The pornification of everyday life affects not only the way women want to dress or look like naked.

According to Prof Laurie Essig of Middlebury College, Vermont, US, even the most intimate of female body parts - the vagina – has not been spared from the critical scrutiny of the male gaze.

First, a backgrounder: While the 2008 credit crunch may have left Americans with lighter wallets, their anxiety over job and relationship security has led to more spending on cosmetic surgery and fuelled the growth in this industry. In 2006, there were one million cosmetic surgeries recorded, and the procedures have increased +846% in 2007 over 1992. Even if we were to shorten the comparable period, that's +151% rise since 2000.

So who gets the body job done?

The surgeries are not cheap. Breast augmentation, the most popular surgical procedure, starts at around $3,500.

That's almost £2,200 (I can buy 10 androids with that). But thanks to the credit mechanism and plastic money, patients are able to fund their surgeries by credit.

At a medical anthropology seminar, "Plastic Migration: Cosmetic Surgery and the Globalization of Bodily Perfection" held last week, Prof Essig said the cosmetic surgery has a huge uptake among working class, white, female Americans. But other ethnicities, such as the Latinos and Asian Americans, are catching up fast.

The age brackets have also expanded to include females in their teens, and "for the first time recently, women in their 50s" who are remortgaging their homes to get under the knife.

Botox is also popular, especially in Europe where plastic surgeries carry a social stigma. In the US, Professor Essig said about 20% of the users are men, a growing demographic. Children, as well, are growing in numbers as patients because of the popularity of ear and nose enhancements.

Designer vagina

During these times when people think twice about what they spend their money on, you would have thought that when they do fork out the cash, they'd want something to show for it. Very intriguing then, that vaginoplasty is currently the fastest growing type of cosmetic procedure. Considering that, unlike one's face, skin colour, breast shape, waist size and hair type, the results of a vaginoplasty is not something you can visibly 'signal' to society on day-to-day basis. We can comprehend the logic of "getting a new face to get ahead" in one's career, or to crawl up the social strata.

Certain physical attributes, according to Prof Essig, have a better "body prestige" (read: young, beautiful, of a certain ethnicity). But the vagina?

If the TV shows are teaching us about "ordinary ugliness", then online pornography, accessible only a click away, is normalising a visual fantasy that is certainly achievable via digital manipulation only.

We were shown the photo of a porn model: blonde, slim, long legs, perfectly round boobs, and with the vagina of a five-year-old.

She's been enhanced, if not by cosmetic surgery, by lighting, camera perspective and Photoshop. Professor David Napier, who chaired the seminar, wondered aloud where the homogenisation of such an image - the blonde hair, the cowboy hat - comes from.

Every ethnicity have gender issues about the vagina; the culprit is almost always their menfolk. Some races like them hairless, some like the labia minora elongated (Bagnol & Mariano, 2009: Politics of Naming Sexual Practices), but in this first world instance, they like the labia minora trimmed back, because that's the porn ideal. Their point of reference for sex remains, sadly, online porn, and the model vagina these women look to are designer vaginas.

Is there such thing as a "pretty vagina"?

Unlike the penis, you can't compare girth or length, and you can't do peeing contests with it. Women don't check out each other's vagina in the changing room. It's always hidden from view, biologically. When women go shopping for clothes, they don't think: does my vagina look good in this.

But of course, there is a pretty vagina, said a male heterosexual friend, who also has had a cosmetic surgery (a nose job). He explained what an "ugly" vagina is. It sounds like something that naturally alters after childbirth and in the aging process. A "pretty" vagina, he described, is "small, visually neat and trimmed".

Does it vary from one race to another? Yes, he said. The prettiest package belongs to Asians, namely Orientals, because of "the small hair area and size".

So what would he consider "physically prestigious" in a woman: a pretty face or a pretty vagina? After a moment's hesitation, he answered: "A pretty face."

Prof Laurie Essig's blog is available on Future Majority

More on the UCL medical anthropology seminar

Part of the UCL Public Engagement Beacon programme, Migration and Wellbeing is a series of public seminars and lectures developed by UCL Anthropology in cooperation with, and hosted by, the British Museum. Held over the academic year 2009-10, the series opens up a space for a broader conversation that incorporates not only UCL staff and students, but also local communities' knowledge, experience and opinions. All lectures take place at the Stevenson / BP lecture theatres, British Museum.