I only have two pairs of thongs and I wore one of them the other day. By the end of it I was seriously thinking about writing an essay on my love for my lacy, black friend. She just made me feel so free and…sexy…so sexy. I slept in my underwear that night and I almost never sleep in drawers because vaginal aeration is important.
And just as I was about to head to Victoria’s Secret– or a comparable but cheaper store–to purchase some more of these magical panties, I stumbled upon this article from Jezebel titled: “Why Is There Poop On My Thong? An Investigation.”
Whoa.
The very pervasive problem, according to the research the writer Tracy Moore conducted, seems to be that it is virtually impossible to defecate without fecal residue ending up on the stringy part of your thong. There were quite a few posts about it all over the internet, actually. Women yearning to know the secret to keeping their thongs clean after defecating.
Women on Reddit and Yahoo Answers and elsewhere online seemed to echo the same sentiment:
“It seems like no matter how much I wipe I always end up with tracks…what’s your secret?”
“…I could wipe 20x and it wouldn’t be adequate.”
And then
“Poop finds a way.”
For a minute I was truly concerned like what the [insert your favorite expletive here.] You mean to tell me that no matter how many times I wipe I’ll inevitably end up with skid marks in my pretty panties?! I couldn’t recall this ever happening to me personally but if so many women reported the problem maybe it had and I just hadn’t noticed…Terrifying.
But I kept reading and luckily Moore interviewed a nurse practitioner who said simply that women just may not be wiping as diligently as they think they are.
Ahhh yes. That’s it.
I was so troubled by the article that I shared it with the other MN editors and after all of their faces were completely twisted, one of them said, quite simply, “you know not everybody was taught these type of things.” The rest of us nodded in sadness.
Yeah, some ladies out here don’t know how to wipe properly. The article ended with advice for women to wipe from front to back, a necessary tip I would have assumed all women learned sometime during potty training.
Apparently, that’s not the case.
So if you’re one of those women who finds there’s doo doo on your thong at the end of the day, here are some tips and tricks to make sure you’re wiping well– you know so there are no stains when you take your underwear off at the end of the day.
1. Yes, please, please, please always wipe front to back. Feces in your vagina is not what you want in your life.
2. If you find you have to poop in the middle of the day while wearing a thong, do your business and then wipe, and wipe, and wipe, and wipe some more. A trick my mom taught me back when I was a child was that you wipe until the toilet paper is white and then do it one more time just to make sure you’ve gotten everything.
3. And then, since we’re being so frank today, if you’re having a particularly liquified poop, don’t be scared to a) use a wet wipe or b) wet some of that toilet paper (a gob of it if it’s super thin) and tidy up before you put that string back in your butt. There’s nothing worse than walking around feeling less than fresh before you have a chance to get home and really scrub…gently of course.
After reading the article, I think I’ll keep rocking with my two pairs of thongs because Moore spoke to several doctors who all said that prolonged thong wear can cause all types of infections. Yeast, bacterial and something called bacterial vaginosis. And that’s just inside. Externally, thongs can leave what one doctor called skin tags in the vaginal and rectal area. Skin tags are basically, “small piles of soft tissue that occur from skin being constantly rubbed in the same spot.” Kind of like the area where your bra sits.
It’s not the best option for your vagina and keeping my vagina happy and healthy is high on my priority list.
So, back to the wiping part. I know this was review for a lot of you but judging by the article and the subsequent comments on the Jezebel piece this common knowledge might not be so common to everyone. Don’t be caught slippin’… or should I say sh*ttin’ and stainin’?
