In that labia stretching is attempting to change this body part to fit an ideal, and that it is often done by older women to girls, it has been compared to female genital mutilation (FGM) and child abuse.
[3] Elongated labia are perceived to facilitate orgasm and female ejaculation, and are considered to enhance sexual pleasure for both partners.
[8] Children in the African diaspora practise this too, so it occurs within immigrant communities in, for example, Britain, where a BBC report labelled it a hidden form of child abuse.
[citation needed] When Captain James Cook reached Cape Town in 1771, towards the end of his first voyage, he acknowledged being "very desirous to determine the great question among natural historians, whether the women of this country have or have not that fleshy flap or apron which has been called the Sinus pudoris"; eventually a physician described treating patients with labia ranging from 1.3 to 7.6 or 10.2 centimetres (1⁄2 to 3 or 4 in).
Another section of the community downrightly abhors elongated labia.Some human rights activists in the country, including feminist scholar Sylvia Tamale, support labia stretching.
[13] According to a report in the Global Press Journal, labia stretching is common in Zambia, but such a social taboo that it is rarely discussed.
[14] Wala Nalungwe, a feminist and activist, says that powerful, cultural figures – such as marriage counselors and family matriarchs – unfairly pressure young women to stretch their labia.
Quoted on the overview of the Mongo people by the Database for Indigenous Cultural Evolution at the University of Missouri.
Bronisław Malinowski wrote about the Trobriand Islands in The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia:[20]The body, as distinguished from the face, is very seldom painted, and no tattoo markings are ever visible.