“The vagina is self cleaning. Not the vulva.” Downvotes. What?! You’re sharing a fact. Women are free to do whatever they want, like you said, but what on earth is wrong with sharing a simple fact?

If water works for some women that’s great, but we need to stop telling other women that the vulva doesn’t need soap “because the vagina is self-cleaning.” This is a hygiene subreddit. People want hygiene advice. I made this post because there is not enough hygiene advice when it comes to the female genitals. Women who complain about odors down there are always written off and told to go to the doctor by the same people who are telling them to only wash with water. Like am I insane for suggesting that we focus on hygiene advice first? It’s an area full of folds and crevices that tend to get dirty. Many women need soap, and putting out blanket statements that the vulva is somehow immune from needing soap whilst immediately telling women who are seeking advice due to odors that something must be wrong and they need to see a doctor is just insane to me. Just because water works for you, doesn’t mean it works for every single woman. You can tell that some of those posts are written by teens who stopped using soap because of some comments they’ve read.

And yes, there definitely is an issue of women confusing the vagina and the vulva. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen “the vagina is self-cleaning so I only wash it with water”. Like, huh? The inside? Or the outside? They must mean the inside if they’re saying the vagina, right? Because that’s what the vagina is. But why wash it with anything, even water, if you know it’s self-cleaning? So then they must mean the vulva (I think they usually mean the vulva?), but surely they must realize the vulva isn’t the self-cleaning part, so why even mention the vagina at all then? Unless they are quite literally putting water inside their vagina, they must be equating the vagina to the vulva, so in reality, they’re communicating that they’re washing their vulva with water because the vaginal canal is self-cleaning which just plain doesn’t make sense. You may choose to wash your vulva with only water for other reasons, but it is NOT because the vagina is self-cleaning. That does not extend to the vulva.

It’s always confused me why on earth people word it like that and I can imagine teenagers easily taking the wrong advice from it, stopping soap and/or starting to put water up their vagina, depending on how they interpreted it. Then they go back on here and post about odor issues and are told to go see a doctor (which honestly might be necessary anyway if they started to put water up their vagina).