I concede, this borders on true Scotsman territory, but I’m curious anyway. We were debating this at a party. One woman made the claim that a substantial portion of literal mankind has the erroneous notion that women pee out of their vagina. I found this extremely dubious.
Even were this true, how would she know? Has this specific topic really come up often enough in her conversations with men that she feels it’s some sort of trend?
And even then, I think the more likely scenario is a miscommunication. While pee doesn’t come from within the inner depths of the vaginal orifice, it does come from a hole that is inside the labia, and most men who aren’t being doctors or playing some other technical role tend to refer the whole area as the vagina in casual conversation.
I strongly suspect she’s interpreting men saying women pee from their vagina as meaning the orifice specifically when what they really mean is the whole unit.
But I leave it for the masses. If you don’t have a strong opinion or helpful anecdote, feel free to expand the discussion to other crazy anatomy misunderstanding stories.
I agree; I see “vagina” used to mean “vulva” more often than I see the word “vulva” used at all. It’s not really that much more inaccurate than saying “a man pees out of his penis” instead of “a man pees out of his urethra”. I suppose the real question would be how many people don’t realize that women have a urethra, and think that they really do literally pee out of their vagina.
In fact, I think that it’s something left over from earliest childhood. When we’ve very young, we learn that boys’ pee-pees are different from girls’ pee-pees; a bit later, we learn that the the boys’ pee-pee is called a “penis” while the girls’ pee-pee is called a “vagina”. By the time we learn that these regions of the body have other, secondary purposes, their names and roles are pretty much established.
I think I only learned that there was more than one hole in that area within the last few years. :o If you’d asked me to draw a diagram, I probably would have had the urethra bending around to end somewhere right behind the cervix. I really don’t think it ever came up in school, though, and I don’t really have any desire for practical experience in that field.
Way, way, way back in time, when I first learned that the clitoris is structurally parallel to the penis…I thought that women urinated from the clitoris. Well, it makes some sense… Just turns out not to be so.
Of all the things, I learned the truth from reading a nursing manual, with diagrams on how to insert catheters. Comes the dawn!
Q: Do you know the correct way to wash genitals?
A: The same way you wash Jews.
Seeing as quite a few women don’t even know it, I don’t know why it’s so far fetched. I mean, I’ve seen books that tell adult women that they have three holes.
As for me, my genitalia has only one hole, and there’s only one visible hole when you see a girl naked unless you actually peer up in there. It’s not something anyone I know generally talks about (until I got to the Dope, of course), so I don’t know how I was expected to know until I encountered it for myself. And when that happens, you tend to have something else on your mind other than hole inspection.
The only way I’d expect people to learn it would be in health class. And while mine talked about the different systems, the idea that there were two holes never came up. Maybe it did when the women were taken by themselves, but I doubt it.
Note: I’ve known about it for probably five years now.
I think more women should be encouraged to squat over a mirror. My coworkers - don’t ask how this came up, but in a surprisingly legitimate way - thought the very idea was horrifying.
See, this is why the death of the World Book Encyclopedia saddens me. Apparently, there’s a whole generation or two behind me who did not benefit from being bored and poring through the R-S sections, for “reproduction” and “sexuality.” My set of World Books had these nifty clear plastic pages all layered together showing anatomy so you could see musculature separate from the skeleton, separate from the organs, separate from all the veins and arteries… Wikipedia doesn’t really have anything like that, does it?
Well, that may help with women’s lack of understanding, but if you’re trying to correct a man’s misunderstanding and suggest he watch a woman squatting over a mirror, it’s unlikely he’ll retain any actual information he might have gathered from the experience.
Well, you don’t even need the mirror for teaching the men. But it just sounds wrong to say, “I think more women should be encouraged to squat over men’s faces.” Even when you’re talking about teaching anatomy.
Although, come to think of it, it would have been a lot more effective at keeping me awake in high school health class than whatever it was they actually did to try to keep me awake, if anything.
To guys there are two holes down there… the butt hole, and everything else is “the vagina.” So yes I suspect most men would say that women pee out of their vagina; even though they know there is different plumbing up there.
