A running joke, or an ongoing complaint depending on who you’re talking to, is that men, particularly straight men, either don’t know how or don’t care enough to maintain basic standards of hygiene, which can be boiled down to the simple claim that “men don’t wash their asses.”


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This claim has spawned countless viral posts, as well as Reddit threads and articles. A disturbingly frequent complaint on subreddits like Am I the Asshole or r/Relationships is that the poster’s boyfriend doesn’t take care of himself in the asshole region, resulting in things like skid marks being left in underwear that the partner is left to clean.



It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how widespread this issue is, or what the causes are, but we may have found one potential culprit on r/Hygiene. Turns out, a moderator there pinned a post on the topic of anal hygiene a little over a month ago that reminded users to wash the area with water every day but to avoid using soaps, as they “reduce the natural oils that protect the anus and may make the area dry and itchy.”


Their source is a legitimate one — an Australian government-funded health information portal — but the language may be what’s causing some of the confusion: It’s not recommended to use soap on the anus itself, which is to say, any interior part of the body. Instead, if you need to clean inside, use something like a shower head or a bidet, limiting the soap usage to the crack and exterior area (ideally something fragrance-free).



Twitter users had a few alternative suggestions, however, including peppermint-scented Dr. Bronner’s soap so it can feel like your “butt is smoking a menthol.” As for the Reddit post, comments are turned off, so we’ll probably never know what drove that moderator to make a post urging people not to use soap to wash their asses the only pinned post in the subreddit.