Some things are so rage inducing that they cause you to start a blog.

I’ve been enraged by Fair and Lovely, a skin lightening cream used in Africa and India that bleaches your skin with the intent of making you whiter, and therefore somehow more attractive. I studied abroad in Kenya when I was an undergrad, and I promise you that people actually use this heinous. One of my homestay sisters would very casually apply it, and when I pressed her for details about it, would simply say “oh, it’s just my cream.” It’s so horrifying that we assign so much importance to whiteness that people freely apply this crap to their bodies that there is no way I can address all of the implications in one blog.

I’ve also been equally or possibly more enraged by My New Pink Button. MNPB is a “temporary dye to restore the youthful pink color back to your labia.” It’s apparently supposed to keep your lady bits looking young since as we age we get “genital color loss.” Oh, and when we make babies. Dirty stuff that.

Women don’t need another thing they are comparing themselves to other women about or another way to live up to a non-existent ideal. Especially when inevitable differences like age and race are being fetishized. And when the process of getting there “burns.” I’ve researched a bunch and haven’t found any ingredients yet. But the chemicals that are in MNPB cannot possibly be okay to put anywhere near your vag. (Especially if they don’t even have the gall to list the ingredients on the website!)

And now we’ve really done it by combining the two. Clean and Dry is a great new product that will leave you “fresher, cleaner, fairer!” As if the idea of douching isn’t insane enough already, preying on the most ridiculous of lady insecurities, this product is bleaching while douching, and that’s just perfect.

One of the ads portrays an (already light skinned) couple clearly not having enough sex. But somehow this lightening douche magically makes everything more magical again. How is it possible that we have taken racism and sexism so far and so intertwined as to be disrupting our poor lady bits in such a foul manner? It makes me so sad that in some ways we have come so far, but in the ways that matter, we are still so far from having figured it out.

Everyone has different colored vaginas. That’s fact. Whatever natural stat your labia/vulva/vag/general lady parts are in is beautiful and perfect. Don’t go fucking with products like this to make em more appealing. Gross! There is no normal vag color, and thank god. Yours is right.