Warning: The contents of this interview may not
be suitable for young people.
There's a
long list of things teen girls agonize over: Size. Skin. Style.
Now
there's a new concern — one that has doctors worried: Genital plastic surgery.
According
to a report in the New York Times, there is an uptick in the number of teen
girls seeking the procedure. The number of girls 18 and younger who actually
went through with the surgery jumped from about 200 to 400 in one year. A group
of gynecologists has issued guidelines to help doctors process these requests.
But why
is this a concern for teen girls, and what do parents need to know?
New York
Times reporter Roni Rabin and Dr. Julie Strickland, chair of the American
Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' committee on adolescent health
care, joined host Deepa Fernandes.
INTERVIEW
HIGHLIGHTS
On what genital cosmetic surgery is:
Dr.
Strickland: "The kinds of procedures that teens are seeking out are really
to modify the appearance of the external genitalia primarily... For some time
we have known that adult women often seek modification of their external
genitalia. Often that is a result of the normal aging process, or disruptions
of their appearance during child birth. This is a little bit different in that,
what we're seeing is more concern about teenagers who are unhappy with the
native appearance of their genitalia or are concerned about the variation in size
and shape."
Why this is something teenage girls are
concerned about:
Dr.
Strickland: "We certainly all have seen an uptick in concerns of, and much
heightened awareness of, what the genitalia look like as far as teens. You
know, many teens come in without really an accurate perception of the large
variation of normal. So we often get more of a request to evaluate and to
educate on what kind of procedures can be done to modify the appearance. A lot
of them really don't realize the extensive surgical nature of what they're
asking for, but they just come in with a general unhappiness and a need for
reassurance that their genitalia is normal. We don't really know why that has
happened, but certainly there's a cultural change that has occurred in that girls
are much more aware of sort of an idealized image."
Roni
Rabin: "What the doctors were telling me is this is a generation that is
seeing a lot of imagery. And I have to say this because we got beaten up in the
readers comments about this: They're seeing pornography. Soft, hard, I don't
know. There's all the Instagramming, and the texting, and the social media, and
there's a lot more exposure to imagery. And these images, as Dr. Strickland
suggested, are usually idealized. They've been airbrushed. They're pretty, and
symmetrical, and whatever colored in a way that's not reflective of the wide,
human variation that's perfectly in the range of normal, and I think we have to
be aware of that. And it also comes in the context of women doing a lot more to
their bodies on a regular basis than may have been the case for older
generations. Whether it's just polishing your nails and toe nails on a regular
basis, and your eyebrows and waxing, and just a lot more grooming overall, and
a lot more attention."
What parents can do before heading to a
doctor's office:
Dr.
Strickland: "I think just reassurance. There's certainly nothing wrong
when a teen approaches their parents because they have concerns about their
body or their body proportions. It's important for parents to have a good
working knowledge — and they may also need that — about the normal growth and
development, and the fact that puberty extends overtime and isn't a static
episode in a young woman's life, and that actually growth and development occurs
over many years."
by Deepa
Fernandes and Francine Rios
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