your vulva is PERFECT the way it is. I’m truly concerned with how many women feel self-conscious about how their vaginas look and are going under the knife to change the shape, size, and appearance of their genitals, to make them tighter or more desirable.  I’m not telling women they are wrong for wanting these surgeries, but as a medical professional, I want to make sure women understand the risks and complications that can happen as a result of nipping and tucking down there from a physical as well as emotional standpoint. In this episode I address:  The WHY behind your need to change the appearance of your genitals. Did someone make a comment about it being “too loose” or not attractive that left you feeling self-conscious? Physical Changes you don’t expect like sensations during sex that may change The anatomy of your vagina, your vulva, g-spot and how it all really works … and how your vagina can adapt to different size penises.  I also give you exercises to strengthen your vaginal muscles. Which you need to do whether you have surgery or not.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the last 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Bites, where I tackle your most asked questions and requested topics. These episodes are designed to be fun, quick and to the point. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. All right, darlings, let's talk about your genital self-image, shall we? Because it is a huge issue

and something that is really starting to concern me with all of the surgeries and people out there offering vaginal rejuvenation surgeries and labioplasties and all of these surgeries and interventions to women to change the shape, size, appearance of their genitals to make them somehow tighter or more desirable or more like the airbrushed pictures they see online or on porn sites or whatever else. And it's something that obviously you make sense is so important to your sexual experience, the way you feel about the size, shape, appearance, odor of your genitals, but it's something that nobody ever talks about. Now, I got to tell you, I did a study on this in my academic geekdom. It was published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy.

And this was actually a study I did way back in 2003 before they were even doing a lot of the surgeries and the offerings that they're doing today. But what I found is that I created this genital self-image scale asking women what they thought about the appearance, the size, the shape, even the odor of their genitals. I found that poor genital self-image, meaning they felt bad about all those things, didn't necessarily affect their sexual response, their sexual experience, their arousal, but it did affect their desire to be sexual, which makes total sense because if you're self-conscious, you often will avoid sexual scenarios or avoid having your genitals seen or experienced. I also have found that when

people have poor genital self-image, now this has changed since nobody was concerned about their behinds until, you know, about their butts until Kim Kardashian and everyone started having those butt implants and then everybody or everyone wanted a butt like Kim Kardashian and started to do the butt implants. And now everybody's self-conscious about their butt. It's the same thing with genital self-image. Now, here's my problem. Like you might want to say, okay, Laura, look, I'm allowed to do whatever surgery I want. If I'm self-conscious about the way my genitals look and that affects how I feel naked, why shouldn't I be allowed to change it? You are allowed to change it, right? And I'm not going to stand in your way or tell you you're wrong for

changing it. But I do think we have to have a conversation about the effects of changing it because there are effects and they're not always pretty. And also to maybe call us to consciousness to at least question why you're changing it. Because I cannot tell you the number of women I have seen who have come to me after having one of these procedures and their response is no longer the same, their sensation isn't happening anymore. And the reason that they were doing it in the first place is because some partner had told them that they were too large or that their genitals were somehow unattractive,

which infuriates me. If a man ever tells a woman that her vagina is too loose, instead of going to get surgery to change the size of your vagina, you tell him to go get surgery to change the size of his penis, to make it a little bit larger. Because here's what you have to understand about a vagina. Let's just have a little moment of anatomy. What you see on the outside is called the vulva. It's not the vagina. The vagina is the internal canal that penis or something else can go in. Baby can come out. Your period comes out of your vagina, right? That is the vagina, that internal canal. What you see on the outside is the vulva. Now, let's just talk for a moment about the vagina and the things people are doing to their vaginas.

they are tightening them. Okay. Now you have to understand that a vagina is a potential space. It can get wide enough, stretch wide enough to let a baby pass through there, and it can squeeze tight enough to hold onto a pencil if you want it to. I mean, I don't suggest you do this, but it can squeeze, right? It all has to do with your Kegel muscles and your transverse abdominal muscles, those muscles that surround the entire torso. So strengthening those muscles is really the key to a tight vagina. You can squeeze it as tight as you want. And if you strengthen those Kegels, which are the muscles that you say muscles used to stop the flow of urine, and I'll make a separate, I think I have a separate video, but I'll check and make sure.

And if not, I'll make one about how to strengthen your Kegels. But if you strengthen those and they are strong and you have a healthy vagina, you should be able to squeeze around a pencil-sized penis as well as relax around the largest-sized penis or anything else that's in there. So when some guy has told you that your vagina isn't tight enough, you need to tell him that his penis isn't large enough and or you need to strengthen those Kegel muscles. But do not do the surgery that they offer for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are crucial nerves and blood vessels in your vagina that are central to your sexual function. And when they go in and cut in there, they are cutting around and in those nerves and blood vessels without any care.

They don't even, they haven't even adequately mapped them in women. They don't pay attention to that when they're doing genital surgeries. So not only are you likely to lose sensation doing these surgeries. In addition, there is an integrity to the shape and size of the vagina. Naturally, it's like a banana shape. Actually, it's a little bit curved. And so very often when people do these surgeries, it tightens and shortens the vagina and it changes the integrity of the shape of the vagina. And so then the woman ends up with no sensation, little to no sensation because the nerves and blood vessels that have been affected by the surgery, she has difficulty with lubrication, and she very often has pain. I cannot tell you hundreds of women I've talked to

who have experienced this after vaginal rejuvenation surgery, as they call it. Calculating route to avoid seeing poverty. Turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street. Then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food. Steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away. Then take the next exit. let's stop looking away and get in the way of rising poverty your donations help the united way fight poverty in thousands of ways like providing food shelter and crisis prevention donate today at unitedwaygt.org the other thing that is ridiculous and preying on your insecurities is this whole idea of the o spot or the g spot shot or whatever they call it where they say

they're going to put an injection of collagen into your G-spot, which is a point in the vagina, about a third of the way into the vagina on the belly button side. If she's lying on her back on the anterior side of the vagina, that is essential to sexual function. It's a bundle of nerves. It's thought to be associated with the Skeen's glands. It's kind of the analogous to the prostate in men. And some doctors out there who are looking to prey on women's needs and insecurities have said, we'll give you a collagen shot in your G-spot. It's going to make your G-spot bigger and then it's going to be easier to hit. You do not need to put a collagen shot in your vagina to get aroused. Just strengthen those kegels, strengthen those muscles, use them during intercourse so that

you're creating that friction with your muscles and you do not need to inject any foreign substance into your vagina or into your G-spot. It's just doing it on the surface, first of all, it's not pushing up the nerves underneath. And it's just a marketing tool just preying on women's insecurities. Now, final thing I want to talk about, okay? We've talked about vaginal rejuvenation. No, don't want you to do that. We've talked about G-spot shots. Don't want you to do that. Final thing I want to talk about is this whole idea of labioplasty or changing your labia, right? Now, this comes from looking at way too many airbrushed, filtered pictures and images of women's genitals and the onslaught of media

that women are being exposed to telling them that they need to have perfectly symmetrical labia and that somehow having this labiaplasty will make their vulvas look younger or prettier or more perfect. Every vulva is different. Every vulva is beautiful. Our labia, meaning those lips that are around the entrance to the vagina are different sizes. Each one, just like women have different size breasts, we have different size labias on each side. Some of us have more uneven labia, just like some of us have uneven breasts to greater degrees or lesser degrees. In addition, remember what I said about the vaginal surgery? Even more so, do you know that your labia are richer in nerve endings than almost anywhere else in your body? And when they go in and they

cut the labia with their special laser or whatever stupid technique they've created that is going to make your labia like when you were 14 or whatever it is that they're claiming they're going to do. They are cutting into crucial nerves and blood vessels that are central to your sexual function and enjoyment. And for what? To match some airbrush picture in a magazine or online? It's ridiculous. And it's preying on our insecurities. And it's negatively affecting our sexual function. And it infuriates me. I have colleagues that are doing this. I have relatives that are in the field that are offering this, and it infuriates me. Calculating route to avoid seeing poverty. Turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on

the street. Then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food. Steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away. Then take the next exit. let's stop looking away and get in the way of rising poverty your donations help the united way fight poverty in thousands of ways like providing food shelter and crisis prevention donate today at unitedwaygt.org it infuriates me because it is preying on women's insecurities it is attacking our most central point of our sexual well-being our genitals and it is promoting this idea that our genitals are supposed to look a certain way. And it is preying on women's inherent poor genital self-image because society tells us that those are dirty or ugly or

whatever. If you ask, I remember when I was doing sex education with kids and I was getting them comfortable with vocabulary and also understanding gender differences. One of the exercises I would do with them, which they loved, but was also very telling, was I would ask them to come up with all the slang words that they could think of to describe male genitals and all the ones they could think of to describe female genitals. And so when they would get into the male genitals, they're like seven inches of heaven, love snake, all of these empowering words about penises. Oh, you should hear the words they came up with to describe women's genitals. Stink box.

Let me look at that. They're just disgusting. I don't even want to repeat them, but they are not pretty. Axe wound, right? That's another one that you'll sometimes hear. These are really derogatory, really negative terms, slang terms that kids hear, not to mention adults and not to mention girls and women. all these derogatory terms to describe a woman's genitals in negative ways and unattractive ways

and in ways that imply they're smelly and ugly and bad. And so, of course, we are going to easily fall prey to these surgeons and doctors who are offering shots and plumpers and lasers to cut away at your genitals and make them somehow appear perfect. And they may, in fact, appear perfect on the surface. But your sexual enjoyment, your sexual sensation is going to drastically change, not for the better. And more often than not, you're going to have pain as a result. Now, there's one caveat to this. And I have met and worked with many women like this, where for whatever genetic reason, and sometimes even after having several babies, their labia are stretched out and hanging so low that it impedes their ability to play sports or

to wear jeans or to ride a bicycle because it's uncomfortable and painful, or they're getting chronic infections because the vagina is almost getting sealed off by labia that are too long and clumped up together. And so in those cases, obviously, if you're having pain or chronic infections, then yeah, okay. Go and see a specialist, someone who does a ton of this, who really can pay attention to the nerves and blood vessels as best as they can. And obviously the pain that you're currently in is probably greater than the loss of sensation you may experience with a labiaplasty. But that is the rare exception. The majority of women who are doing these procedures do not need them and quite frankly, end up regretting them.

So please do not fall prey to these doctors and so-called experts that are telling you that somehow you are required to change the size and shape and appearance of your genitals in order to enjoy sex and in order to be sexually desirable, because neither one of those are true. In fact, the opposite is true. Okay. Now, if you want me to make a video about male genital self-image, I got some things to say about that too, or anything else on your mind, I'm always here for you, helping you learn

to love and be loved better. Calculating route to avoid seeing poverty. Turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street. Then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food. Steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away. Then take the next exit. Let's stop looking away and get in the way of rising poverty. Your donations help the United Way fight poverty in thousands of ways, like providing food, shelter, and crisis prevention.

Donate today at unitedwaygt.org. Helen Mirren. Do I have to do everything myself? You want more? I'll give you more! Mobland. New season is now streaming on Paramount+.