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  • Porn and Its Influence on Women and Their Self-Confidence
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Pornography is not a factor in my patient population with labiaplasty. I basically have two kinds of patients.

One, the adolescent who has congenital or born with extra large labia minora. So they're hanging an intratubal labia majora. So they actually have a functional problem where they can't wear underwear, they can't wear tight jeans, they can't wear anything because they have this extra tissue. It gets irritated. They have difficulty with sports, because they don't have a way of keeping it protected and they're of course humiliated in front of their friends and potential sexual partners.

So I have a group patients that are below 18 that basically are sent to me by their pediatrician or their first gynecologist. And it's a wonderful procedure, because you can do labiaplasty in my office under local anesthesia with sedation. So it's a wonderful procedure for a teenager who would be very scared of a general anesthetic or even an IV. But there's a rigorous post-operative regimen that they have to follow. So the key with this patient population that's so young is that they're mature and so maturity place a big factor in terms of emotional maturity, being able to do what they need to do after the surgery.

And then the other group that gets labiaplasty is the post-partum, post-pregnancy woman who has very enlarged labia from maybe a bad childbirth or whatever. And then they come in for the same reasons. It's a functional problem.

So pornography really hasn't ever played a role in my practice in Chicago.

A labiaplasty in my practice typically just involves trimming the labia minora which is the tissue that's hanging below the majora, and the key is that that tissue heals without any complication. So we have to prevent bleeding and infection. Those are the two things. And because it's where we have to urinate and where we have to have bowel movements, it's critical that that area stays clean and moist with an antibiotic ointment. So the regimen is 3 24-hour days of icing the area. Every time that they go to the bathroom, they have to wash the area and apply an antibiotic ointment on the two labias, if it's two-sided, and put a little piece of gauze between the two labias so they don't stick together, rub, and create humidity. So it's three days of vigorous icing. And then from day 3 to day 14 when the initial wound-healing starts, they have to continue doing that process but ice as needed. That's a two-week recovery.

In my patient population for labiaplasty, it's clearly congenital. In other words, they go through puberty and they have an enlarged labia minora. They've never had sex before or it's post-partum, and it's always related to large pregnancies, and it's related often to twins or triplets. So I have not seen the issue of vigorous sex or any other myths. The only other thing that can happen is normal labia minora, but the labia majora so the mound over the labia has deflated. And, that, we're not sure why that happens. So in relation to the two, it looks large but in fact, it's not. So you have to inflate the labia majora, which is adding fat, injecting fat.

Porn and Its Influence on Women and Their Self-Confidence

Many still wonder if the porn industry is what has caused women to become more self-conscious about their vaginas, or was it something else? Dr. Laurie Casas explains.