The Labiaplasty Depiction on "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" Normalizes a Harmful Idea About Vulvas

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In this op-ed, Teen Vogue Features Director Brittney McNamara explores how the labiaplasty episode of "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" perpetuates harmful ideas about vulva appearance.

Sitting at tables in a bright white room, the women of #MomTok sip mocktails with names like “Labialicious” and “The Pink Pussy” as member Jessi Ngatikaura stands at a white board drawing a perfectly oval-shaped vulva. She instructs the women to paint vulvas on the small canvases in front of them in an event that she says is supposed to celebrate the power and femininity of the TikTok-famous group of women.

In Ngatikaura’s next line on Hulu’s reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives — which follows a group of Mormon women who rose to popularity on TikTok through #MomTok and videos about a swinging scandal — the actual intention of the event is revealed, and it’s far from empowering.

“The reason we’re going to do this is because, on Monday I’m getting a labiaplasty,” Ngatikaura tells the women. “They’re cutting it all off, tightening it back up, getting a mommy makeover.” She tells the women to draw what they believe to be the “perfect vagina” to “give [her] inspo” ahead of the surgery.

When Ellie Sedgwick, a photographer who started the movement Comfortable in My Skin to help reduce people’s insecurity about vulvar differences, saw Ngatikaura’s segment about her labiaplasty, it immediately rang alarm bells.

“I was feeling really scared for the viewers, especially the young viewers. A lot of the people who would follow [the women on this show] are really young and impressionable. These [viewers] don’t have great sex ed that includes all your anatomy and what a normal vulva looks like,” she says, with particular concern to the language used on the show that could make labiaplasty seem normal and easy. “[Viewers] are not to know that if your inner labia starts protruding…that’s actually really normal.”

Sedgwick has photographed 500 vulvas for her coffee table book, Flip Through My Flaps, an effort to shed light on the very normal range of how vulvas actually look. The book both helps vulva owners see the variation in how genitals appear and fights back against the idea that all vulvas are tucked and taut, like those so often represented in media and pornography.

“The skin tone might be darker, the labia will protrude often, you might have skin tags,” Sedgwick says of just a few common ways vulvas can appear. “The vulva that’s idolized, the ‘designer vagina,’ is not realistic.”

But, the popular idea of what a vulva “should” look like is pervasive. In the episode, Ngatikaura’s words about her own anatomy highlight this. “My meat curtains, they just hang low,” she tells the other women. In a confessional, she says that after having a baby, “I’ve noticed a big difference down there to the point where it’s uncomfortable. So they’re basically just cutting off that extra meat and making it so my lips are just nice and perfect again.”

According to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG), labiaplasty is a cosmetic surgery to “eliminate unwanted tissue of the labia minora or labia majora.” This can often be with the intent of restoring the vulva to a prepubescent appearance, in which, according to ACOG, the inner labia don’t protrude from the outer labia. While there may be a few physical reasons that someone may choose this type of surgery, it’s largely cosmetic, done to make the vulva adhere to certain beauty standards. According to ACOG, labiaplasty is the most common form of “female genital cosmetic surgery,” a term that encompasses multiple surgeries that in general have a “lack of published studies and standardized nomenclature” associated with both the procedures and their outcomes, which “translates to a lack of clear information on incidence and prevalence and limited data on risks and benefits.”

In other words, outside a few very specific indications, these surgeries aren’t medically necessary, and there isn’t a lot of information about whether they’re effective, or even safe.

What we do know, however, is that interest in labiaplasty has boomed over the last dozen years, particularly among teen girls. While rates of labiaplasty have held largely steady in the last few years, requests for labiaplasty increased 217.2% from 2012 to 2017, one study reported. A 2021 study said that labiaplasties are increasing among teenage girls, and new research from Australia shed some light on why that may be. Women’s Health Victoria published a survey in June that found that “shame and stigma is a primary driver of labiaplasty, one of the fastest growing cosmetic procedures amongst young people in Australia, and worldwide.”

That survey found that nearly a quarter of people ages 18-24 feel “anxious, ashamed or embarrassed” by how their labia looks, and nearly a third use negative words like “weird,” “disgusting,” or “ugly” to describe their labia. In their survey, Women’s Health Victoria reports that one in 10 respondents ages 18 to 50 had considered labiaplasty.

It’s Ngatikaura’s personal choice to get labiaplasty, and if it makes her more comfortable with her body, that benefit can’t be ignored. But neither can the lack of research on safety and long term impact, nor the platform that Ngatikaura has. As always, though, personal choice is rarely the issue when it comes to things like this. Ngatikaura choosing to have this surgery is one thing, talking about it the way she did on television is another, but the larger societal influence that makes any person, particularly any woman, think there’s such a thing as a “perfect” vulva is yet another. That’s certainly the biggest factor here — the persistent and all-encompassing ideas foisted particularly upon women that there’s a certain way they should look, from their long, blown-out hair to their perfectly painted toes and, apparently, to their designer vagina.

Efforts like Sedgwick’s to represent the variety of ways vulvas can appear — and to find the inherent beauty in each — can go a long way to counteract ideas that there’s one “perfect” way a vulva should look. Moreso, though, it’s a necessary step toward easing the pressure, the shame, and the stigma that vulva owners feel, allowing more room to dismantle the systems that cause those pressures.

“They’re making money off of your insecurities,” Sedgwick says. “You are worthy of pleasure and love, no matter what your vulva looks like.”

Teen Vogue has reached out to Ngatikaura for comment but has not yet heard back.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue