spinofflive
things not to put in vagina
things not to put in vagina

SocietyDecember 16, 2019

Five things people need to stop putting in their vaginas in 2020

things not to put in vagina
things not to put in vagina

The medical professionals at Family Planning New Zealand are uniquely qualified on the subject of things that go in and out of vaginas, so please listen to them when they tell you to stop putting these things up there.

It’s 2019, friends, and we wish we didn’t have to say this, but as an organisation that deals with vulvas and vaginas all day, we are becoming straight up alarmed at the number of bizarre products being touted on the internet  as being in some way beneficial for vaginal health without any scientific evidence to back them up. 

Products to either detox, balance hormones, cleanse or tighten the vagina are being endorsed by celebrities, influencers and fashion magazines without any concern for verifying the claims and the safety of the products. In fact, many of these products are down-right dangerous for your vaginal health, so we feel we need to set the record straight.

Here are five trends we have come across that we strongly discourage you to put anywhere near your vagina.

Jade eggs aka yoni eggs   

Trust me, the egg will do wonders for your *checks notes* uterine prolapse.

Probably one of the more famous vaginal trends thanks to lifestyle websites endorsing and selling them. Online sellers claim that jade eggs help to strengthen pelvic floor muscles and vaginal muscle tone, balance hormones and even detox and take away negativity. To be honest, if your vagina has too much negativity, it’s more likely because of a lack of reproductive rights than because you haven’t put a jade egg in it. Get better priorities, people! You should focus more on, say, actual problems like gender equality and leave pelvic health to the professionals. 

These claims are irresponsible and have no scientific backing; on the contrary health professionals discourage use of jade eggs, as the stone they are made from is porous, increasing the risk of bacterial infections and toxic shock syndrome. If you’d like to strengthen your pelvic floor muscles, we recommend basic pelvic floor muscle exercises.

Period sponges

As an alternative to less environmentally friendly period products, such as single-use pads and tampons, period sponges have been gaining popularity. Period sponges are used like tampons – inserted into the vagina to soak up menstrual blood. They are actual sea sponges, which appeals to many people as it means they are all natural and fully biodegradable products, and they can also apparently be reused for up to a year.

But listen up – just because something is all natural does not mean it is all good for you.  

Sea sponges have been found to carry dirt, sand, bacteria and mould; definitely not what you want to be inserting in your vagina. Too little research has been done on the safety of using sea sponges as a menstrual product, so this is definitely not a product we would recommend.

If you want to make your periods more low-waste, there are products like reusable pads, underwear and menstrual cups that are a lot safer than poor old Spongebob Periodpants. 


Related:

Meet the man who wants you to glue your vagina shut

Revealed: New Zealand’s favourite vagina and vulva nicknames

Don’t put Gwyneth’s balls in your vagina: How to avoid celebrity quackery and pseudoscience


Douches

Many people believe they need to clean their vagina, and so they turn to douching. Douching involves squirting water or other fluids up in the vagina to “flush it out”.

The thing is, vaginas are perfectly capable of cleaning themselves, and the notion that they are dirty things that need to be cleaned is a symptom of a patriarchal view of women’s bodies. 

The balance of bacteria in a normal, healthy vagina keeps it healthy and prevents infections. When you attempt to “clean” the vagina, in fact you are disrupting this healthy balance, making you more prone to infections. Also, squirting liquids up in your vagina can force liquid up into your uterus, putting you at risk of a number of serious health complications. 

You do not need to clean your vagina at all. Just rinse your vulva in warm water when you’re having a shower and that’s it. 

If you notice an unpleasant odour from your vagina, the best thing to do is talk to your GP or family planning clinic, as you may have an infection or other vaginal health problem.

Yoghurt  

Yoghurt might be great for your acai bowl morning routine but it’s not going to cure your yeast infections. Sorry. For many years this myth has been circulating – that putting yoghurt inside your vagina will cure your yeast infection due to all the good bacteria in yoghurt that will help rebalance the bacteria in your vagina. This is simply not true. All it will do is make a mess and possibly cause further irritation. The only place you want to be putting yoghurt is in your mouth.

Steam

The only type of rug that needs steaming

Another ridiculous and dangerous vaginal trend endorsed by celebrities with absolutely no evidence to back up the claims of its benefits is vaginal steaming. 

Vaginal steaming is offered in a number of spas and beauty salons and involves sitting over hot water mixed with herbs. It is claimed to be able to detox the vagina, help ease period pains and even help with fertility. 

There is no scientific evidence to support this, but there is evidence of women getting second degree burns from this practice and needing reconstructive surgery. Gynaecologists strongly discourage the practice of vaginal steaming, as not only do you risk burning the delicate skin around the vulva, but you also risk disrupting the healthy balance of bacteria and pH levels in your vagina, making you more prone to infections.

If you come across a trend similar to these ones above – maybe your friend suggests something, or you see something on social media, please stop, and engage your critical thinking facilities. 

Are there reputable sources to back up these claims? Could someone who isn’t qualified to be giving advice about your body be making money off misinformation and the “wellness” industry? Are they using the word “yoni” but do not appear to be a follower of Shakti the Hindu goddess of creation?

The best thing to do is to talk to your GP or a nurse or doctor at your local family planning clinic before trying any new practice, even if they’re advertised as a “natural alternative”. Otherwise you could be putting yourself at risk of serious health complications. 

Rose Stewart is a national nurse advisor for Family Planning New Zealand

Keep going!
A selection of shocked humans. Photo: Getty
A selection of shocked humans. Photo: Getty

SocietyDecember 16, 2019

Let’s not get too prudish about pornography

A selection of shocked humans. Photo: Getty
A selection of shocked humans. Photo: Getty

Even on a subject that can generate pearl-clutching, good policy-making wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of the benefits, writes Jenesa Jeram

When I was a kid, I was the last of my friends to learn what a BJ stood for. Of course, I pretended I knew, because that’s what kids do. It’s quite possible that even if someone had educated me, I wouldn’t have believed them. Though quite frankly, I’m not sure my life has improved significantly having now learnt the proper meaning.

It appears kids today might not have the luxury of being so naïve. To steal Children’s Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft’s phrase, kids are facing an “avalanche of porn”.

The comments respond to a new report from the Censor’s Office looking into Kiwi’s porn viewing preferences using viewer stats from PornHub. It found that New Zealanders are big into step-family porn (46% of the 200 most watched videos), are not really into non-consensual behaviour (35%), nor the aggressive stuff (10%).

A recent commentary on The Spinoff, responding to the same report, calls for a national conversation on pornography, and recommends better sexuality education that accounts for what young people experience and engage with online. Samantha Keene wrote that people should not panic about the step-porn, but goes on to claim the non-consensual nature of porn should be the focus of our attention, and that “the findings about low levels of aggression in pornography from this report should also not lead us to a false sense of security about pornography”.

Of course, anything that involves risks to kids automatically raises alarms. And risks to kids almost always lead to blunt regulatory tools to solve the problem. Judge Andrew Becroft has already jumped the gun by recommending the 18-year-old “age gate” proposal as an immediate and practical step that could be taken – a policy that has caused implementation headaches in the UK. Concerns about children is also the reason the internal affairs minister, Tracey Martin, said “she would not rule out any measure, including age gates, and hoped to announce something on the matter next year.”

I have no argument with the idea of updating sex education to account for the digital era. But I will argue that the detriments of pornography deserve a bit of scrutiny before pulling out the big regulatory guns.

First, let’s look at the content of porn: is it that bad? Three studies are cited relating to the “aggression” that is apparently rampant in porn. The first, and purportedly most cited study, found that 88.2% of porn scenes contained physical aggression.

The numbers seem big. But it depends on what you consider aggression.

Spanking (35.7%), gagging (27.7%), and open-hand slapping (14.9%) were the most frequently observed physically aggressive acts. To be honest, I’m not clutching my pearls at this revelation. It’s certainly not nice and lovely in a kittens-and-ponies kind of way. But I guess, considering all the handwringing, I was expecting something a lot uglier and a lot more violent (although even the thought of gagging makes me want to sympathy gag).

Perhaps then, the problem isn’t the aggressive acts per se, but the treatment of women. But as it turns out, in most cases, (95% of the time) women reacted to aggression with pleasure or neutrality. Consent is also important: are the acts non-consensual? On this, the study did not observe depictions of rape or scenes that perpetuated the “rape myth” (in which the target first expresses pain or resistance to male dominance but eventually expresses enjoyment), a finding that is shared with other recent studies. It has been suggested that this shift has occurred because people have become more educated about women’s rights and sexual assault.

The other two studies cited showed similar results, but with even less “aggression”. The second study found that 43% of the videos in the sample included visible aggression, and the vast majority of videos portrayed consent. The final study found that except for spanking and gagging, violence occurred rather infrequently, and non-consensual sex was relatively rare.

These findings are remarkably consistent. A 2018 report (titled Harder and harder) looked at whether aggressive porn was increasing (it wasn’t), and whether viewers had a preference for it. The report found that aggression, and in particular non-consensual aggression, “were less likely to be viewed than videos with no aggression and were less likely to receive favourable reviews from viewers”. The report argues “the fact that women display pleasure in the large majority of videos, and that the majority of these pleasure displays do not follow aggressive acts, sends a message that women’s sexual pleasure is important after all.”

So, studies have found that aggression in pornography does occur but is typically not hardcore violence and is typically consensual or pleasurable. Not everyone will be convinced this is reason to relax. A related issue is how this content affects behaviour. Does the content of porn adversely affect real life interactions? And most concerningly, does it perpetuate real-life aggression and violence?

A 2009 literature review of the causal relationship between exposure to pornography and sexual aggression provides reason for scepticism. In fact, it argues that available data and extant research “seem to lead to a discounting of the notion that pornography has causally increased the prevalence of sexual assaults and rapes”. A caveat would be that the studies span a long time-range so not all of the studies in the review would account for today’s pornography landscape.

There is definitely room for more research in this area, especially given a lot of past studies on pornography and real-world effects suffer serious methodological inadequacies.  This means re-opening the hypothesis that porn causes real-world harm. Contrary to much of today’s commentary, the hypothesis shouldn’t be taken as a given.

Finally, a discussion of good policy-making wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of the benefits (or for the nerds: utility) of an activity – it’s the “benefit” part of cost-benefit analysis after all. Now, I know taking into account the enjoyment people derive from an activity has fallen terribly out of fashion in some academic/policy circles. It’s why people advocate for anti-fat and anti-sugar and anti-salt and anti-smoking and anti-drinking and anti-anything-pleasurable regulations.

Yet it has to be said: some people – perfectly normal non-threatening people – enjoy porn. Porn makes some people happy (for want of a better euphemism). You won’t necessarily see people announcing it to the nation on breakfast television or marching in the streets, but I do assure you that these people exist. Heck, New Zealand didn’t become 13th in the world per capita for frequency of visits to Pornhub by sitting on our hands. And it’s not just about men. 39% of New Zealand Pornhub viewers are women, which is well above the world average of 26%.

So if we’re going to have a national conversation about porn, let’s start by ensuring risks are given accurate weight, and the benefits aren’t thrown out the window completely.

And once that research is all done and dusted, it’s time to move on to the next big area of inquiry: are New Zealanders concealing a deeply held desire to have sex with their family members? I suggest raising that one at the family Christmas dinner.