Women travel. Lies about us travel farther.
There are things women are told about their bodies in clinics and classrooms, but more insidiously in kitchens, in dorm rooms, on WhatsApp threads, at bridal showers - essentially in the spaces between older and younger women where knowledge is passed without being formally named.
How to clean.
How to smell.
How to prepare for sex.
How to avoid pregnancy.
How to manage a period.
How to endure pain (and her lesser cousins: How to endure pain to please your husband, How to endure pain to be strong for your children, and How to endure pain to be a stellar daughter-in-law)
How to recognise when something is wrong and, more importantly, when it is not worth mentioning.
It often sounds practical, and most of it even looks protective.
But much of it is wrong, yet almost all of it persists.
In this article, we unpack common myths about women’s health, including vaginal hygiene, contraception, hormonal changes, and conditions like PCOS and endometriosis.
Nothing survives this long by accident.
What is striking is how coherent these myths are. They rarely appear as obvious falsehoods but are assembled instead from fragments that, over time, harden into rules: a piece of lived experience here, a side effect observed somewhere, a warning passed down through the ages without context, a silence where explanation should have been.
Rules about what is normal. What is clean. What is shameful. What must be fixed.
What must simply be endured.
And because intimate health sits at the intersection of biology, culture, and privacy, these rules are rarely interrogated in full view. They are prescribed to us from a tender age - followed, adjusted, and quietly reinforced without any room for questioning.
What we call care is not always care.
How women are taught to manage their bodies is the most obvious illustration of this falsehood.
Many of our African cultures purport that young women, usually at the time of puberty, must learn to actively clean their vaginas, with soap, antiseptics, sometimes even harsher solutions, because anything less is neglect and a slippery slope towards undesirability. While the intention may be hygiene, the effect is often disruption. Almost always to the woman's own detriment.
The vaginal milieu is not passive. It is a self-regulating ecosystem, typically dominated by bacteria that maintain an acidic pH and help suppress harmful organisms. Interfering with that balance does not make the body cleaner; it, in fact, makes it more vulnerable.
But the myth persists, because the alternative (that the body knows how to maintain itself) is rarely explained with the same confidence.
Control is often fear, disguised as guidance.
Elsewhere, the myths are less about cleaning and, I dare say, more about control.
Contraception remains one of the most persistently misunderstood areas of women’s health. The central themes around dissuading women from contraception specifically are that it causes infertility and damages the womb, that emergency contraception is something more treacherous than what it is - a hormonal intervention that simply delays ovulation to prevent fertilisation. These beliefs are sometimes rooted in real experiences, such as side effects, poor counselling, and mistrust of systems that have not always served women well.
But over time, they accumulate into hesitation, which, in the context of women's health, has real consequences.
What is repeated long enough stops being questioned.
And then there are the myths that do not present as myths at all, because they are so deeply normalised that they are barely recognised as beliefs.
- Periods must be endured quietly, even when they are debilitating.
- Severe pain is simply part of being a woman, rather than a possible sign of a gynaecological disorder (endometriosis has entered the chat).
- Heavy bleeding is just a minor inconvenience, certainly not a dire situation to merit more comfortable, more protective, more predictable sanitary products.
- Irregular cycles, unexplained weight changes, excessive hair growth or loss, acne are simply things to be managed, not investigated. What vanity, after all, to seek a holistic diagnosis.
What is missing here is not just information, but the permission to interpret symptoms differently. And this pattern continues across the life course.
Perimenopause arrives without introduction. Sleep shifts, mood changes, weight redistribution, cognition feels less reliable, and yet many women do not immediately recognise these as part of a hormonal transition. Menopause itself is still spoken about in fragments, often reduced to hot flashes, as though the broader physiological shift does not exist.
Postpartum experiences follow a similar logic. A woman feels unlike herself after childbirth in every sense of self (emotionally, physically, cognitively), and what she is often told is that this is simply motherhood. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is also depression. Sometimes it is thyroid dysfunction. Sometimes it is the combined effect of hormonal withdrawal, sleep deprivation, and a life that has reorganised overnight.
But because the language to describe these states is incomplete, the experience is often internalised rather than examined.
Biology is neutral. We made it otherwise.
Even infection, one of the most common reasons women interact with the healthcare system, is filtered through this same structure.
Symptoms that are biologically ordinary, like discharge, odour, and irritation, are quickly moralised. They become signals not just of imbalance, but of something done wrong.
So care is delayed and treatment becomes experimental with over-the-counter antibiotics, home remedies, partial solutions such that by the time the healthcare system is engaged formally, the condition is often more complex than it needed to be.
In the absence of clarity, something else takes its place.
It would be easy to say this is a failure of education if it were that simple. These myths persist because they offer guidance when formal systems are distant, inconsistent, or difficult to navigate. They provide language where none has been made accessible. They fill the space between lived experience and clinical explanation.
In that sense, they are not irrational but adaptive within a maladjusted ecosystem.
But because they are built on fragments, they are limited and cannot fully account for the system they are trying to describe.
And the body is a system: hormonal, microbial, immunological, neurological; overlapping, interacting, shifting across time. What appears as a single symptom is rarely just that. It is usually the visible edge of something more complex.
When that complexity is reduced to rules such as "clean this," "avoid that," "endure this," understanding narrows, and with it go our options.
Most women are not careless about their health. We are attentive, observant, and responsive, even in the absence of clarity.
The point is not why myths exist. The more poignant question is why, in a world with so much accumulated knowledge and know-how, they are still doing so much of the work of explaining women's health.
[If you’re new here, start with: Glossary of Women’s Health Terms]