Are Proposed Links between Pornography and Labial Surgery More Than Just Wild, Unmitigated Speculation?

Every now and again, fears of pornography are stirred, often by the religious right, under the guise of a "public health" crisis of some sort. Very recently the governor of Utah signed a decree declaring pornography a public health issue. Although claims of the ills of porn are typically far reaching, some of the usual horrors, such as violence toward women, have been largely questioned, in part because rates of such violence have plummeted during the era of internet porn. Teen pregnancy rates, likewise, are declining to historic lows, somewhat inconveniently for the "sky is falling" set. Claims that viewing pornography may lead some women and teen girls to seek out elective surgery on their labia to obtain a "genital ideal" have been around since at least 2011. The argument is pretty straightforward: Viewing women with perfectly shaped labia leads young women and teen girls to seek out perfect labia of their own through elective, otherwise unnecessary surgery. The notion that pornography might convince teen girls, in particular, to seek out brutal, painful, unnecessary surgery is intuitively horrifying. And, unlike violence toward women, the numbers appear to be going in the "right" direction, at least as far as the theory goes. As Newsweek in its not-at-all-clickbait titled article "Porn as Sex Ed: Online Smut Warping Teens' Views on Sexuality" notes, labiaplasty among teen girls increased from about 222 cases in the US in 2013 to 400 in 2014. Those numbers (in...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news