When I was a young law student I went for my first pap smear at a local GP. As he was removing the speculum he commented casually, “You know, you have a really nice pussy”.

It took me five years to go for another test. I was 19 and I didn’t think about complaining to anyone. I just took a very long shower.

I also did something else that day. I got out a mirror and had a proper look. The whole shebang – outer lips, inner lips, clitoris and urethra. And my vagina – the opening that my beautiful babies eventually came out of.

Like many young women, I’d never acquainted myself with the features of what my GP had taken a way too interested look at. Male genitalia is out there. It’s dangly. Boys joke and talk about it all the time.

But female genitals are still in the closet – despite some fabulous feminist attempts to get them out of our undies and proudly on display. The Guardian has recently posted a fabulous series on our VGs. Vagina isn’t technically a catch-all term but it’s the best one we have for now, which shows us what many of us don’t know about our downstairs bits.

A disturbing new study by Dr Magdalena Simonis from the University of Melbourne’s department of general practice, published in the journal BMJ Open, found that there has been a threefold increase in women requesting labiaplasty – cosmetic surgery to their vaginas.

She interviewed more than 400 GPs, most of them specialising women’s health. They reported an alarming rise in the number of women requesting advice on labiaplasty.

So what are we to make of this? Vaginas come in all sizes, shapes and colours. Like all good things. But do most women, particularly young women, know that?

Simonis is concerned that fashion, online pornography and beauty ideals are playing into this new trend. And she’s probably right. The reality is we don’t really know. We need more interdisciplinary research across medical science and the humanities to understand this trend.

As someone who has done recent large-scale research into young people and online media, I’m aware that most young people are not watching the Barbie Doll-style porn older generations associate with porn. You know – the 90s Hollywood porn where women called Bambi, Mandi and Candi pretend to be lesbians with fake breasts and nails? You can take the Fifth Amendment if you want but you do know.

That’s not the kind of sexually explicit material that most younger people look at. A lot of it they create themselves. Old people call it “sexting”. Young people don’t. They call it sharing images of their bodies, which suggest there are many kinds of vaginas involved.

Young women don’t go looking for online porn. On the other hand, they are drowning in a culture where perfecting their bodies is seen as paramount.

Many young women in my study told me how shamed they felt about their bodies – if they flaunted their conventional attractiveness too much they were shamed for that. If they didn’t stack up to male ideals of beauty they were shamed for that.

And when I asked young women, in an age-appropriate way, about whether they had access to information about how to have sexual pleasure, many of them averted their gaze. The young guys laughed it up when I asked the same question.

There’s a core issue here – we don’t talk about vaginas. We don’t talk about how they can be a source of pleasure for women. We don’t talk about how they are all different. And we don’t tell young women and men that there’s no “normal” vagina.

I understand that young men are increasingly coming under pressure about their bodies and their genitalia too. But a good start in changing the relationship young women have to their bodies – and young men do too – might be to start talking more openly about women’s vaginas.

I’d like to see sex education classes where someone explains the role of the clitoris. Then we could move on to talking about how fabulously multitasking vaginas are – a bit like breasts. Western society obsessively sexualises breasts and vaginas but ignores the wonderful work they also do in bringing children into this world and feeding them.

In the meantime, we should applaud Simonis for her study. We need to know a lot more about young women and why they are so anxious about their bodies.

Her research confirms a large study conducted in the UK in 2012, which found there is a growing trend for women to request cosmetic surgery – for all areas of the body. Figures have continued to increase since then and the vast majority are still women.

As a feminist I was hoping things would have changed by now. Time, perhaps, for all us girls to get out that mirror and say, “Looks fab to me.”

Catharine Lumby is a professor of media at Macquarie University. She led a 2014 Australian Research Council funded project examining young people, media, sex and relationships.