the love

I never noticed there was anything wrong with mine until I was changing in the locker room, the girl next to me was freaked and told me there was something wrong with mine. She showed me hers and she had virtually no minora. At this incident I was 16 and I had been sexually active since I was 11.

I looked online, like on reddit, all the women who submit pictures to r/gonewild have such perfect pussies, and all the guys on that site agree that they are wholly disappointed if they get a girl naked and she has big labia, a lot said they would “nope the fuck out of there” if that be the case.

I’m 20 now, but sex hasn’t been the same for me since then. I can’t truly give control to my partners, I feel so insecure about mine even though I know I’m not alone, my best friend’s labia are just like mine but somehow she manages to not feel insecure about them. I haven’t been able to let anyone go down on me. I don’t want them to do it because they think it’s expected of them and I don’t want them to keep it up when they’re actually disgusted by me.

I can endure physical torture, but I can’t bear displeasing a man with my body. I hate the look of disappointment on their face. I’ve seen that look before when I was real young and the guy was disappointed by how small my breasts were. Then again when I was 18 and that guy said my ass was round but not grabable. The fallen look in their eyes – I just can’t.

My labia—they aren’t ridiculously large, I can wear bikini’s without comment, they don’t get caught places, but they do extend past my majora and they are dark colored, although I am very fair skinned. None of my partners have ever commented on them to me, but I get the feeling when I have sex with someone new for the first time that are taken aback and don’t know what to make of them.

I’ve heard about surgeries, where they can cut them to make them smaller, but I’m a college student, my parents don’t have that kind of money and I would never ask them to pay for something like that even if they did. Not to mention I’ve heard horror stories of women who have awakened to find that the surgeon removed all of the minora, and their clitoris. Some said they dehooded their clitorises and it looked weird but they never asked the surgeon for such things. Some women end up in chronic pain post-surgery and sexual dysfunction.

All this being said, is there anything I CAN do? Do I just resign myself to reducing my dating pool to creepy men on the internet who fetishize large labia? I feel like yes, there are men who it won’t bother. But men who want to be in a committed relationship with me, if things progress in such a way? Who’d marry me? I don’t want it to be a huge impediment to guys seeing potential

——

Our bodies are all different.  There is infinite variability in our physical appearances and a bigger labia is one of them.  A big labia doesn’t make a pussy unattractive to me.  And there are people out there who are into big labias.  There are blogs that focus on it sexually like http://only-biglabia.tumblr.com/ and others that delve much deeper into it and provide community and resources like http://largelabiaproject.org/.

Girls who freak out about your labia or guys that say they would ‘nope the fuck out of there’ are either immature and inexperienced or have a motive for making you feel poorly about yourself.  It takes a weak, lesser person to make another person feel bad about something over which they have no control.  It’s a petty, insecure person who chooses to classify you as lesser, and worse yet, leads you to self-classify as lesser, because of something like labia size.

You’ve had some really bad experiences.  That girl in the locker room when you were 16, the look on the guy’s face when you were 18, and this continued cultural conditioning that large labias are unattractive, that they detract from your sexual empowerment, that they are a source of shame and revulsion.  I don’t blame you for feeling the way you do.  But I can tell you that those things are not true.

Labias come in all shapes and colors and sizes.  Just because media, and in specific, pornography, focuses on one type of labia - which they purport to be the ‘correct’ version - doesn’t mean that they’re right.  We are primed and conditioned by repeated exposure to a limited sample and it makes us think that those are ‘normal’ and that those that deviate from that image are not just different, but wrong and defective.

There is no such thing as a labia that is wrong, or defective, or shameful by virtue of its size, shape, or color.  That is a subjective judgment.  And unfortunately, every asshole and idiot in the world has an opinion - but you don’t have to let it erode your self-confidence.  You can choose to push back.

In the end, I find stress and anxiety over things you can’t control or change to be a waste of time.  An oversimplification, but it’s served me well.  You can’t change your labia.  It’s not a choice that you made.  It’s just part of the fact of who you are.  We don’t have to like all of ourselves.  But we do have to live with ourselves.

I suppose you could change it with surgery, but you don’t seem keen to go down that route, and I don’t blame you.  And I wouldn’t recommend seeking fetishists - don’t reduce yourself to a fetish.  You’re more than that.  Right now, it seems like a huge thing and a major obstacle to not only your sex life but your future relationship prospects as well.  But it is not.

Some people don’t like large labias.  That’s their taste and opinion.  But if a large labia is what stops a man from having sex with you or being in a relationship with you, they’re idiots.  It’s one physical aspect of you, one that you can’t control, and if that one thing for some reason overpowers all your other attributes and qualities, well, they can go fuck themselves.  You don’t want those guys anyway.

Some people do like large labias.  And it doesn’t have to be a fetish, it can just be something that they enjoy, something that turns them on.  Others still realize that the appearance of a labia doesn’t really affect much of anything, practically speaking.  

The healthy thing is a person who cares about you, as a person, instead of focusing on one aspect of you.  The healthy thing is a sexually and emotionally mature person for whom the appearance of your labia isn’t something by which he judges you.

I went home and I also researched and found the same things, and from that second on, I was insecure, I hated it, and I didn’t let my partners go down on me or would make sure they weren’t staring at it or anything. I also considered the surgery, planned on how I could save up for it, told my best friend (who is now my boyfriend and Sir) and he was in absolute awe that I would ever consider something like that. My boyfriend at the time had encouraged it, he didn’t enjoy going down either and he really fed my insecurities about it.

But I wanted to just say that my Sir, who is my best friend and the love of my life, has helped me see how wrong it is to be insecure about the size of my labia. He eats me out all the time, and thoroughly enjoys it, and talks of how one of the best things about vagina’s is that no vagina looks the same. Everybody’s different. You will find someone who will help you embrace it, and anyone who makes you feel bad about the size of your lips doesn’t deserve to be looking at them.

So. I got stood up. I dropped and shattered the screen on my phone even more and it’s stuck on this shitty fucking filter but c'est la vie, right?

I’m a grumpy baby right meow.