Some things are better left alone. Beyond the fun sex stuff and occasional grooming, if that’s your cup of tea, we need to learn to just leave our vaginas be. Recent reports have detailed a rise in the number of women using Vicks VapoRub to clean their lady parts and while the cause and effect are both ridiculous and relatively straightforward to understand, we’re dangerously far from understanding just how problematic this is.
Over recent weeks there has been lots of talk about a growing trend of women putting VapoRub on their vulvas and in their vaginas. They’re doing it to ‘tingle and cleanse’ the area on the recommendation of various blogs and internet sources. For the record VapoRub, aka the stuff your parents would rub on your chest when you were small, poorly and congested, does not belong anywhere near your vagina. Period. However, the fact that so many women are driven to do so only goes to reinforce the fact that we’re still unnecessarily fixated on this idea that our vaginas need to be cleaned when the fact is that no, they don’t. They’re pretty clever and can do that all on their own.
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Rogue recommendations like this, those weird Detox Pearls last yearand Gwyneth Paltrow’s silly vaginal steamer all reinforce a depressing (and inaccurate) ideology that there is something inherently wrong with the smell, taste and appearance of women’s’ vaginas. Thanks to poor sexual education and knowing little more than what we see in porn and in the media, we’ve all had wobbles and spent time wondering whether or not our vaginas are weird – spoiler, there is no normal – but even more troublingly, the combination of dangerous misinformation and nervousness around what should be expected down there, lends itself to our reluctance to talk to our GPs about anything sexual health related.
Things like discharge, for example, are really normal. If you notice a change or think you might be getting thrush then the recommendation is, of course, to visit your doctor and tell them rather than shove some vaporizing ointment up here (which is potentially really dangerous, by the way). But there’s still a reluctance among an alarming number of young women who can't even say the word 'vagina', to visit a GP about anything to do with it.
For all that recommendations like this are really unhelpful and counterproductive in the quest to normalise women's bodies and remove the stigma around female genitalia, the fact of the matter remains that women are still being failed by the medical system. The All-Party Party Parliamentary Group on Women's Health reportearlier this year on how women across the country are not being treated appropriately when it comes to their physical, mental and gynaecological health found that there's a worrying culture of mistreatment, misdiagnosis and misinformation around matters of health specific to women, so it's really no wonder that women are turning to the internet for (poor) advice on their vaginal health. Obviously, that doesn't justify the use of things like VapoRub to 'clean' areas of the body we're conditioned to feel self-conscious about. But it does go to show how broadly the issue of women's health stretches.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.