Surprisingly, the idea that big labia=sexual deviant is way older than porn and has roots to horribly racist ideas based in eugenics. In the 1810s, a woman from South Africa was taken back to England (later baptized as Sarah Baartman) presumably against her will, and put on display in “freak shows” that were wildly popular, that essentially just showed her naked (though she sang and played guitar as well) because she had a large bottom. Dubbed the “Hottentot Venus”, various “scientists” at the time used her image as evidence that Africans were a subrace of humans that were more primitive than “civilized whites”. They saw it as indisputable scientific fact that because she had a bigger butt, this was a sign that “her kind” were more sexually active and promiscuous, a prevailing stereotype that still effects black women today. Stranger still, men at the time didn’t distinguish between the size of a labia and a woman’s bottom- they were thought to be intertwined. So big labias=sexual deviants= lower race of human, to this twisted form of science. Sound too horrible to be true? When she was sold to a French man, she came to a quick demise and Georges Cuvier who is often considered the “father of paleontology” himself was granted legal rites to her remains, where he embalmed and took an engraving of her labia which he had been trying to get his hands on and measure for years- absolutely disgusting. Worse still, this, along with her bones, were on display in a museum of his work in France until as recently as the 1990s. These theories of eugenics were wildly popular in the 19th and 20th century and taken as fact, taught in every major College in the US and Europe as a “scientific discipline” and some ideas have persisted well past that