Worries about vagina size are extremely common among women.

This is scarcely surprising, because a woman's feelings about her own vagina are central to her sexuality.

If you are concerned about your own vagina, please don't hesitate to consult a doctor and get yourself examined.

Quite a few women who write to us say that they're not happy to consult their own GPs about this subject.

In the UK, a very useful alternative is your local family planning clinic. These clinics are staffed by (mainly) female doctors who are skilled in vaginal examination - and who carry out dozens of such examinations each week. So they can rapidly give you an expert opinion about the size of your vagina.

Are you too big?
If you've never had children, it's almost unthinkable that your vagina is too big.

Unfortunately, there's a very common myth in some parts of Britain - a myth to the effect that a woman who has lots of sex will get a large vagina. This is just nonsense! No matter how much sex you have, it won't affect your vaginal size.

But what does affect vaginal size is childbirth. Unfortunately, the more babies you have, the more likely your vagina is to become widened. This is due to damage to the muscles and other supporting tissues of the vaginal walls. It's more common after difficult and prolonged labours. It can often be prevented by very determined use of the postnatal exercises that midwives teach.

What happens if your vagina really is too big?
If your vagina is excessively big, this can have the following effects:

intercourse may be less satisfactory for you.

intercourse may be less satisfying for your partner.

you may be more liable to experience the phenomenon of air getting into (and out of) the vagina - a phenomenon known in some countries as 'fanny farting'.

bath water may get into your vagina - though this isn't often a health problem.

much more seriously, lax muscles and ligaments around the vagina may lead to prolapse (descent of the womb and other organs) in middle age or later life.

What can be done about a slack vagina?
If your vagina is over-large and slack, the possible courses of action are as follows.

Urgently set about doing pelvic floor muscle exercises. Any midwife, nurse, physiotherapist, or doctor can teach you to do them. However, you'll need to do them intensively for six months in order to get much improvement. To get you started, try this:

tighten up the muscles at the front of the lower part of your body - as if you were trying hard to stop yourself peeing.

hold this contraction for 10 seconds.

relax for 10 seconds.

contract again for 10 seconds.

continue to contract and relax like this for a full five minutes.

repeat four times daily.

Buy a vaginal muscle developer. However, these are expensive - about £75.00 - and you do have to work at them for quite a while to get any improvement. Having said that, they are becoming very popular as they also improve the problem of stress incontinence, and it is claimed that some women experience more intense orgasms as a result of using these gadgets. For more details contact the sex-aid company run by women for women: www.passion8shop.com.

Go to a gynaecologist (in the UK you'll usually need a GP's referral letter first) to discuss the possibility of a 'repair' operation. This draws the weakened pelvic tissues together and firms everything up.

Finally, please note that as a temporary expedient, a woman whose vagina has become too big can improve the quality of intercourse (for herself and her partner) by simply popping a small vibrator inside during intercourse. This may sound surprising, but in fact, if you have had several children and become quite loose, there may well be plenty of room for both a small vibrator and a penis inside you - thus giving a much snugger fit.

What if you think that you're too small?
Alternatively, do you think that you are 'built' too small?

I have to tell you that statistically this is most unlikely. Vast numbers of patients think that they are excessively small, but only once in a blue moon are they actually right.

The symptoms that make them feel that they are unusually small include:

pain on intercourse

inability to have sex at all

inability to insert a tampon.

But the vast majority of women who complain of these problems do eventually turn out to be normal-sized. Nearly always, they are suffering from a degree of vaginismus - the common condition that makes the vaginal muscles contract whenever any approach is made to the genitals.

To find out if your vagina really is too small, you should have an internal examination by an experienced doctor who is good at putting patients at their ease.

The obvious place to go for this is a family planning clinic - especially as the staff are mainly female.

In the unlikely event that your vagina really does turn out to be too small, it is possible for a skilled gynaecologist (or a plastic surgeon) to enlarge it surgically for you.

However, I must stress that in 25 years of practising sexual medicine, I have yet to see a patient who actually needed this operation. (Indeed, the surgical procedure is so rare that at present it does not even have a name!)

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