On January 31, 2021 the news ran with the story about Wikipedia and it’s gender discrepancies. It was then that a study revealed that 87% of the entries written on Wikipedia are written by men, dudes, guys, boys - the average age somewhere in his 20s, which means that yes, some of them are indeed young lads. The NYTimes published this article on upping the female writer ante on Wikipedia by 2015.  It quoted Sue Gardner, executive director of Wikimedia (they conducted the survey that led to the results) as saying something along the lines of Wikipedia wanting more meat in entries that women would be most interested in, pointing to entries like Sex and the City and Mexican feminist writers. But it’s not just the meat that’s missing here.

After reading the article, a dear friend who writes about things that don’t have to do with sex, and so therefore asked me not to mention her by name, decided to do some research of her own. She looked up something utterly female on Wikipedia, to see what kind of information a girl could get on a topic that would be more important to her than to him. She went with vaginal discharge.

The post, barely two paragraphs in length, had some disturbing information. It said:

However, too many females suffer from an abnormal smelly vaginal discharge, and of course weird vaginal discharge color. It is important to pay attention to the color and smell of vaginal discharge to make sure that it is healthy.^[2]

The [2] which refers to the source is even more appalling. It’s a website called vaginal-health and the page description reads loose vagina/tight vagina/vaginal odor/vaginal discharge/virgin stick. The fact that loose vagina is the first thing you see on a website called vaginal-health made my stomach turn, and that’s not all.

WTF is a virgin stick?

Welcome to the home page of the Virgin Stick. I’m hoping that you’ll find the treatment you’ve been on the search for to get rid of vaginal odor, vaginal discharge and most important to tighten a loose vagina. Virgin Stick is a natural vaginal discharge treatment that also gets rid of vaginal odor and even tightens a loose vagina. This virgin stick is made up of a combination of herbs that are popular in Indonesia to cure smelly vaginal discharge and get rid of the vaginal itching without labioplasty ore expensive vaginal rejuvenation.

If I weren’t an educated sex educator, and instead say a 13-year old girl who wonders what’s going on between her legs, I’d be totally freaked out and may even be convinced to spend the $39.90 to avoid the risk of embarrassment. I wouldn’t know that my vaginal discharge was normal (smell or no smell) and wouldn’t want to talk to anyone else about it. But vaginal discharge, and odors, are normal, and only in extreme cases would there be any need to visit a medical professional who can then assess if everything is in balance. To read this on Wikipedia, that’s not okay. And yeah, I know I can go change the entry, and I may, but the point is an entry like this shouldn’t be allowed in the first place. And even if Sue Gardner says, “The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know,” if one person has a bad experience with a vagina, should we all have to know about it on Wikipedia?

Read the NPR piece (with links) too.