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New research has found that half of people in the UK don't know where the vagina is. Perhaps worse, this includes the worrying information that only 45 percent of people who have their very own vagina are able to locate the vagina.
Research from YouGov provides some quite alarming statistics about how well Brits know their own bodies. A team of researchers asked respondents to label female genitalia. Overall, 52 percent of people couldn't locate the vagina. Of course, women were slightly better at locating it than men, with 45 percent of women unable to find it compared to 59 percent of men.
Contrary to "men can't find the clitoris" jokes, this was actually the part of women's genitals that men were most able to locate. 69 percent (NICE) of men were able to locate it, just 2 percent behind women's 71 percent. That's still a lot of people who don't know where it is, but we'll take any victory we can find here.
58 percent of Britons couldn't identify the urethra, and 47 percent couldn't do the same for the labia.
If you're thinking that maybe people know roughly where everything is down there even if they don't know the clinical terms, I regret to inform you that is not the case.
"We accepted misspelled but obviously correct answers, and even euphemistic or descriptive responses when appropriate," the team wrote. "E.g. ‘wee hole’ for ‘urethra’ or ‘lips’ for ‘labia’."
They were more than generous. Sorry, Brits.
Now onto the really worrying bit.
According to the survey, nearly half of women don't realize that you aren't supposed to clean inside your vagina. A third think you are supposed to wash it every day, and about one in six women think it needs washing with soap.
The vagina contains a lot of good bacteria. Washing inside it, even without using soap, upsets the balance of bacteria and can easily lead to an infection. Stop it, England. You too, Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland, where this survey was taken. It's not quite as bad as people following the infamous "cucumber cleanse" or people putting parsley up their vaginas, but still: No. Bad.
Let's leave on a high note. Nearly half of men (43 percent) think that tampons interfere with how you pee, with 82 percent of women correctly identifying that this is not true.
