Bloke ridiculed after ‘mansplaining’ the difference between a vagina and vulva to a female gynaecologist
One man just didn't know when to stop
A MAN is in the midst of a Twitter storm after he tried to mansplain the vagina to a female gynaecologist, and when that didn’t work tried to mansplain mansplaining itself.
Paul Bullen, from Chicago, left a comment on an article about a photo series called ‘Me and my vulva: 100 women reveal all’.
Paul, who claims to be an ‘editor, writer, teacher, researcher; Ph.D. and M.A., from the University of Chicago’, corrected them on their very obvious mistake, tweeting: “The correct word is vagina”.
Alarm bells began ringing across the internet, but luckily Dr Jennifer Gunter, a woman and also a gynaecologist, came to the rescue.
She very politely corrected Paul, and if that wasn’t enough also included a handy diagram for clarification.
She said: “Hi, I am a gynaecologist and an international expert on both their vagina and the vulva.
“These are vulvas. I wrote this post with a handy Venn diagram to help people separate the two. Enjoy!”
Dr Jennifer is a long-time campaigner to get people to use the correct terminology when it comes to female genitalia.
She linked Paul back to a 2015 article where she wrote: “I’m sick of people forgetting the poor vulva and referring to everything in the female lower reproductive tract as vagina.”
But Paul was still not convinced.
Instead he wrote a string of tweets proving why he was right, and the expert was wrong.
Some key points Paul tried to make were: “I’m claiming the word vagina has two meanings.
“I’m addressing language use, not anatomy per se.
“To summarize, many words have both a strict meaning and broader meaning (species and genius).
“’Vagina’ is like that.”
Dictionary.com waded into the saga, helpfully linking to the word ‘vulva’, saying “well, actually”, so Paul could educate himself a bit.
To summarise Paul, you’re so wrong the dictionary itself felt as if they needed to get involved.
And when none of that worked – Paul decided to mansplain mansplaining itself.
When Dr Jennifer pointed out that Paul had done a teeny-tiny bit of mansplaining, accompanying her tweet with another reference for poor Paul, he seemed to be an expert on that subject too.
She said: “So @paulbullen here is where you mansplained to me – the correct use for the article was vulva, the common use vagina would not have applied here as it was specifically about loving vulvas and not a general lower repro tract article.”
Wrong again Dr Jennifer, as Paul points out: “That’s an incorrect use of the word mansplaining.
“Not that I want to legitimize the term, but by its own definition it requires more than just have just a man who is explaining something.
“Even if some in the audience are women.”
Rumour has it Paul is still digging his hole, but his tweets have since gone viral much to the ridicule of Twitter.
Commenting on the thread, one person said: “Paul, dude. You’re mansplaining to a gynaecologist.
“A woman gynaecologist. She’s a lady with lady bits who work on other lady’s bits as a profession.
“I’m embarrassed for you.”
Another person tweeted: “He just… mansplained…mansplaining????!!!”
A third posted: “So according to this mansplaining it’d be acceptable vernacular to call a man’s balls his penis since it’s there somewhere in the vicinity.”
Also in shock, this person tweeted: “Dude, she literally wrote a book on this topic. Maybe you should preorder?”
And this person said: “Honestly I just want Paul to show us where he thinks the clitoris is. WITHOUT Googling.”
Another commented: “I love how he had to move the goal post, then explain some more.”
Fabulous has reached out to Paul for a comment.
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