Barbie Doll Bare: A Piece on Genital Beauty Standards, Esperanto Magazine

---

Esperanto Magazine, The Sex Edition, Issue 3, 2026 (print)

For the third 2026 edition of Esperanto Magazine, The Sex Edition, I wrote Barbie Doll Bare: A Piece on Genital Beauty Standards. The article explores the increasingly narrow expectations placed on vulvas and bodies in an age where pornography is often encountered long before real sexual experience.

The piece began with a question that I found both confronting and strangely simple: what happens when pornography becomes our anatomy lesson?

With constant access to highly curated and often unrealistic images of sex and bodies, it can become difficult to distinguish between what is representative of human anatomy and what has been selected, staged, altered or performed for a camera. Hairlessness, symmetry and smooth skin can become mistaken for the norm, while perfectly ordinary things — body hair, stretch marks, scars, bumps, pigmentation, ingrown hairs and variations in labia — become sources of insecurity.

In writing the article, I wanted to push back against the idea that there is a single way a vulva is supposed to look. Human bodies are varied precisely because they are human. They change throughout our lives, and their differences are not defects to be corrected.

I also considered the influence of cosmetic procedures such as labiaplasty, alongside the smaller, everyday rituals of trying to make ourselves more desirable — from removing every trace of body hair to worrying about whether our bodies look “normal” enough to be seen by someone else.

One of the references that stayed with me was Sex Education, in which Aimee expresses insecurity about the appearance of her vulva and is shown photographs demonstrating the enormous diversity of vulvas. I loved the simplicity of this moment: sometimes what we need is not correction, but representation. To see other bodies can be enough to realise that there was never anything wrong with ours.

The article coincided with Safe + Sexy Week at Monash, making the conversation particularly timely. I wanted the piece to sit somewhere between cultural criticism and reassurance — questioning where these beauty standards come from while acknowledging the very real insecurities they can create.

The accompanying artwork was created by the lovely Mia Katherine Nguyen, whose cyanotypes of flowers offered a beautiful visual response to the article. The delicate botanical forms created an unexpected but fitting connection to the subject: natural bodies, like flowers, exist in an extraordinary range of shapes, colours and textures. There is no single template for either.

I’m grateful to Esperanto for giving me the space to write about a subject that is so often surrounded by embarrassment or silence, and to Mia for creating such a thoughtful visual accompaniment.

Bodies are wonderfully diverse, and none of these realities makes a person less worthy of intimacy.