Gayzing Women’s Bodies: Criticisms of Labia Depend on the Gender and Sexual Orientation of Perceivers

ABSTRACT

The heterosexual male gaze is often credited with producing bodily anxieties among women, yet empirical and popular cultural evidence suggest gay men have especially negative views toward women’s bodies, particularly women’s genitalia. Across two studies (N = 6,129; M_age = 27.58; 2,047 women, 4,082 men) we conducted secondary analyses of existing datasets to test the hypotheses that gay men would evaluate labia more negatively than heterosexual men, and that lesbian women would evaluate labia more positively than heterosexual women. We conducted fixed-effects mini meta-analyses to estimate summary effect sizes for perceptions of normalcy and fit with societal ideals; we additionally assessed an outcome of disgust in Study 2. We found support for our hypotheses: For normalcy and societal ideal, we found small summary effects such that gay men evaluated labia more negatively than heterosexual men, and medium summary effects such that lesbian women evaluated labia more positively than heterosexual women. Gay men also rated labia as more disgusting than any other demographic group, and lesbian women rated the stimuli as less disgusting than heterosexual women, supporting our hypotheses. The current findings suggest a pressing need to acknowledge and incorporate gay men’s perceptions of women’s bodies into literatures on misogyny, objectification, and body image more generally.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2022.2112647.

Notes

¹ Given ethics committee requirements, the surveys for both Study 1 and Study 2 were anonymous, with all potentially identifying participant information disabled. Thus, information regarding participant acquisition across studies is unknown.

² We are unaware of any data on rates of labiaplasty seeking by sexual orientation which could confirm this.

³ Primary effects of time (pre vs. post-labiaplasty) were established in Skoda et al. (2021), and the subset of the original sample which constitutes the current sample was included in the analyses establishing these effects. Thus, we did not hypothesize, aim to replicate, or interpret these effects in the current paper as they have already been established with the current sample.

⁴ Participants in both Study 1 and 2 could identify their sexual orientation from a number of choices, including straight/heterosexual, gay, lesbian, and bisexual, or could specify another option not included in the above list.

⁵ Only items regarding perceived normalcy (question 1) and societal ideal (question 3) were analyzed for the purposes of this study. We did not examine the question of personal ideal (question 2) given that this question may be influenced by attraction (or lack thereof) to women’s genitals; for example, it is unclear whether a gay man would hold a personal ideal for the appearance of women’s genitalia. We return to this point in the General Discussion.

⁶ Missing data were replaced on dependent measures using multiple imputation procedures; no more than 2% of data was replaced for any item (Garson, 2019).

⁷ Demographic variables were recoded (collapsed across education, ethnicity, and relationship status) to satisfy statistical assumptions of chi-square in Study 2. Recoding was consistent with that described in Study 1.

⁸ As in Study 1, perceptions of personal ideal were omitted from analyses.

⁹ We could not conduct a meta-analysis of results for disgust as those data were only assessed in a single study (Study 2).

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.