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“Our ability to understand size as it relates to sexual function is poorly understood,” Christopher Tarnay, MD, director of the division of female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery at the UCLA Medical Center, tells WebMD. “But in the last 10 to 15 years, there has been a lot more attention paid to the field of sexual medicine.”
Accommodating and Changeable
The vagina is a very “elastic” organ, says Christine O’Connor, MD, director of adolescent gynecology and well women care at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. It is small enough to hold a tampon in place, but can expand enough to pass a child through. This is because the walls of the vagina are similar to those of the they have rugae, meaning they fold together to collapse when unused, then expand when necessary.
“It doesn’t stay one particular size,” O’Connor says. “It changes to accommodate whatever is going on at that time.”
The most commonly used measurements regarding the size of vaginas come from Masters and Johnson’s work from the 1960s. They looked at 100 women who had never been and found that vagina lengths, unstimulated, range from 2.75 inches to about 3¼ inches. When a woman is aroused, it increased to 4.25 inches to 4.75 inches. Regardless of how long the vagina is, the area that is thought to be important for most women’s sexual response is the outer one-third.
So how does length relate to sexual satisfaction? No one seems to know for sure.
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