On top of it, referring to it as a “rose garden” which goes along with the message women are given since birth that we should smell like roses or mangos or other sweet smelling things. vaginas smell like vaginas but we are told we should smell like roses.

and this also makes me sick to my stomach because “trim your private rose garden” feels very similar to the campaigns that say we should shave our pubes off completely. The bush is referred to as a wild garden and in need of trimming. but this is more extreme. it is coopting language that tells us that our natural pubic hair is distasteful and extending that language to talking about even the shape of whats underneath the pubic hair and how that needs to be “trimmed” as well. (such a sickeningly gentle word for what is essentially cutting off chunks of our genitals for “aesthetic” purposes.)

the fact that any woman has been made to feel bad about her labia makes my heart hurt, the fact that this industry is growing makes my whole soul hurt. Plastic surgery is a field largely dominated by men (only 4% of all the board-certified plastic surgeons in the United States are women, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery) and the vast majority of surgeons who perform labiaplasties are plastic surgeons. And doctors in the U.S. report a 44 per cent increase (5,070 people from 3,521) from 2013 to 2012. This makes labiaplasty the most increased aesthetic surgery of 2013, tied with buttock implantation.