Pussies, patriarchy, and access to sex education

Zoe Mendelson Transcript

Sabrina Merage Naim
All right, welcome back. Kassia

Kassia Binkowski
I am so excited to dive into this conversation and I want to hear all the juicy details.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, I'm really excited to tell you about it. This was a really interesting one for me. I got to speak with the writer of the book, Pussypedia. Her name is Zoe Mendelson. She is a really interesting person. She's based in Mexico City, but actually from Chicago, so she's American born, loves Mexico City has built a life for herself there. And in 2019 started the website pussypedia.net which is a bilingual free basically encyclopedia for people with pussies. We're trying to be gender neutral as much as possible, because this is really important that not only women have vaginas. And there's reasons why we are using the word pussy versus vagina, which we go into in the conversation. But it was like such an interesting adventure as to why she started this, what was the impetus, what happened, what's involved in the whole thing?

Kassia Binkowski
So I gotta be honest, Sabrina, when we started building our list of guests for season two, and her name came up and then we started assigning them are you going to interview or am I going to interview her? You got her, which is awesome. And I was like, "Damn!"

Sabrina Merage Naim
Were you jealous?

Kassia Binkowski
Well, she's an information designer. So from the design perspective, I had this moment of jealousy of like, "Oh, wait a minute, I think this would be really interesting conversation." And then dive into the research and hit the brakes, because I have to tell you, I cannot stand the word pussy. I can't stand it. Like it makes me cringe 100% of the time.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So this conversation is exactly for you.

Kassia Binkowski
Yeah, uh huh.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Because not only do we break down the fact that we all need to get over our cringy-ness of the word pussy and take that word back from the likes of the Donald Trump's of the world, right? That that word belongs to us. And that it should not be seen as crass or vulgar like that is a social construct that we need to break down and reconstruct in our own way for our own purposes. But also, that in the length of this conversation, we talk about all the cringe worthy things that happen to our bodies, we talk about our discharging and goopy-ness and the hair that grows in places we don't want to admit that it grows. This conversation is exactly for the likes of you, right? Because we do, we need to admit that our bodies are these beautiful, complicated machines that do not have the like perfect view of whatever society expects, when we are all waxed, and we're clean, and we're smelling perfect. And we're doing this and we have like, there are no juices or whatever. That's not reality. This is reality. This is real. This is like a full blown, real conversation. So what I love about Zoe is that she has no shame to talk about any of that she really opens up her own personal life and experiences. One of the things that I really commended her on is the website pussypedia.net. And now the book, which is phenomenal. So the website is much more informative. And there are hundreds of collaborators who write in.

Kassia Binkowski
I mean, there's contributors from all over the world, is that right?

Sabrina Merage Naim
That's right. They they talk about all kinds of things that happen with our bodies. And this is really necessary because for so long. The the medical science - you know, the writings about people with pussies - it was very contradictory. There were a lot of things that were missing. It was always written by men. And so Zoey really brought together a community of people to be like, Okay, what's really going on, and let's figure it out from the science of it, but also make it interesting and engaging. And then in the book, she you know, she really brought her own personal experiences, and made it funny and witty. And I mentioned like part of it is self deprecating, which I kind of appreciate that she really opens up that side of her because I would be mortified. But it really hooked me.

Kassia Binkowski
Well, and it takes a very distinct personality to build this platform, to kind of curate that community and all of that content in an accessible and approachable way. And in a way that doesn't turn off a generation of people who have been raised to not really talk about it and to not ask questions about it and to not know where to go for information. I mean, if she was going to tackle it, she needed to do to do it with so much personality and so much vulnerability and honesty. And it's very clear that that she brought that to the table.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, she really did. I think she did a phenomenal job of it. So this is a really interesting conversation. It is meant to break down all of those initial knee jerk reactions that we have that may be cringy, or may be kind of pushing away these things. This is all about the beauty and the joy and the celebration of our bodies. may it always be excellent. Take a listen.

Kassia Binkowski
Pussy. Pussy. Pussy. Pussy.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Hi, Zoe.

Zoe Mendelson
Hi.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Where in the world are you calling from?

Zoe Mendelson
I am in Mexico City where I didn't.

Sabrina Merage Naim
But you're not from Mexico City?

Zoe Mendelson
No, I'm from Chicago. It's been here for seven years.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Lovely. And from what I understand, Mexico City is a place that you have decided to make your home because it's such an incredible place. And you love it so much.

Zoe Mendelson
I mean, I love it. I think it's also important to acknowledge that like, you know, a lot of people who live here including me are also living here to take advantage of wealth disparity. You know, I left New York because they wanted more time to do my projects. And you know, it was working on others, like part time, crappy jobs, and more often unable to live here and do a lot less of that. So it's important to acknowledge that too.

Sabrina Merage Naim

Yeah. And you do have a pretty eclectic background in terms of your upbringing, and also your work history. And you've worked in a lot of different industries, and you're a writer and an activist and have worked in government and had been hired and fired from restaurants and, and the whole slew of things. But what we're here to talk about today, which I'm very excited to jump right into, is Pussypedia and I'm gonna ask you to kind of describe it starting with 2019 when you started pussypedia.net. We're going to start with a little disclaimer because yes listener we will be saying the word pussy many times in this conversation. And for some people, that word can land as a bit crass. But let's redefine that. Because I think that's really a social construct. And it is, we want to take that word back. We want to reposition it not as vulgar or as crass as some people kind of can feel it is or define it as being first tell me how you started pussypedia.net. And then we're going to talk about why you use the word pussy versus vagina or other words.

Zoe Mendelson
So we started pussypedia.net because I was Googling whether or not all woman can squirt. And I just was reading a lot of bullshit on the internet. And I got into some medical journal articles and started trying to read them and it's really hard. And then I was learning some things that I was like, "Wait, how did I never know this? I really should have known this. Everyone should really know this!" But it took so much work to sort of get there and I was like why is all this really crucial information so hard to access? Why is all this internet information such garbage? It's so contradict ory is probably up so I called Maria Conejo, my my collaborator who's an artist who works with representations of the female body, and said, "Let's do some kind of vagina project." Because, well, initially, I wanted to make a 3D model and a 3D interactive model just because I was having I was trying to learn about how squirting works. And I didn't understand where the bladder was in relation to the vagina. And I was trying to look at diagrams but it was really hard to see a 3D spacial relationship from a 2D image. So initially, we just wanted to make that interactive model that's on the site. That's sort of how it started and we called it Pussypedia because I'm in the original name was "Thinking Inside The Box." It's cute and funny, but it was too long and so I kind of just started calling it Pussypedia as a joke but then we realized that it gets really hard to talk about the pussy because there's no word for pussy. Like it was so important to us to be scientifically accurate with this project, because if it wasn't, it was just going to be more of the same of what's already out there. And vagina only means the vaginal canal. So when we call the whole thing of vagina, we're ignoring all of these really improtant parts. And if we call it a vulva, then we're ignoring, you know, everything on the inside, and there's the rectum, there's the bladder, there's the uterus, there's the internal clitoris, and all of these things work together in so many ways as integrated system. And so I think that the problem with there not being a word for it, as one system is not just that we can't talk about it, which is a huge problem. But it's also that we don't conceptualize it as a system, which is so it's like, we didn't have a word for leg, like we only had like foot knee calf, shin, thigh - you know? The leg works as a system to help you walk right? And sit up and stand, you know.

Sabrina Merage Naim
There's so much to dissect there. And I want to just, I want to just comment on that the reason why pussypedia.net came to fruition for you was based on a lack of knowledge, understanding and information about your own body, right? And the body of people with pussies around the world. And that is something that I think you would agree throughout your research and the time that it has taken you to, to create pussypedia.net and then the book which we will also talk about is so common, like we just don't have the information, we don't know, we are not taught. You have found in your research so much contradictory information, even in the medical community, about people with pussies and the whole pussy system. And yes, I'm gonna continue saying the word pussy, pussy, pussy. So, you know, get used to that. And it is fascinating for me as someone, like as an adult female who has that system like, wow, I don't know so much of this, right? I am raising a daughter who needs to know more than I did growing up. And I grew up in a house where it wasn't shamed. And there was, we talked about things, it's just there was no culture of that. So I want to just acknowledge that pussypedia.net is a wealth of information, you were very meticulous about making sure you fact checked there was data and resources and you talk about how you had hundreds of collaborators, right? And how important it was for you, too, have a 3D model that you could really see and understand from all angles. We don't really have that. Like, we've just never seen that before. It was fascinating for me. And then the reason why you chose to use the word pussy versus vagina, which is kind of an interesting thing. So talk about the Latin root of vagina.

Zoe Mendelson
Yeah, so now I've actually posted this there, it says it's like the first fact in my book and now I am wondering, actually. Someone emailed us, a linguist from NYU saying "actually the word for sheath, it's not that the word vagina comes from the word for sheath. It's the word for sheath comes from the word vagina." And I'm looking at what he said and looking at some other sources and different things. Different sources say different things. So I'm not absolutely sure, but I don't really care though. It bothers me the association. It bothers me that we call our whole part that thing a penis goes in.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So that's what it is right? You have in your book and on the website that vagina is the Latin term for sword holder, which insinuates that it's a holder for penises.

Zoe Mendelson
Yes, that it that the vagina is an object of service to the penis, right? That it, that its mere existence is as an object of service to the penis, that it exists merely in relation to the penis. And that really bothers me and I also think we need to stop thinking of it as penis and vagina and start thinking of it as penis and clitoris, because that's anatomically accurate. It's the, the clitoris and the penis are very, very similar. They're even about the same size. A clitoris is about nine centimeters on average flacid, which is the same as a penis. So it's not like we have this smaller version even it's the same size. It's just inside inside.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Inside. Just not as visible. Exactly.

Zoe Mendelson
Yeah, and It's like, they're formed from the same tissues, and they have the same parts just in different, like slightly different, slightly rearranged. It's mostly, the difference is like the size of the glands part and also the positioning of the urethra within it. And it's the thing that produces heterosexual pleasure, which is why it has been so erased over so much time.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Fascinating. So this gem of a book that I can't wait to dig into on our conversation is brand new, just launching now, I highly, highly recommend it for our listeners, I just wanted to say it's so witty, it's so intelligent. It is packed with the history and the facts and the data. But it's not, it doesn't feel dense, it doesn't feel overwhelming. It's not an encyclopedia in the sense of, "Oh my god, this is so dry and boring." And it is really funny and sometimes self deprecating, which I kind of appreciate. And, and like I said mind boggling how much contradictory information exists in the world and in the medical community that you had to personally sift through and be like, "Okay, let's try and figure out what's really going on." And, and how some of these things are really rooted in historical patriarchy that we're having to dissect from, like the reality of our bodies. I actually do think the, the personal narrative that's woven throughout this book is so important. It's so relatable. And it's something that anchors a lot of the medical and scientific data that is in this book, to reality and to our own personal experiences. So I really appreciated that.

Zoe Mendelson
I'm really happy to hear that it works. Like, people asked me a lot after the project like, "Well, why is knowledge power? And why does having knowledge about your body give you power?" and explaining that over and over again, sort of in a theoretical way felt unsatisfying. Like, isn't it obvious? And so I felt like it was easier just to use personal stories to explain that. So like, when things happen in your body, and you don't know that it's normal, it can cause a lot of shame and embarassment. Ok, well what happens when you're embarrassed about your body? Well, what happened to me and like, my early sexual experiences, like, well, I just thought I was gross, and was embarrassed about that. And that caused me to not insist that men used condoms, or to that, like, ask for things that would, I mean, my pleasure was like, so out of the question. And you know, like asking for, "No, do it like this? Can you do this or that to me?" like, that didn't prompt us so much. And so it's like, how does knowledge become power? And also, I was like, spending time thinking about these things. And I was, you know, experiencing the symptoms instead of seeking treatment, because I was embarrassed because I felt like it was my fault, which is something a lot of people do. So yeah, trying to make it more obvious, like why it is unjust that we don't have this information by just using my personal experience, but also like helping just people feel more and more or hoping that that people would feel normal instead of embarrassed about a lot of things, you know. Whether it's like, like, having had unprotected sex and knowing better or having like, a physical trait on your body, or having certain feelings towards your body that you can't control. Like, I feel like, there's so much body positivity discourse out there now, but I don't feel that very easily inside of me. I love it as a political discourse, but like, I don't love my belly, and I'm constantly trying to love my belly, and I really hate my belly. And so that's just like another way to fail. And so, you know, trying to be like, well, it's like about trying, it's about like, acknowledging that this patriarchy has taken this mental space away from you and trying to get it back but not setting up like a new standard that we can fail to meet.

Sabrina Merage Naim
In the way that you talk about, you know, the oversharing about your body and sex life and experiences, you talk about how it was really an intentional approach in the book. And I think it's true through that it makes it so much more accessible and personal. Did you have to come to terms with anything before being so free to share openly in a public format like this?

Zoe Mendelson
I mean, yeah, I think it was a lot of change, to be really honest with myself about why I've made decisions I've made. Like in the safe sex chapter especially and, you know, finding a balance between like, well, what is patriarchy? And why what was really making bad decisions and being accountable to my own decisions? Because I feel like, you know, a lot of people know that you have to use condoms to not get STIs. But a lot of people don't use condoms and get STIs. So it's like, well, what is going on here? So I felt like if I could really do a deep dive for myself, that hopefully it would help other people make better decisions. And because also, like, you lose credit with your reader, when you're, like, "Get tested before you're gonna have sex every time or like, get tested after every, you know, three weeks after every." And it's like, "What?" These are just utterly impractical, weird things. And if you save if you just say that it's like, without acknowledging how impractical it is, I felt like I would lose my readers trust, which I really wanted to have. So and also just to acknowledge, like, I hate reading, you know, when people are like, "Oh, all you have to do is exercise for 40 minutes a day." I'm like, "Fuck you! I hate you." Like I do it. I am a runner. I love running like I didn't want to be I didn't want it to be that. So I didn't want to be like, yeah, "Just use condoms every time and you'll never get an STI, it's easy." Yeah, okay well...

Sabrina Merage Naim
I think the practicality of it is such an important piece, because you are talking to your peers, and you're speaking from personal experience. And when we feel like we're being preached to, or talked at, like, forget it. I'm tired of people telling me how I'm supposed to live my life to be the most fulfilled version of myself. Okay, it's too much, right? I do my best, we all do our best every day. So we need to be realistic about what our lives really look like. Right? So I want to be really honest about something. And this is like me being honest with myself. I think in your being super open about your sexuality and your sexual experience and partners and whatnot I had an unconscious knee jerk reaction, which was to try and understand your upbringing, right? To try and like, put you in a box and define this as why Zoe was like making these kinds of decisions.

Zoe Mendelson
Well, I wonder if part of that was about raising a daughter? You said you're raising a daughter, right?

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yes.

Zoe Mendelson
So probably you're thinking like, I don't want these outcomes for my daughter. So trying to reverse engineer it - like what led to these decisions?

Sabrina Merage Naim
I do think that's part of it. But I also think part of it is just society telling us that women cannot be, you know "sexually promiscuous", or have a lot of partners, or sexual freedom, or all of these things. Like, even I consider myself a pretty progressive and socially evolved person, that I had these things subconsciously that I have not dissected from my brain. And it wasn't until I very consciously stopped myself and was like, why are you asking these questions? And why are you trying to put a box around it? And why are you even kind of putting any kind of negative connotation around it? So my question to you is, how do we reshape the societal narrative that is put on us? And you know, I think part of it is like, the shame, the sexual shame and stigma that is just oppressive, we place on women. How can we, for our daughters and the next generation, change that narrative so that she, if she read that, she would never even think twice about it?

Zoe Mendelson
Yeah, I love that question. And I think part of it is acknowledging the narrative and being like, well, this is a historical narrative about women and it's oppressive. And, you know, being able to see it clearly and reject it, and know why we reject it, that it's arbitrary. That it's trying to control us. That it's this leftover thing about Adam and Eve and the woman's body being, you know, the source of all sin of humanity. And yeah, like the Beginning of Time. Yeah, it's just, it's partially just based in "sex is bad." Like, if it's bad to have sex because you're a woman, we still have to start with the first implication, which is that sex is bad. So you know, talking about sex as a positive thing. And that's the other half of it, you know, so the first thing is seeing it clearly being able to articulate it, and teaching each other to articulate it, and like just having a very clear vision of what it is we're rejecting. And then secondly, having agency having sexual agency, so it's "Pleasure is good. Pleasure is a reason to have sex. Pleasure is a good reason to have sex. It's, it's okay to want to do that." And there's all these amazing studies that show that when we teach young people with pussies that it's okay to seek pleasure and that pleasure is an okay reason to have sex. They have more sexual agency, and they are more able to advocate for their own pleasure and advocate for condoms.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, I really believe that. I really believe that.

Zoe Mendelson
It's like, why are you making these decisions? Like, once you know that it's okay to want to do that. Maybe you're going to make those decisions from a more intentional place. And also, once you're thinking about sex as something that should feel good and should be good. You're not, you're going to know okay, well, I've been disrespected or my, you know, my bodily integrity has been disrespected. I no longer feel good. This is no longer why I'm having sex. Because I think a lot of the sex I had when I was young was like, "Well, everyone else is having sex, I better have sex to be left out."

Sabrina Merage Naim
Which goes back to the information is power, right? Giving our kids that information from a young age to have agency over their own bodies had the knowledge of their own bodies and how it works. And you mentioned in the book that you went from being an unselfconsciously horny kindergartener to unselfconsciously horny adult and yet mortified by your body, which seemed at first contradictory to me. So explain how these two things can coexist within you.

Zoe Mendelson
Yeah, I think what I said was "The journey from unselfconsciously horny kindergartener to unselfconsciously horny adult was long and fucked up and is honestly not over." So I wouldn't call myself a totally unselfishly, unselfconsciously horny adult although less self consciously, you know, then for a long time. But I think you can be horny and not have shame about being horny, but still have body shame. I mean, I also grew up in a really progressive house, but the patriarchy will just find you. It'll get to you, like you will be taught not to love your body, you will be taught to be embarrassed by your body, if you don't have a perfect body, which you most likely don't. You know, no matter what your mom tells you. So yeah, so it's, there's just so much messaging everywhere. And so much that is so brilliantly designed to make us feel bad about our bodies.

Sabrina Merage Naim
You've mentioned patriarchy a couple of times, and I want to understand. You had a really interesting definition of what patriarchy means. In the book, I want to understand how you define it, and also how it is woven into the narrative of this entire book.

Zoe Mendelson
I think I define it as just the way things are. The patriarchy is the way things are and the way we all interact and the way we're taught to think and be. And it's a self perpetuating system that is replicated through media, through parenting, through, you know, interactions on the schoolyard. And it's woven into the book, it's kind of like, it's the villain in the in the story. And, to me, it does not mean men, that's that's like, to start it does not mean men, we're not blaming men for all these things. Men are also victims of the patriarchy. And with all of the like, you know, drawbacks of being a woman I would never want to be a man. Like I think that they actually get the worst end of the stick like and have these like profoundly emotionally limited lives and are so controlled by what they have to present to the world and I would never want to be in their position, ever. So I really want to make clear I'm not saying men when I say the patriarchy even when it's men that carry out sort of the bad deeds of the patriarchy. I'm not blaming them for the whole patriarchy.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting distinction was patriarchy being the status quo that we all live in, that feeds the oppression of so many people in so many different ways, but is not about man blaming. I want to ask about your mom. You mentioned her briefly. What was your relationship with her growing up? How did she impact your view of sexuality?

Zoe Mendelson
Um, she was like, very open about it. Like she would have like, young sexy lovers all the time. I mean, she was a single mom, and she worked a lot, a lot, a lot. So I didn't see her that much. But I respected that she was, you know, hustling to take care of us. And she was also living her truth. And she was, you know, pretty openly queer for the 90s like, not like she had a lesbian school bumper sticker on her car. But you know, she showed up to events in a suburban town with like, her girlfriend, which was a big deal. And like very brave. And yeah, she just she had a lot of lovers and boyfriends, young boyfriends, especially that were so hot and I just thought that was cool. And she just, it was normal. You know, when you're a kid everything your mom does is normal, whatever it is.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And you felt comfortable talking to her about sex, about your body? Was there ever a time that you were like, "No, this is where I draw the line."?

Zoe Mendelson
Go like, sometimes it's my line. Sometimes it's her line. Sometimes something will be uttered and one of us will be like, "Oh man, nevermind. Let's not talk about this."

Sabrina Merage Naim
I wanted to talk for a second about the historical lack of information available for people with Posies about their own bodies, the thing that shocked the hell out of me, like it was so I was reading about the clitoris. It was not so shocking to learn that for a long time, we didn't really understand the whole structure of the clitoris because so much of it is hidden inside of our bodies. That even you know, male doctors thought for a long time that it was useless that it served no purpose like, fine. Okay. That's not so surprising. That is all part of the oppressive patriarchy narrative that exists in so much of our history. But the fact that it was removed from Gray's Anatomy, the predominant text, okay, of the 20th century on our anatomical systems was just like deleted, bye bye. Didn't exist. Shocked me. What the hell? Yeah.

Zoe Mendelson
Yeah, like, just take this out. Look, just take it out. I mean, but why is that more shocking than like - I don't know how old your daughter is - but like when she learns the "reproductive" (and I'm putting reproductive in air quotes) the reproductive system in school, it's almost guaranteed that they're just going to teach her vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, and it's just going to you know, every image that we see of the female reproductive system is just has the clitoris completely erased status.

Sabrina Merage Naim
That is so unfortunate. So talk a little bit about the discovery of the clitoris, and the penis being like, essentially the same organ.

Zoe Mendelson
Yeah, it's the same. We start I mean, when the baby's growing in a stomach, it's like, they have the same little genital lump. And then it forms different parts. And then they form into different organs, but they have all the same little pieces just arranged in different ways. It's all the same parts, it's just arranged in different ways. The clitoris and the penis are extremely similar.

Sabrina Merage Naim
They're very similar and the fact that from a historical standpoint, it is bad news for the patriarchy to acknowledge something like that. That our systems are actually much more similar than people want to accept. That the way we the way we feel pleasure is very similar, right? The things that are actually happening inside of our bodies is not so dramatically different and that the the body that has a pussy does not exist, just for the sake of the body that has a penis, which really changes the entire historical landscape of male female gender narratives.

Zoe Mendelson
And that's all I think that there's been, you know, way too much attention paid to the ways that male and female bodies are different. And trying to say that like, oh, the vagina is an inside out penis, you know, that was the model for like, super long time, the one sex model. And just sort of obsessing about what, you know, a body with a pussy lacks, and how it's that. But then at the same time, like we pay too much attention to we often assume that it's the same. So like with all this off label prescription of testosterone, which is, you know, the endocrinologist association put out this statement being like, "Oh, my god, stop doing this is so dangerous and not effective." Like, we're assuming that testosterone also has the job of making people with pussies hornies just because that's what it does in a body with a penis. So it's like, we have both over-emphasized biological differences, and also under-emphasized them. Taking like the male body as the normative structure and applying what we know about it to body with the pussy.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right, which is also true. Something we've talked about in the show before is that actually, like medical studies, for women had been done on men, because we don't menstruate, you know, and you can't, and they don't get pregnant. And for all of these reasons. So a lot of the medication that exists for bodies with pussies actually, were not tested on bodies with pussies which is so upsetting for me.

Zoe Mendelson
It is extremely upsetting. And it's just lazy. And I think a lot of it has to do with this sort of narrative of like, one of the gender narratives that I think messes with me the way we do science a lot is this idea of like, the the mystique of women, right? Like "Oh, they're impossible to understand. Don't even try."

Sabrina Merage Naim
I think there's a really important PSA that we need to shout from the rooftops, which is, recently there was a lot of hullabaloo among a couple of celebrities talking about how they don't soap their bodies, they only soap the pits and slits. And in fact, it is true, that not soaping your body is much healthier, right? We know that soap is actually breaking down the natural barriers that our skin has against bacteria and all of that. So I want to say first of all, lay off the soap a little bit. But do not soap your slip.

Zoe Mendelson
No, no soap in the crack. Big time. No, no, do not soap in there. NO.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right? So this is super important. People need to hear it, people need to understand it, that your pussy is an amazing self cleaning organ, you talked about this feeling of shame and desire to like, clean it vigorously. And to get rid of the smell.

Zoe Mendelson
Yeah. And that kept giving me like recurrent yeast infections,

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right? It's supposed to have smell like you have a beautiful natural smell. Just get used to kids.

Zoe Mendelson
And know your smell. Because if it changes, you know that you need to take care of something. There's a lot of infections that like don't get itchy or don't change your discharge. But if you notice, like there's a lot of infections that really don't have a lot of symptoms, even chlamydia cannot have any say it does. So knowing your smell is a great resource and taking care of yourself.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Knowing your smell, knowing the consistency of your goop, the smell, consistency and color. Really important. Just to pay attention to your body. Your body tells you so much about your own health. And I also love how you say like if you have an infection, take yourself to your gynecologist. They are so sick and tired, they're like board of infections.

Zoe Mendelson
Of stinky pussies. Yeah, they're not gonna think it's gross. Like they're really not.

Sabrina Merage Naim
They're bored of that. So don't think that there's something shameful if you have an infection or if you've got something going on that needs to be checked out. Go see a doctor about it. Listen, our our pussies are complicated mechanisms that have so many different things going on. And it's super important to be aware of what's going on with our bodies, but not I think what Zoe is saying not self-diagnosing when we have tests, we have doctors who exist for this purpose. So important.

Kassia Binkowski
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