By David Futrelle
It’s only been a month since the most stubborn man in the universe broke the internet by trying (and trying again at much greater length) to explain what he incorrectly saw as the correct use of the word “vagina” to a literally world-famous gynecologist.
Now a new mansplaining legend has appeared: A Jezebel commenter called Bagdash who has some choice words for staff writer Ashley Reese about, well, her alleged ignorance about her own labia.
Reese, you see, wrote a brief, three-paragraph piece for Jezebel gently mocking a new pleather “bodysuit” from Fashion Nova that “will probably give me a labial wedgie” and possibly a yeast infection to boot. As you can see from the picture above — or in much greater resolution at the Fashion Nova website — this is an outfit that really is remarkably thin in the crotch area; as the headline of the piece jokingly noted, it seems designed to “Only Cover 15 Percent of My Labia.”
Apparently that “15 percent” line was the camel(toe) that broke poor Mr. Bagdash’s back. In a comment that was literally twice the length of the original story, he offered Reese what he saw as some remedial vulvar education.
“It seems you need an anatomy lesson,” he began promisingly, because obviously only good things can follow when some random cis dude tells a cis woman who he doesn’t even know that he understands her body better than she does.
Labia are not the entirety of the groin. Whereas I can see where you are trying to compensate for the idea that the vagina is the totality of female genital, this is a little beyond what is necessary.
Not sure where this is going but continue.
Some women have large labia minora, which might not fit in this, but not everything in the word is tailor made to YOUR BODY.
Ah, that’s where it’s going: Man yelling in all-caps at a woman about her allegedly plus-sized labia.
You can’t expect for everything to fit you “just right”. Women with smaller labia are also just as normal as you are with whatever your labia size is.
Dude, regardless of the size or shape of a woman’s labia, that thing is going to wedge right up in there, where it will function much like floss between one’s teeth except in an area that definitely does not need flossing. Hence Reese’s remarks about a “labial wedgie.”
Whereas I could give a fuck a bout the Kardashians or this company, maybe some of them might like it.
Honestly, I’m going to guess that not even the Kardashians would much enjoy a 95% polyester, 5% spandex thing basically sandpapering their most delicate parts. I mean, it’s practically trench warfare.
I might want to be able to where pants with a 35″ inseam, but it will never happen because that’s not my body shape.
Sorry you’re not as … tall as you’d like to be, I guess? But that’s not really the issue here.
Instead of whining about shit that doesn’t meet your specific needs, why don’t you champion something that does instead.
This shit company, whatever it is, isn’t doing this to spite you, it just doesn’t fit you. So, like any normal, non-armchair social activists, just buy the shit that fits and don’t buy the shit that doesn’t. If this company is really that shit, which I’m sure it is, then let it be on the smaller-labia-ed women to decide if they like it or not.
Yeah, lady, stop complaining and go shop at the Big-and-Tall Labia Store!
As a short man, I wouldn’t comment on the designs of a big-and-tall store.
Oh, wait, he really is suggesting she shop at a store for larger-labiaed women.
And he really is mad about being short.
So you have big labia. Great. Keep it to yourself. D0 you want me talking about the size of my dick, big or small? For example, these jeans just wouldn’t be able to handle me.
Ok, but what are the chances that this dude has sent unsolicited dick pics to random women on the internet? Just asking.
It’s not for you, I get it. But who fucking cares really. The size of your labia and what they do or do not fit into is not a topic of conversation any more than you would like to hear about my penis and how it might be chafing from my clothes, which you have every right not to want to hear.
Dude, she referred to labia four times in a piece about a bodysuit that is pretty much guaranteed to turn into coochie floss about 30 seconds after anyone with a vagina puts it on. You’ve referred to labia eight times, including several snide references to her own particular labia. You’re the one who won’t shut up about it.
Now to get myself in trouble,
Ah yes, NOW is when you will start saying objectionable things.
a problem with feminism in this sense is that it tries to bring women to the level of men by acting like men.
TIL that cis women talking about their labia means they’re “acting like men.”
That being said, men acting like men has been the problem. We don’t need women to act like men in all of their bullshit.
Be a woman, not like a man—I think we would agree that what we’ve seen over the past couple thousand years and beyond of recorded history is that men are/can be total shit. Don’t be like us.
Well, don’t be like this dude, specifically.
And all that being said, yeah, this whatever it is is stupid.
Dude, “stupid” is a massive understatement when it comes to the “whatever it is” you vomited up into the Jezebel comments.
Can we just have a total shutdown on cis dudes lecturing cis women about their vaginas, their vulvas, their labia, that whole area down there, at least until we can figure out what’s going on?
H/T — @emilyofpratt on Twitter
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To steal a quote from Jim Sterling, “There’s always one guy who had to make it about sex and be creepy while doing so.”
I’ve always been vaguely aware that long-distance cycling was bad for male genitals, but what Hannah Dines (and, by extension, other female competitive cyclists) suffered is a new, fresh level of Hell.
@Mara
thank you for sharing.
My neighbour’s boyfriend recently tried to explain to me how to operate my rather stubborn kitchen window. It was his first time in my apartment, I’ve lived there for 6 years. Not that it should matter. Of course he has never installed or repaired a window or anything.
Ah, yes. I have a very long torso and huge boobs.
One piece swim suites: Cover the boobs and get a wedgie or be wedgie free and have the boobs uncovered. Wedgies are bad. So are sun burned boobs.
Tankinis: Bare midriff. Bad when you’re day glow white. You can watch me turning red in real time.
Bikini: Even more bare skin. Bare skin and sun bad!
I finally found a solution: Men’s swim shorts, surfer style, and UV protection swim shirts. Those look like regular t-shirts and are made out of a fast drying fabric that’s very elastic.
That thing up there? No idea if my labia are big or small compared to the average, but that thing would give even a barbie doll a wedgie!
@Cat Mara
Yea, those are quite a read. I’ll add my most recent one here only because I’m not on twitter. ;P
Last fall some young stranger at least 15 years my junior at a small nerd convention asked how old my son in the stroller was. Apparently being a high school student in a child development tech course gave him the confidence to mansplain with adorable certainty everything he thought he knew about babies’ needs, abilities, and cognitive development at this stage. Even what mine was communicating when he was beginning to fuss at the moment (naturally, he was incorrect).
It was slightly amusing to watch him gloss over when something he’d asserted wasn’t true about the particular baby he was mansplaining. He’d simply continue, entirely unaware that babies have unique personalities and develop at different paces from one another. I only hope he grows to look back on this encounter with the same embarassment I felt for him.
Anybody else in favour of some fair play turnabout and having some women explain wieners to some dudes?
I can already see it breaking their brains.
I do remember this amusing little stop motion cartoon from the mid-aughts called Rick and Steve where the characters looked like Playmobil toys and one of the characters made a “labia menorah” for Hannukah. That needs to be a thing.
That or they need to fight Rick and Morty in a battle to the death.
Yikes. That outfit is giving me flashbacks to being 13 years old and struggling to wedge into last year’s bathing suit after a winter of growth spurt. “Maybe if I stoop over a bit, no one will notice…”
So brave of this guy to step in and defend the .04% of women who could actually wear this thing without discomfort.
OK but this isn’t about clothes. It’s about how, so often, high end fashion yokes together physical discomfort and impracticality with conventional beauty standards, and what “beautiful = hobbled” implies about women’s place in society. Women are expected to be small, not take up space, not mind that their labia feel like they’re being sawed in half, in order to please men like this. This guy’s entire comment, the way he barges in and lectures that THIS ISN’T FOR YOU, LARGE-LIPPED LADIES, just reinforces that.
Which is why it’s incredibly disingenuous
for him to humblebrag about the size of his equipment as if it’s an equivalent complaint, when he knows full well there’s a double standard between men and women when it comes to being larger than average.
“Trench warfare”?
Oh, David.
@Surplus to Requirements
It’s even worse than it looks, because the person writing that article doesn’t begin to grasp how much of fascism is starting to spread in South America. Also to note, SA has been under so many military and fascist dictatorships we’ve already lost count. Pinochet in Chile, Videla in Argentina and Fujimori in Peru, whom we had to suffer between 1990 and 2001. So there are plenty of historical precedents for it.
With Fujimori it got so bad that he was literally sending paramilitary groups to murder, kidnap and torture innocent people. He literally had some of them burned in an oven they had in the headquarters of the Peruvian National Intelligence Service.
And despite the fact that the historical heads of the Peruvian far right have been getting their comeuppance (Keiko Fujimori for example), because of their various involvements in corruption scandals, their voter base is still intact and in search of a Peruvian “Bolsonaro”, as they have explicitly said.
Argentina’s situation is one of the most worrisome though. They have their own fucked up version of Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk, who is called Agustin Laje.
Laje not only straight up denies the 30,000 deaths of Videla’s military dictatorship, he also peddles Nazi conspiracy theories such as “Cultural Marxism” and has lately taken to expanding his beliefs around the region. The biggest problem is that the liberal media is ill equipped to challenge him on his bullshit, because they don’t know how to deal with this brand of fascism and how it uses social media and memes to spread.
One of my friends, whom I considered a brother, has legit been taken in by this sort of bullshit and is now peddling Nazi conspiracy theories. They are beginning to organize now and he is starting to become overly hostile towards leftists and minorities.
And, as bad as it is, people don’t appreciate how dangerous Bolsonaro himself is. He already straight up announced a “purge” of socialists from government. He used that precise word “purge”. Half his cabinet is filled with military members. You think DeVos is bad? Imagine if Trump had filled all departments with nothing but reactionary and fascist military members, because that’s what’s happened in Brazil.
Last month a councilwoman and gay activist was legit killed by off-duty police officers. Under whose instruction? We don’t know yet. But if leftists politicians and activists are already getting killed, where do you think this shit is going to lead?
It’s made out of pleather! who would by that! And small bits or not I don’t think that a going to fit an adult woman at all.
Off topic, but, kids these days!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/03/26/teen-boys-rated-their-female-classmates-based-looks-girls-fought-back/?utm_term=.a22bf3b1ba4f
I mean that in a good way. I love that teen girls are able to discuss feminist issues in such an articulate way. Even though I always held progressive and feminist positions, I was not able to talk and think this way until maybe age 23 or 24. It was also great to see that male students were willing to learn from their female peers.
@Redsilkphoenix:
That…is the kind of thing I’ve seen on a big bunch of female superhero/supervillian characters from about the mid-1990’s onward.
(And oh Lord–your pseudonym suggests exactly the sort of character who’d be shoehorned into the above getup.)
There’s a whole Tumblr devoted to critiquing gender disparity in heroic costume designs: http://bikiniarmorbattledamage.tumblr.com/
(They also showcase turnabout sexualized male costume designs , female armor done right, and corrective redesigns.
I think that the most hilarious part of this is the suggestion that these outfits are made for women with small labia. TWO other parts and a vagina in between, so unless you have VERY small inner labia and NO outer, you are going to have serious pull between the inner and outer labia, and your outer labia is going to be on the outside of the tiny gusset!
NO woman wants to wear something that does that – this thing is designed to lie about in, very still with labia tucked carefully in, look alluring and then take it off.
I’ve never heard any alt rightie dudebros complaining about their labia, but I guess it happens. Truth be told, I make it a point not to listen to them anyway. Thanks, short Bagdash mansplainy guy!
There are TWO types of labia: majora and minora. The “large” ones are, unsurprisingly, the majora. This guy seems to think that the writer only has labia minora, but that they’re excessively big. That’s not how this works.
Also: gynaecologist (UK) or gynecologist (US). Never, ever, gynocologist.
@Katamount
I feel a need to share TMI here. I took a human sexuality course in college and learned the names of the parts of male genitalia. I generously provided a detailed show-and-tell (he showed, I told) for my college boyfriend, a decent guy with a good sense of humor.
He loved it. We’re no longer together, but I’ll bet that all these decades later he remembers that incident fondly.
Of course, the part about him being a decent guy with a good sense of humor (yes, manospherian lurkers, even about himself) made for this vast difference between him and some other guys. Lots of other guys. More guys than I personally would care to count. Yecch. That’s right, manospherian lurkers, it’s just one more piece of evidence pointing to the reason you can’t get dates: you are, in a word, repulsive.
My partner ‘splains stuff to me all the time. But he is a teacher and he kinda does it to everyone. He does it such a gentle way that I don’t even mind too much when he ‘splains stuff that I already know. He doesn’t begin to ‘splain stuff to me that is exclusively in my domain – so that’s cool.
One thing I will say is that my partner has been up close and personal to a lot more labia than I have. So while I would take that on board, I would also seriously doubt his experience with pleather unitards (where I also have no experience -thankfully) or unitards in general. My labia aren’t huge, but I’ve sure pulled a swimsuit or two from places they oughtn’t have gone. ‘Cos fabric.
@Redsilkphoenix:
Yes, it’s like the costume worn by every female character drawn by Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee or one of that lot from around that time (one of the reasons I’ve heard for that is that they used to use the Victoria’s Secret catalogue as a character reference, when the high-cut look was in fashion for swimwear and lingerie)
Specifically, it reminds me of this Jim Lee character seen in this cosplay video. The colour even matches!
Well…he did a very good job at displaying the fact that he knows zilch about female bodies, physical movement while female, and personal concerns. And fit into what? That isn’t made for genitals to fit into. Nor is “fitting into” a typical concern for the lady junk…it’s more about varying degrees of coverage. Some of which seem designed to fail at that job.
And this thing…? It’s just made to look like you’re starring in porn, but take three steps tops and that thing is going right into places you don’t want it to be and you’ll be walking around uncomfortably for the rest of the evening like a cat with a wad of packaging tape stuck to a hind foot.
Just by looking at it, realistically that’s the sort of thing you wear for all of two minutes after changing into it in the bathroom and stepping back into the bedroom. Wear it for an evening and the only thing you’ll want to be doing later is soaking your nether regions in a cool bath. >.<
“‘Don’t be like us….’ but we’ll keep being like us because men will be men, hah.”
Isn’t it interesting he was so offended by an article on a women’s fashion site, about women’s fashion, that he had to write a comment longer than the article itself?