While I occasionally appear in Em & Lo’s popular “Wise Guys” feature I didn’t participate in this week’s version. That doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion. First of all here’s the question

“What is the general consensus on women with big labia, or longer inner labia, or dark labia? Does it really matter? With the rise in labiaplasty surgery and all the adult men’s mags only showing only “neat and tidy” vulvas, it’s hard to figure out if this is just some manufactured porn ideal or a vast preference among men…?”

See how this week’s real wise guys answered here.

First let’s talk about labia since that’s the main question: I think it’s a good idea to think of labia the same way you think of, say, ears, scrotums, tongues, or elbows — maybe in isolation you could say some are super-duper cute and others are unsightly. But a lot like elbows or scrotums how they look doesn’t really really matter because who sees them in isolation? In the context of a whole person and what everyone’s generally doing when they’re visible (during sex, sure, but also at the midwife’s or OB/Gyn’s, with other nude people in a locker room or at a nude beach, etc.) they’re not what someone else is going to notice first… or stop to think about for very long when they do.

Now let’s talk about labia in porn, since that’s the context of the question. At the end of the day a heck of a lot that happens in porn has at least as much to do with production and distribution as it does with what’s actually erotic.

The sometimes grotesque positions would be one: there has to be a clear line of sight for the camera. “Money shots” would be another big one: wiping semen off skin takes a 10th the time it takes to squeeze it out of one’s orifices. Which takes us to the next oddity: while you’ll see plenty of semen (and, even more commonly, fake semen) you almost never see natural lubrication. People in porn evidently go through a lot of towels, in part, because the alternative is paying a lot more for laundry, upholstery cleaner, and rental damage deposits. (How erotic is that?!?!?)

Tiny labia are another possible fallout: biggest “soft-core” porn companies pay a lot of attention to markets like hotel pay-per-view, and nations or states that are willing to tolerate porn as long as it doesn’t go “too far.” And one big measure — best exemplified by Australia’s domineering Classification Board — is “discreet genital detail.” By which they mean little or no visible labia minora.

With a result that, for instance, visible labia are Photoshopped over or even right out of existence. Or, even better, unaroused models with very small labia are preferentially hired, and therefore are preferentially viewed.

See, for instance, Kirsten Drysdale’s extremely interesting post “Healing It to a Single Crease“ in Australia’s Hungry Beast who says that even though virtually all women have externally visible labia minora you’ll never see them in Australian porn. Here’s why

...it’s not because they’ve chosen to only photograph women with ‘innies’. Many of those models actually have outies in real life, which have been ‘healed to a single crease’ (that’s the charming term used in the magazine industry) with the aid of image editing software. Think of it as ‘digital labiaplasty’.

It’s important to be clear that this is not something magazines do to suit the taste of their readership. Although mainstream pornography is hardly known (or appreciated) for a commitment to realism, in this particular case it’s a different issue. They’re not removing lady bits because people don’t want to see them, in the same way they smooth out cellulite or remove blemishes. They’re removing them because as far as the Classification Board is concerned, the labia minora are too rude for soft porn. It’s as though the censors think you could only possibly see it by spreading your legs or pulling your flaps apart.

If you still don’t believe me – go and pick up a copy of the ‘Unrestricted Category’ (M15+) Penthouse and compare it with Penthouse Max (the ‘Category 1’ R18+ version of the mag). I did this at the recommendation of the Classification Board, and found it a very enlightening little exercise. You’ll see exactly the same girls, from exactly the same photoshoot – and in some cases, exactly the same photographs – which will illustrate very clearly how they’ve been ‘tidied up’ in the softer version.

And they don’t even have to be very ‘messy’ to begin with…

It’s straight-up reporting although the (necessary) illustrations are NSFW. She said it here.

I rest my case.

The problem with these shortcuts, time-savers, and censorship avoiding techniques is that without countervailing real-world sex education a lot of viewers end up believing that’s not just what people are supposed to do (money shots? seriously?) but also how they’re supposed to look (tiny labia? seriously?)

Anyway, even though they’re there for really stupid and almost entirely non-erotic reasons porn shortcuts like these end up having very real consequences. They create absolutely daft impressions about how bodies ought to look and what people should do during that don’t have anything to do with what actually happens and, especially, what actually feels really, really good!

It’s definitely worth pushing back on these kinds of porn-induced cliches: It doesn’t feel as good when real men ejaculate outside their partner’s bodies. I’m pretty sure “reverse jackhammer” positions don’t feel good for anybody in real life. And, especially, real women get aroused during sex and for crying out loud real women don’t have airbrushed labia!

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Finally, this is just so not a call to eliminate, reduce, censor, or otherwise tinker with porn. They’re welcome to continue to grind out cheap-assed unrealistic wank material all day long for the same reason Warner Brothers is welcome to continue to grind out crap Saturday morning cartoons about animals with grave speech impediments and gravity-contingent coyotes. Porn is to sex as The Roadrunner is to physics. The problem is that we get our ideas about physics somewhere other than cartoons. We should be getting our ideas about sex somewhere other than porn.