At last, I’ve finished high school for good. No more uniform, no more bells ringing periodically. Except of course for the fact I want to become a teacher. There are so many things I’ve been waiting to do, and now my exams are all over, I can finally get on with it.

I want to become more fluent in German, because I have neglected it since I went to Germany almost a year ago. I want to get started on learning Japanese because I have a conditional at Edinburgh Uni to study it. To be honest, I don’t think I did well enough in my exams to get in, but it’s better to be optimistic. I think it’s important to keep your self-esteem no matter what happens.

Speaking of self-esteem, I was watching a documentary about Vaginoplasty today.  I felt incredibly sorry for some of the women on it. One girl had been verbally torn apart by some men in a club because of the way her labia looked. How petty and ridiculous is that? As if it wasn’t bad enough the way people are treated based on their breasts or their tummies, now the aesthetics of the vagina is a problem. One plastic surgery had seen a 300% increase in labia reductions; many of the patients were only around 16 years old.

Well of course we know what this is going to be blamed on. Porn. This is an excuse. Yes of course porn shows an unrealistic perfection in people’s bodies. But can’t we see through this and realise that porn is just a fantasy? You wouldn’t watch a film about human flight and then jump off a cliff. No, we need to be more realistic. Porn isn’t to blame, our society is.

We ourselves perpetuate this behaviour. We try too hard to emulate what is clearly impossible and then that kind of standard is passed on. The taboos of sex and body image need to be forgotten, and we need to become more comfortable with ourselves.

It just makes me so sad and disgusted when people would rather change their own body rather than the way they see themselves. If your boy/girlfriend doesn’t like the way you look, well then, what on earth are you doing with them? Another part of the documentary showed young Muslim women going for hymen reconstruction because on their wedding nights, if their hymen wasn’t intact, they could be punished, even killed because it would mean they were not a virgin. This is happening right here in the UK. Apart from the fact that you can break your hymen from activities such as horseriding, what’s the big deal with losing your virginity before marriage anyway? Virginity is a meaningless word. Having sex makes you no less of a person, it doesn’t change anything. People still seem to think it’s some kind of dark magical act that will make you impure and evil.

Our society is in desperate need of reform.

“The Perfect Vagina” can be watched here.