Dear Luv Doc,
It used to be that no one really cared too much about how their vagina looked – probably because they were covered in a thick layer of bush. Nowadays, however, even a wisp of hair is rare down there, and I just read an online article about vaginal beauty care that left me wondering if I was being pranked. Moisturizing oils, spray scents, vajazzling?!?!? And Gwyneth Paltrow is selling jade eggs for insertion into women’s vaginas to help “tighten and tone” their vaginal walls. Seriously?!?!? Where does it end? How much is too much – or rather – how much is just enough?
– Lazy Lady
My brother’s friend Mike used to say that his mother always told him to marry a girl who takes good care of her feet. The idea being that if she is taking care of business way down there she is taking care of business everywhere else. Now, to be fair, I don’t think “everywhere else” was referring specifically to the vagina. Mike’s mom was from Alabama, but she wasn’t that crass. I do think it’s safe to say that the vagina was lumped into a laundry list of things requiring regular maintenance. Some people are better at regular maintenance than others, but I think everyone finds their acceptable level of maintenance eventually.
As you might expect, maintenance levels vary considerably, sometimes disturbingly from person to person. This is a good reason to have friends. Good friends. Friends who are willing to tell you that leaving pizza crusts, banana peels, and cigarette butts on your coffee table for weeks on end falls well outside the boundaries of what most people consider acceptable. Mere acquaintances will encounter an abomination like that and make a quick mental note to cross you off their acquaintances list. True friends, on the other hand, will hound you mercilessly until you get your act together … or at least until you’re racked with enough neurotic guilt about not getting your act together that you get it together every once in a while.
When my brothers were all in college, they used to throw a huge New Year’s Eve party at their house near campus. In preparation, they would move all the easily breakable furniture to the garage and then cover everything else with towels and plastic. This minimized the damage of what always turned into a rager. The rest of the year that house was generally a mess, but they at least knew enough to get it together for that one special occasion. I have long since come to realize that some people’s houses are ready for a special occasion every single day of the year.
So it is with the maintenance of your vagina. The most important person who will benefit from that maintenance is you, so you need to find a level of upkeep that makes you feel healthy, happy, and confident. That may or may not include entertaining guests. Guests inevitably have expectations, but it’s up to you as to whether or not you want to live up to them. If you’re going to try to keep your vagina up with the Joneses, or the Paltrows, my guess is that you will always come up short.
Regardless of what Gwyneth says, or Johnson & Johnson, or the last person you slept with, vaginas have been taking care of themselves just fine for thousands of years. They’re ingeniously designed for self-maintenance. Anything beyond that is mostly window dressing. That said, who doesn’t like a nicely dressed window?
This article appears in August 11 • 2017.
