Life

Uhh... 10 Reasons to Lift Weights With Your Vagina

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

In a YouTube video titled 10 Reasons to Lift Weights with your Vagina , sex and relationship coach Kim Anami offers a multi-pronged defense of vaginal weight lifting. Tell me I'm not alone in having no idea this was even a thing? But apparently "the ancient Taoist practice" of vaginal weight lifting is to kegels what Crossfit is to Zumba. I just don't know about this, you guys.

Anami's website — kungfuvagina.com — is awful. After promising you "bodacious" love and sex, it states (in bright pink) that "most women are sexually disconnected and have a weak vagina...DO YOU?" Oh my.

There's also a quiz on the site if you want to "discover the truth" about your vagina.

Anami's 10 Reasons video is cheesy, a bit terrifying, and a bit intriguing. Apparently, the Guinness Book of World Records holder has lifted 31 pounds with her vagina, which is incredible, but also not very compelling as Reason #3, "become a world record holder" (no thanks!). It is, I suppose, a better incentive than Reason #5: "Be the life of the party." The video actually features a woman shooting a ping-pong ball out of her vagina with the voiceover "Think the ping pong trick only happens in Thailand?" "Bodacious" way to trot out racist stereotypes, lady.

HuffPost's Sarah Barness talked to sex therapist Dr. Laura Berman to dissect the more serious claims made in the video, including the charge that kegels (the act of contracting pelvic floor muscles) don't work. "Kegels can strengthen vaginal muscles without resistance in the same way yoga strengthens the core with a pose," Barness writes. According to Berman, women who want to strengthen vaginal muscles and find kegels ineffective "might be suffering from pelvic floor damage, or more likely, they might be doing them incorrectly."

Images: Kim Anami/Youtube; Giphy