In the event you’ve ever made an additional effort so as to add pineapple to your eating regimen or swapped synthetic underwear for cotton, you’re probably aware of the talk around vaginas that endlessly rumbles on. Concerns across the cleanliness, the look and the smell of vaginas have created a $22 billion global feminine hygiene industry, and the market is predicted to achieve $32 billion by 2028. On TikTok, hundreds of individuals share suggestions and tricks for vaginal hygiene – the hashtag #femininehygieneproducts has 31.3 million views on TikTok, with the #femininehygiene hashtag racking up 1.4 billion views.

Amongst these relatively innocent and infrequently helpful videos, nonetheless, there may be a growing variety of videos about being a ‘clean girl’. In contrast to the well-known and now heavily criticised ‘clean girl aesthetic’, which is especially fixated on a refined yet supposedly effortless physical appearance, this clean girl discussion is firmly rooted in age-old conversations around sexual purity and virginity. 

Vaginas are self-cleaning machines and don’t require internal washes or sprays to keep up hygiene. Products and coverings like steaming can, the truth is, often cause more harm than good. “Excessive vaginal ‘cleansing’ could cause not only infection as a consequence of pH disruption, but can remove the healthy bacteria inside our bodies,” explains sex educator Debbie Bere. “Vulvas ought to be washed with warm water and, at most, a delicate soap applied to the outside and never inside.”

This hasn’t stopped a growing variety of TikTok users from sharing, promoting and selling products and remedies for “vaginal freshness”. These promise to eliminate vaginal odour and – apparently – “tighten” the vagina. One TikTok user has a series on her page called ‘Clean Girl Suggestions I Wish I Knew Earlier’ dedicated to the topic. One other user provides her followers with recommendations on the way to make their “vag a virgin again.” While misguided social media advice like this will seem relatively inconsequential, it’s a small but sinister and indicative a part of a culture that has created the ‘revirginisation’ medical market. 

In 2020 it was revealed that 22 private clinics within the UK were offering ‘virginity repair’ surgeries, where women, predominantly from Muslim or Jewish backgrounds, pay upwards of £4,000 to revive their hymen to prove they’re ‘pure’ on their wedding night. The thought of sexual purity dates back hundreds of years and could be present in cultures world wide. Various versions of the marriage night ‘bed sheet test’ have existed in communities in countries including India, Armenia, Georgia, Tonga, Greece and Spain.

In 1864, the Contagious Disease Act (CDA) was passed by the UK Parliament to stop the spreading of venereal diseases. This laws essentially allowed cops to arrest and inspect women’s vaginas (against their will) to find out whether or not they were prostitutes. While the CDA was suspended in 1883 because of the advocacy work of the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, until the Eighties virginity testing was done on women entering the UK on ‘fiancée visas’ as a technique to find out whether the ladies were telling the reality about their reason for immigrating. Outside of the UK, in 2011 Egypt’s military forces performed virginity tests on women detained in the course of the revolution, while in 2020 rapper T.I. made headlines when he revealed that he took his then 18-year-old daughter to the gynaecologist every yr for virginity tests.

A lot of ‘clean girl’ videos are coming out of the US where, within the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, a ‘purity culture’ movement emerged in response to the sexual liberalism of the 90s, the Aids crisis and the increasing explicitness of sex within the media. This evangelical Christian teaching conflated sexuality with morality, sex with being dirty and was built on a longtime religious ethic: no sex until marriage. 

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During this era, the purity economy was booming, from purity-themed bibles, rallies and books to purity rings worn and promoted by celebrities just like the Jones Brothers, Britney Spears and Selena Gomez. Young people signed purity pledges to showcase their vow of abstinence. Many were made to imagine that by maintaining their virginity, they were honouring their relationship with God. This made them ‘good’, ‘godly’ and ‘pure’. Many individuals growing up within the 90s and 00s were exposed to those teachings, if circuitously through church, school and family than through the media, and the results at the moment are being felt.

The male obsession with virginity is all about control. Ideas around cleanliness and virginity only exist because men view women as property, to be owned and ‘used’ only by them. Before paternity tests, men needed to know that their sons, who would inherit their property, were legitimate heirs. Thus virginity became a commodity. In 1971, sociologist Professor Randall Collins wrote, “the concept of female chastity (including premarital sexuality) is a side of male property rights.”

Today, this manifests as men asking women about their so-called body count on the primary date. The more people you’ve slept with, the more ‘unhygienic’ you’re. “If one key can open many locks it’s often known as a master key, versus if you’ve a lock that could be opened by any key, it’s a shitty lock,” as one man ridiculously said in a recent viral video. These men are inclined to forget that girls are fully realised human beings with desires and urges as real as their very own. “If a girl is an analogy to you then you definately’re not fucking able to be talking to a women, and it is best to probably get fucked,” as the lady within the video replied.

Virginity shouldn’t be something you gain or lose. It’s a social construct designed to police women and people with vaginas, and prioritise penetrative sex.

Sex doesn’t make you ‘dirty’, nor does the absence of sex make you ‘clean’. All of it means nothing. Virginity shouldn’t be something you gain or lose. It’s a social construct designed to police women and people with vaginas, and prioritise penetrative sex. Many ladies’s desire to make their vaginas ‘virgins again’ is an try and achieve the unattainable patriarchal definition of womanhood. To (at all times) be good, virtuous and excellent.

Undoing centuries of thought around virginity and sexual purity is not going to occur overnight. But on TikTok, at the very least, the work can begin to be done by ensuring that young people aren’t getting dangerous misinformation about their bodies. “We’d like higher comprehensive sex education and TikTok to enhance their policies,” says Anna Lee, head engineer at sex tech company Lioness. “I’ve seen so many certified sex educators, sex therapists and even doctors get banned for talking about sex from an academic perspective for using proper sexual anatomy terms like ‘clitoris’, ‘vagina’ and ‘penis’”. 

In consequence, Lee says, these policies force content creators into using slang terms that may “perpetuate harmful misunderstandings around our bodies and sex. Corporations like Tiktok and Instagram must work with experts on this field to create higher policies around sex education content on their platforms.”