A guy tried to mansplain the female anatomy to a gynecologist and it went exactly how you'd expect

Editor's note: This article was originally published on October 25, 2021. It has since been updated.

By now women are somewhat resigned to the fact that the world has an unfortunately high number of men who WILL mansplain all types of subjects to them. Be it politics, technology, sexual harassment by other men, feminism, our opinions, our jobs, or even the meaning of mansplaining itself, there will almost definitely be some dude somewhere who believes he knows better than us. This annoying phenomenon has gotten so bad that a few years ago, Twitter user Kim Goodwin even came up with a classic easy-to-understand flowchart for men that lays out when and how they might be getting on a woman's nerves.

Unfortunately, this "corrective dysfunction" — as someone so eloquently put it — persists in our society even today despite our best efforts to stamp it out. One man took things to another level some time ago when he took it upon himself to explain the difference between a vagina and a vulva... to a gynecologist. It began when The Guardian shared an article titled 'Me and my vulva: 100 women reveal all', which covered a photo series (and film) by Laura Dodsworth where she shares "stories of 100 women and gender non-conforming people through portraits of their vulvas."

While the article aimed to decrease stigmas around women's bodies, a Twitter user by the name of Paul Bullen couldn't help but mansplain what the article supposedly got wrong. "The correct word is vagina," he wrote arrogantly. Although Dr. Jennifer Gunter, an actual gynecologist, stepped in to set the record straight and hopefully maybe even educate Paul about the female anatomy in the process, he was having none of it. "Hi, I'm a gynecologist and an international expert on both the vagina and vulva. These are vulvas. I wrote this post with a handy Venn diagram to help people separate the two! Enjoy," Gunter tweeted, sharing a link to a previous post she had written about the difference between a vulva and vagina. 

"I'm sick of people forgetting the poor vulva and referring to everything in the female lower reproductive tract as vagina," Gunter had written in the 2015 post, which also features a helpful Venn diagram. Rather than graciously accept his mistake, Paul doubled down on his misplaced sense of know-it-allness and claimed that inaccurate language in reference to female sex organs highlighted a greater societal issue of gender imbalance. "This question does not require that sort of expertise. In fact, it could be part of the problem: I am speaking about ordinary language, not technical terms. What I am saying has a descriptive component and a normative one," he tweeted.

"The descriptive one you are acknowledging by saying... people referring to everything in the lower reproductive tract as vagina. I am making the empirical claim that in addition to the use of the word 'vagina' to refer to the part of the body mentioned in the dictionary definition, the word is widely used to mean something broader," he continued. "And that meaning is even broader than the word vulva. The normative component has to do with the attitude toward these usage facts (if they are facts). My position is that standard usage is fine and should not be changed. One could agree with me descriptively (as you seem to), but disagree with me on the normative question. It is natural that an expert would prefer the technical terms over common usage. To summarize, many words have both a strict meaning and a broader meaning (species and genus). 'Vagina' is like that."

Paul finished off his rant by attempting to — no surprise there — mansplain mansplaining. Having witnessed enough of Paul's entirely uninformed and increasingly unhinged rant, thousands weighed in with some great insights, i.e. roasts, about Paul: