The Joy Of Teen Sex is actually making the issues of teen girls a shitload worse.
I have just watched the majority of an episode involving a bloke with issues with premature ejaculation (no big deal, imho, there are ways to slow it down), a girl who was self-conscious about her stretch marks, a girl with PCOS and a special report from Billie JD Porter on the hatred spreading through teen girls over their vaginas.
The majority of these are fair enough issues, and I'm not saying the whole of the programme is bad. The counselling and the medical stuff and even the sex life improvement is actually a seriously good thing to be sticking on our tellies in an effort to make sex better for teenagers. Christ knows we have enough of it. (I blame the hormones.)
However.
Billie JD Porter is helping no-one.
I had not even realised that my vagina was something to be self-conscious about.
Apparently, your labia can't be too big, you have to be all shaved and look like a pre-teen to be attractive. This is what I have taken from the reports of Billie JD Porter.
Can anyone else see something pretty glaringly wrong about this?
I'm pretty sure reports like this are supposed to be making girls feel more confident, like The Sex Education Show.
Uhm, no.
I am going to take myself as the average teen girl here. There are going to be girls who are completely confident about their lady gardens and fucking good for them. We should all be more like that!
However for me, the average teen girl in this picture, I actually feel worse about myself having watched the report.
Whilst having never ventured as far as to stare fixedly at my downstairs, I was fairly self-assured that it was normal.
Apparently, my lady garden shrubberies should go, and I should definitely consider having my bits shrunk to make them look neater.
Essentially, what this poor excuse for a teen reporter did was go to a club and ask stupid questions about vaginas like "Do you think they are beautiful?" and "What does the perfect vagina look like?", followed by concluding that porn had affected all our views of our downstairs areas. She then went on to show EIGHT PEOPLE three pictures of vaginas, and because they all thought the neater one was prettier, that means we have warped views of vaginas too. And then she talked to a labiaplasty doctor about how there were teen girls being referred to clinics to get their downstairs modified.
I fail to see how this is representative of our views of vaginas.
I do not care what my vagina looks like. If my pubes don't poke out either side of my bikini bottoms, I think I'm probably fine. So long as my labia don't cause me medical issues, I don't see the problem with them.
Just because eight giggling teenagers thought a particular vagina was prettier than the others doesn't mean that all vaginas that are not "porn vaginas", as Billie JD Porter put it, are derided and rejected by men.
To be completely honest with you, penises are pretty hideous AND SO ARE VAGINAS.
I fail to see why we should care, too.
But because of the way this so-called "study" was reported, I am now wondering if my exes are comparing my vagina to other vaginas or possibly even laughing.
This is not how I should feel about my sex life (Non-existant as it currently is and seems to be staying.)
As I said, in my opinion all genitals are hideous, and the only thing remotely appealing about any of them is the pleasure you can get out of them.
So why should we care? We could just accept that that is a part of our bodies that NO-ONE likes.
They aren't going to be symmetrical, they aren't going to be pretty, they are going to spurt stuff and have moles in awkward places and have hair.
Accept it and move on!
I found this on PostSecret the other week, and couldn't help but agree with it.
What I found more worrying is that some poor person felt like it was a secret at all.
Of course they are ugly.
We all know this.
What concerns me all the more is that there is no-one saying how ugly vaginas are.
They are ugly.
Very, very ugly.
So fucking what?
We ALL have these ugly bits between our legs, so what's the issue here?
I made an angry angry Facebook status about this.
The girls are some of the most beautiful people I know and it makes me all the more angry that it's not just me. I'm opinionated and loud and I jump to conclusions easily. These are SANE GIRLS who are self-conscious of their vaginas PURELY because this show has put it in their heads that other girls are conscious of them.
Seriously, Channel Four? This is supposed to make us feel BETTER ABOUT OURSELVES?
But it is not just the vagina hatred report that makes Billie JD Porter so hideously awful.
It is the way she reports on EVERYTHING.
She did a report on teen S&M.
She did a small section on going to a sex shop with two other girls and trying out stuff like paddles and handcuffs and the like, which is kind of okay.
Then she went to showing us a girl who spent her weekends dressed as a cat being her master's plaything, including butt-plug tails.
Where is the medium?
She also reported on this in such a way that played the poor girl up as a complete freak.
She actually seemed pretty nice, just into her niche stuff.
And that shouldn't have to be an issue. What people do in their own time is fine by me, and I don't think there are going to be that many people who are concerned by a girl who wants to be tied up and spanked.
Even if she has a tail.
Due to Billie's portrayal of this as such a deviant act, and to be fair it is quite extreme, any teen who might even be considering this is going to run a mile in the opposite direction and be derided as a freak. That shouldn't be how it is. How we can go from the sex advisor teaching a couple earlier in the show about how good spanking can be to having it subtly (and not even that subtly) ridiculed only a few minutes later is completely ridiculous.
The Joy Of Teen Sex can herald itself as open-minded and frank as often as it wants, but until Billie JD Porter can sort herself out or be sacked, I'd appreciate it if it would JUST GET OFF OUR TELEVISIONS THANK YOU.
It does not help that she looks about a size 6 and appears terrified by the sight of two people shooting a porn scene.
I have seen better programmes by Louis Theroux.
If Channel Four ever read this (unlikely, I keep it by invite only), they should probably take it to heart.
If three incredibly pretty girls and I can feel an awful lot worse about ourselves after watching your shows, you are doing it wrong.
Maddy you are incredibly pretty, so hush your gums <3
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