One of the world’s most prestigious health journals has lashed a fast-growing trend in the United States and Britain for ‘designer vaginas,’ the tabloid term for cosmetic surgery to the female genitalia. The fashion is being driven by commercial and media pressures that exploit women’s insecurities and is fraught with unknowns, including a risk to sexual arousal, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) says. Known as elective genitoplasty, the surgery usually entails shortening or changing the shape of the outer lips, or labia, but may also include reduction in the hood of skin covering the clitoris or shortening the vagina itself. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice is spreading fast in the United States as well as in Britain, but the picture is unclear, the BMJ says. Not only is there a disturbing lack of data about the phenomenon, there has been negligible assessment about surgical after-effects — and almost zero reflexion as to whether a labial ‘problem’ exists in the first place, the BMJ says angrily. In 2004-5, 800 ‘labial reductions’ were conducted by Britain’s state-run National Health Service (NHS), more than a doubling of the figure of six years earlier. Other operations were carried […]