Why Is There Poop on My Thong? An Investigation
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If you are a woman who wears a thong, perhaps you have encountered a moment wherein upon removal of said thong, there is something which appears to be poop-like on the string. You know how to wipe; hygiene is a priority to you. This is no doubt poop-plexing. What is causing this scourge? And how to avoid it?
The Problem
Anecdotally, women who favor a thong have been known to issue the complaint that they get rather upset when they have to poop after they’ve showered, because it ruins their underwear. No matter how aggressively they wipe, even if they dig in there a little bit, eventually a skid mark ends up on their thong.
The Pervasiveness
Hard to say how deep and dirty this issue runs. But online, women were obviously compelled as far as Yahoo! Answers to address it thusly:
Ladies how do you keep your thongs from getting poop on them after you go to the bathroom?
It seems like no matter how much I wipe I always end up with tracks…what’s your secret?
Sometimes, the questions aren’t so direct, but rather, poop-thong complaints are revealed in the comments’ sections of articles about the potential health risks of thongs. In a HuffPo piece about thong hygiene, commenter Tissa says, quite literally, “what do you expect?” After all, they are in your butt all day:

But the issues laid out in the article above are more of the infection-related-to-bacteria issue. To paraphrase: Sexy thongs may not be made of cotton, which means they are less breathable. Even if the crotch is cotton, the panel outside of it traps the moisture inside. The vulva is more vulnerable because there’s less material covering it, and the material moves more often, meaning bacteria has more opportunities to travel, particularly E.coli from the back to the front:
Infections can occur when the balance of the vaginal environment, including the moisture levels from vaginal secretions, is thrown off, says Dr. Ghofrany. The most common? Yeast infections and bacterial infections, mainly bacterial vaginosis. The extra bacteria usually manifests with increased discharge, which leads to what Dr. Ghofrany calls the “vicious cycle of thong use”: the increase in discharge leads to an increased use of panty liners, which leads to even more trapped moisture, which leads to more infections and more discharge.
Thongs also carry the risk of external irritation. “I see more patients with skin tags on their vulva and near their rectum, in the exact distribution of the thongs,” Dr. Ghofrany tells us. “I sometimes will be mid-pap and ask a patient, ‘So you wear thongs a lot?’ And their response is always ‘Ya! How can you tell?’ And it’s because of the skin tags, small ‘piles’ of soft tissue that occur from the skin being constantly rubbed in the same spot. These happen traditionally at bra lines and neck lines, and now increasingly at thong lines!”
Also, this can be worse on your period, due to the changing pH, an environment in which more bacteria can grow. The ultimate advice here is to maintain hygiene “down there” and also wash the underwear often. But nothing specific is addressed about the staining issue.
In response to a post from a mother whose daughter is a 10th grader wearing thong underwear, “Anonymous” felt compelled to snark this question at 1:33 a.m.:
don’t you love the poop stains from the butt crack in thong underwear?
A frustrated poster on youbemom.com added this to the Internet thong poop debate in February this year:

And then, there’s Twitter: