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The Talking Issue

A Woman Who Made A Documentary About Vaginoplasty

Recently, Heather plunged herself headfirst into the murky world of vaginoplasty, or “voluntarily having a plastic surgeon chop off your labia.”

A WOMAN WHO MADE A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT VAGINOPLASTY

INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER, PORTRAIT BY ALEX STURROCK

Heather Leach is a filmmaker from Rochdale, in the north of England, which is most famous for being the birthplace of 80s “soul” singer Lisa Stansfield. Recently, Heather plunged herself headfirst into the murky world of vaginoplasty, or “voluntarily having a plastic surgeon chop off your labia.” We talked to her about what she found, and it was quite revealing, if not something you should read if you’re eating lunch right now (especially anything with roast beef or pastrami in it).

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Vice: Hi Heather. Why did you make this movie?

Heather Leach:

Well, Channel 4 asked me to. After that, I researched it and found out that, in the UK at least, the number of women getting surgery on their labia has doubled in five years. More shockingly, the number of women getting the procedure has gone up by 300 percent in the last two years. Even girls as young as 16 are having these labiaplasties.

Crikey.

I would hear girls complain of awful comments being made to them all the time. Things like “Your vagina is fucking disgusting” or “Going down on you is like going down on the Mersey Tunnel.” Then there was one girl who was bullied by her sister and she’d say stuff like, “It looks like hanging ham down there.”

That’s not a very nice thing to say

.

There are different physical and psychological reasons for operating on vaginas and there are differing methods, but the majority of doctors reshape the vulva by amputating and trimming. They do this by slicing the inner labia off so they don’t hang below the outer labia.

I’m wincing.

Yeah, they slice it all off with a scalpel. But some surgeons cut open the labia and tie up the nerve endings so they will still have sensation. Then they fold it over in and restitch it all together. One thing people don’t realize is that the nerve endings in the labia are connected to the clitoris, so they stand a chance of permanently hampering their sex lives. But I guess teenage girls don’t think about this because they just want a “perfect fanny.”

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This sculpture/cast is called “Design a Vagina” and is by British artist James McCartney. Some of the girls in Heather’s film had their vaginas cast especially for this piece.

We should say for our readers in the States that over here “fanny” means “cunt” and “bottom” means “ass.” “Fanny” doesn’t mean “ass” here like it does there.

Yeah, well, anyway, people used to think that if you had a tit job it meant having “perfect tits” back in, say, 1985. And now they think having a stranger hack away at your fanny is going to mean the same thing: perfect flaps. They’re also going in for things like vaginal liposuction.

Oh come on.

They suck fat out of the pubic bone area to make it flatter. They’re also doing a Botox injection that goes into where your G-spot is supposed to be. It’s a called “G-Shot.” You have to keep going back every three months to have it refilled with Botox. It’s about $1,600 a session and you have to get it through private cosmetic surgeons.

To what do you attribute this sudden increase in teenage girls getting their labia sliced?

There are the things like the big advertisements in women’s magazines from large cosmetic surgical corporations. Then you blend that with peer pressure from teenage peers, particularly boys.

How so?

It’s teenage boys who are watching pornography all the time. As far as I’ve seen, you don’t see any kind of modern pornographic imagery that contains what I would consider to be a normal vagina. People start to think that the perfect fanny should not have the inner labia protruding and that it should be completely hairless.

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Before

After

Right.

Bikini waxing has a role to play in all this. When Bill Clinton reduced the laws regarding porn, the porn producers pushed for total waxing so that viewers could see the whole vagina for the first time, close up. Now these images are everywhere and making young girls think that it’s some kind of natural ideal, to have a hair-free tiny-lipped fanny.

It’s becoming like, “I’m going to have somebody cut my fucking labia off. No biggie.”

Yeah, but what people don’t realize is how harrowing it can be to have the operation. The recovery period can take up to six months. I filmed a surgery and it was horrendous. Once they’re chopped off, the pieces are flung straight in the trash can and thrown away with the rubbish.

Click

here

to watch her documentary.