Animated Infographic About Vagina

The vagina is the female body part that connects the womb (uterus) and cervix to the outside of the body.

The vagina is a muscular tube lined with mucus membranes. Its opening is between the urethra (where urine exits the body) and the anus.

The vagina allows for the flow of menstrual blood and for sexual intercourse, and is the passageway through which a baby is born. Inflammation of the vagina is known as vaginitis.

What happens if your vagina or vulva really is too big?

Let’s look at the vagina (ie the interior) first.

If your vaginal 'barrel' is excessively big, so that you are 'slack', this can have the following effects:

- intercourse may be less satisfactory for you.
- intercourse may be less satisfying for your partner.
- you may be more liable to experience the phenomenon of air getting into (and out of) the vagina - a phenomenon known in some parts of the country as 'fanny farting'.
- bath water may get into your vagina - though this isn't likely to be a health problem.
- much more seriously, lax muscles and ligaments around the vagina may lead to prolapse (descent of the womb and other organs) in middle age or later life.

What can be done about a slack vagina?

If your vagina is overly large and slack, the possible courses of action are as follows.

Urgently set about tightening up your vagina by doing pelvic floor muscle exercises. Any midwife, nurse, physiotherapist, or doctor can teach you to do them. However, you'll need to do them intensively for six months in order to get much improvement. To get you started, try this:
tighten up the muscles at the front of the lower part of your body - as if you were trying hard to stop yourself peeing.

- hold this contraction for 10 seconds.
- relax for 10 seconds.
- contract again for 10 seconds.
- continue to contract and relax like this for a full five minutes.
- repeat four times daily.

You could also buy a vaginal muscle developer. However, these are expensive - about £75 to £200 - and you do have to work at them for quite a while to get any improvement. They’re now readily available through sex shops and the new mail-order organisations which sell sexual devices to women.

Go to a gynaecologist (in the UK you'll usually need a GP's referral letter first) to discuss the possibility of a 'repair' operation. This draws the weakened pelvic tissues together and firms everything up.

Finally, please note that as a temporary expedient, a woman whose vagina has become too big can improve the quality of intercourse (for herself and her partner) by simply popping a small vibrator inside during intercourse. This may sound surprising, but in fact, if you have had several children and become quite loose, there may well be plenty of room for both a small vibrator and a penis inside you - thus giving a much snugger fit.

What if you feel your vulva is too large?

A lot of women are desperately worried about the appearance of their vulvas – feeling that they are ‘too large’ or that the labia are ‘too long', or that bits of it protrude unequally. (Sometimes they are influenced in these views by having seen misleading pornographic magazines or videos – in which the ‘heroine’s’ vulva appears impossibly neat and tidy!)

If that applies to you, my advice is to go to a Family Planning Clinic – because the women doctors there are dealing with this sort of worry all the time.

Very often, they’ll be able to reassure you that you are in fact normal.

But if there really is an abnormality, it can be corrected by surgery – carried out by either a gynaecologist or a plastic surgeon. Since the beginning of this century, such operations have become increasingly common; however, a high proportion of them are performed privately, rather than on the NHS. However, some National Health gynaecologists are willing to shorten the labia of women who are distressed by an irregular appearance.
What if you think that you're too small?

Alternatively, do you think that you are 'built' too small?

I have to tell you that statistically this is most unlikely. Vast numbers of patients think that they are excessively small, but only once in a blue moon are they actually right.

The symptoms that make them feel that they are unusually small include:

- pain on intercourse
- inability to have sex at all
- inability to insert a tampon.

But the vast majority of women who complain of these problems do eventually turn out to be normal-sized. Nearly always, they are suffering from a degree of vaginismus - the common condition that makes the vaginal muscles contract whenever any approach is made to the genitals.

To find out if your vagina really is too small, you should have an internal examination by an experienced doctor who is good at putting patients at their ease.

The obvious place to go for this is a Family Planning Clinic - especially as the staff are mainly female. Indeed, many of the doctors and nurses have been specifically trained in dealing with this particular problem.

In the unlikely event that your vagina really does turn out to be too small, it is possible for a skilled gynaecologist to enlarge it surgically for you.

However, I must stress that in 30 years of practising sexual medicine, I have yet to see a patient who actually needed this operation.