When I was a youngster, the last day of each year at my elementary school was marked by a charming tradition. The teachers would let out class early, the groundskeeper would turn on the sprinklers which watered the grassy playgrounds, the kids would to run around like maniacs getting showered by the sprinklers, then we’d all sit around eating watermelon until it was time to go home for the summer.
Inevitably, there were parents who had complaints and concerns, as well as the spread of odd legends and cautionary tales.
“If you swallow those seeds, a watermelon will grow in your stomach,” one child told me.
As the daughter of an epidemiologist who was fond of summarily shattering silly myths I’d tote home from school, I was already quite familiar with the speciousness of this watermelon-based claim.
“It’s a good thing they don’t do this sprinkler run right before the Christmas break, too,” I overheard one mother say. “The kids would all catch colds!”
Not really, as it’s viruses which cause colds, not ambient temperatures or moisture in the air – but don’t try telling the mother of any pre-teen such a thing, because doing so will just reveal you as a member of the college-educated elitist scum ruining the fun for everybody else.
Some 35 years later, if I want the opportunity to wax nostalgic for the days in which dubious claims were spoken to me in a grave tone which suggests just how assured is the truth of the information contained therein, all I need do is fire up the internet and read about any of the myriad evils which is – without a doubt, the experts tell us – “caused” by pornography.
The porn-caused evil of the day this morning? Why the massive explosion in labiaplasty procedures being performed each year, of course.
If You Don’t Certain Collect Data, Then Suddenly You Do, Guess What Happens?
“Increasing numbers of women are going under the knife to have a ‘Barbie vagina’ as a result of watching internet porn, experts claim,” is how the Daily Mail article on the subject begins.
The experts, in this case, are the good folks from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS), a bunch of people I’m sure are loads of fun at parties – so long as you don’t make the mistake of asking one of them if your ass looks too big in your party dress.
If you read the article, it cites two statistics in total isolation to support its claim: The number of labiaplasty procedures performed in 2015, as well as the number of vaginal rejuvenation procedures performed the same year. More accurately, what the article offers is rounded-off numbers from the ISAPS, numbers which themselves are projections based on surveys of plastic surgeons – projections the ISAPS itself concedes might not be entirely solid.
“Final figures have been projected to reflect international statistics and are exclusively based on the estimated number of Plastic Surgeons in each country and the respondent sample,” the report containing the 2015 estimates states.
I’m not going to get into a big thing about statistical analysis here, but suffice to say assuming all plastic surgeons in any given country perform roughly the same number of each kind of procedure in a year is maybe not the most sophisticated assumption in the history of statistical analysis.
Setting this methodological qualm aside for a moment, there’s another problem here in terms of claiming there’s been an increase in these procedures: The data simply isn’t there to make such a determination, one way or the other.
If you look at ISAPS data for prior years, like 2010 and 2011 for example, you’ll notice there’s no information at all concerning the number of labiaplasty procedures performed. The report doesn’t show a higher number of such procedures, it doesn’t show a lower number; it simply doesn’t reference labiaplasty at all.
This makes it rather hard to determine if there’s been an increase in the number of those procedures in the intervening years, wouldn’t you say?
I suppose this does explain why some people would immediately conclude there’s been a huge increase in such procedures, though; pretty much by definition, this is what happens when you historically don’t count things, then start counting them.
You can prove this to yourself at home using a simple experiment. On Monday through Wednesday, don’t count the number of times your husband pisses you off in a day. Then on Thursday, start keeping track of the times he irks you in a notebook. Sunday morning, compare the count from Monday through Wednesday to the tally from Thursday through Saturday.
Once you’ve performed your analysis of the final tallies, you can then present the report to him over brunch Sunday morning as conclusive evidence he has been behaving like a total asshole since sometime around 11:59pm Wednesday night.
Even When The Relevant Data Is There, It Doesn’t Support The Claim
The first year in which labiaplasty shows up in the ISAPS data is 2013 – and even then, it’s lumped in with the number of vaginal rejuvenations performed the same year, again rendering it useless as a metric for comparing the 2015 estimates.
In the 2014 data, labiaplasty is finally listed as its own line-item, with a projected number of 99,432. Looking at the same number in the following year, the year which serves as the basis for the claim of a troubling increase in these surgeries, the “nearly 100,000” estimate referenced by the Daily Mail is 95,010.
So, after all that digging into these estimates (which are questionable to begin with), what do I find? A decrease in estimated labiaplasty procedures performed between 2014 and 2015 of around 4.4%, with no means of determining what the trend line might be with respect to prior years.
Is this what passes as a basis for a major medical concern these days? A procedure which represented slightly more than 1% of the total surgical procedures performed by plastic surgeons in the year the ISAPS estimated the largest number?
To give you some sense of perspective here, ISAPS estimates 1,348,197 breast augmentation surgeries were performed in 2015, along with 1.4 million eyelid surgeries and nearly 850,000 nose jobs.
Was porn to blame for all these elective surgeries, by the way, or just labiaplasty and vaginal rejuvenation? Did the 10,053 men who had their penises enlarged do so because they were trying to live up to stunt cocks in porn, or were these surgeries “necessary” in a way which doesn’t subject a man to ridicule by saying he wanted a
“Ron cock” to go with their lady friend’s “Barbie vagina”?
To answer those questions may require additional statistical analysis. Let’s just hope the analysis isn’t done by the Daily Mail or we’ll soon be reading panic pieces about men getting hair reduction surgeries because their forehead doesn’t measure up to that of Tom Hanks.
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