Last month, a sex toy manufacturer launched a worldwide competition labelled “utterly creepy and sexist” to find the world’s ‘most beautiful vagina’ – the idea being that the most voted-for submission would be used as the blueprint for a range of oral sex simulators.
Obviously it was a pretty cheap PR stunt and heinous in its propagation of unrealistic beauty standards for women, but an interesting question remained – what does the average joe, conditioned by media, deem an ‘attractive vagina’?
A winner has now been crowned – her name is Nell and she’s from Scotland.
“I still do not believe I have a special vagina,” she told Mic of her strange accolade. “I happen to have the best picture of my vagina. That’s it. It’s nothing less, it’s nothing more.”
“[My boyfriend] has always told me, you have a cute, chubby vagina.”
Indeed, the winning entry was as shaved, petite and porn-esque as you would expect, almost like a cartoon drawing of a vagina. But is there really such thing as a concept of vaginal beauty universal to all?
Of course not, and researchers pounced on the glut of data that came out of the competition to confirm this.
In an incredibly in-depth study that looked at the 2.7 million votes, they measured the lengths of labia minora and majora and assessed clitoral hoods and the vaginas’ rugosity.
“Lloyd et al. [a 2005 study] stated that female genitalia diversity is poorly documented,” the team concluded.
“Our study provides extra evidence and confirms such diversity is broad regarding labia size, protuberance, and rugosity.
“It also provides evidence that both simple and more complex vulvas have a nearly equal percentage of admirers.”
So there you have it, affected though expectations of genitals have become through depiction, they are in fact celebrated in all shapes and sizes.
