Modern medicine hasn’t done much better: in 1975, Professor Sir Norman Jeffcoate, a physician and former president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, compared elongated labia minora to a dog’s ears and concluded, erroneously, that women were causing the condition by masturbating too much. Almost fifty years later, the notion persists that longer labia are a reflection of depravity or sexual promiscuity, particularly among religious conservatives still fighting the purity wars.
