gil on Nostr: ALISON TETRICK SERVED AS THE FACE OF THE MIMIC campaign. But despite all the ...

ALISON TETRICK SERVED AS THE FACE OF THE MIMIC campaign. But despite all the interviews she's since done, She was still "slightly terrified" when we got on the phone.

To this day she is perhaps the only American female professional cyclist to go public about her labiaplasty. Why is this so difficult for women to discuss?

For starters, most women are uncomfortable talking about their genitals. Many of us don't even have the language for it. "Young children, especially girls, are rarely given accurate terms," says Debbie Herbenick, PhD, director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. That lack of vocabulary and overall discomfort with discussing sexual function follows many of us to adulthood. In a survey of more than 1,000 women, Herbenick & her colleagues found that just 42% felt comfortable using words like "clitoris" with their partners, while 54% felt it was embarrassing to talk about sex with their partner in explicit ways.

Herbenick says that having both the language and the comfort to discuss our genital areas is important for women's sexual health. "If those terms aren't familiar to you," she says, "you lose your ability to communicate in clear ways with a nurse, doctor, or new partner." Or, in the instance of saddle injuries, with a bike fitter, coach, or fellow cyclist.

When I started reporting this story, I too felt awkward discussing the topic with sources--we would talk in coded language. Then I decided to start each interview with a quick review of terms, & discussions became more comfortable & informative. A woman could now tell me that her labia majora became enlarged, instead of grasping for vague euphemisms like, "It wasn't pretty down there."

A cultural stigma against labiaplasty may be another obstacle to transparency, as many people believe the surgery is purely cosmetic.

Heather Furnas, the plastic surgeon & Stanford professor, got so exasperated hearing that women were getting labiaplasty only to look like porn stars that she wrote a research paper to dispel that myth. Some academics have also associated labiaplasty with aspects of female genital mutilation.

But both Furnas & Angelica Kavouni, MD, a London-based plastic surgeon who has performed countless minora reductions for cyclists, say only a small portion of their patients seek labiaplasty just for aesthetic reasons. Furnas compares it to breast-reduction surgery.

"There's often an aesthetic concern," she says, "but there's also a strong functional concern that impacts everyday life. If someone wants to look better, that's life-changing too."