TikTok’s ‘clean girl hygiene’ discourse is just the latest version of thousands of years of virginity and purity culture
If you’ve ever made an extra effort to add pineapple to your diet or swapped synthetic underwear for cotton, you’re probably aware of the debate around vaginas that endlessly rumbles on. Concerns around the cleanliness, the look and the smell of vaginas have created a $22 billion global feminine hygiene industry, and the market is expected to reach $32 billion by 2028. On TikTok, thousands of people share tips 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.
Among these relatively innocent and often helpful videos, however, there is a growing number of videos about being a ‘clean girl’. In contrast to the well-known and now heavily criticised ‘clean girl aesthetic’, which is mainly fixated on a polished 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 maintain hygiene. Products and treatments like steaming can, in fact, often cause more harm than good. “Excessive vaginal ‘cleaning’ can cause not only infection due to pH disruption, but can remove the healthy bacteria inside our bodies,” explains sex educator Debbie Bere. “Vulvas should be washed with warm water and, at most, a gentle soap applied to the exterior and never inside.”
This hasn’t stopped a growing number 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 Tips I Wish I Knew Earlier’ dedicated to the subject. Another user provides her followers with tips on how to make their “vag a virgin again.” While misguided social media advice like this may seem relatively inconsequential, it’s a small but sinister and indicative part of a culture that has created the ‘revirginisation’ medical market.
In 2020 it was revealed that 22 private clinics in the UK were offering ‘virginity repair’ surgeries, where women, predominantly from Muslim or Jewish backgrounds, pay upwards of £4,000 to restore their hymen to prove they are ‘pure’ on their wedding night. The idea of sexual purity dates back thousands of years and can be found in cultures around the world. Various versions of the wedding 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 prevent the spreading of venereal diseases. This legislation essentially allowed police officers to arrest and inspect women’s vaginas (against their will) to determine whether or not they were prostitutes. While the CDA was suspended in 1883 thanks to the advocacy work of the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, until the 1980s virginity testing was done on women entering the UK on ‘fiancée visas’ as a method to determine whether the women were telling the truth about their reason for immigrating. Outside of the UK, in 2011 Egypt’s military forces performed virginity tests on women detained during 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 year for virginity tests.
Many of ‘clean girl’ videos are coming out of the US where, in the 1990s and early 2000s, a ‘purity culture’ movement emerged in reaction to the sexual liberalism of the 90s, the Aids crisis and the increasing explicitness of sex in the media. This evangelical Christian teaching conflated sexuality with morality, sex with being dirty and was built on an established religious ethic: no sex until marriage.
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During this period, the purity economy was booming, from purity-themed bibles, rallies and books to purity rings worn and promoted by celebrities like the Jones Brothers, Britney Spears and Selena Gomez. Young people signed purity pledges to showcase their vow of abstinence. Many were made to believe that by maintaining their virginity, they were honouring their relationship with God. This made them ‘good’, ‘godly’ and ‘pure’. Many people growing up in the 90s and 00s were exposed to these teachings, if not directly through church, school and family than through the media, and the effects are now 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 idea of female chastity (including premarital sexuality) is an aspect of male property rights.”
Today, this manifests as men asking women about their so-called body count on the first date. The more people you’ve slept with, the more ‘unhygienic’ you are. “If one key can open many locks it’s known as a master key, as opposed to if you have a lock that can be opened by any key, it’s a shitty lock,” as one man ridiculously said in a recent viral video. These men tend to forget that women are fully realised human beings with desires and urges as real as their own. “If a woman is an analogy to you then you’re not fucking ready to be talking to a women, and you should probably get fucked,” as the woman in the video replied.
Virginity is not something you gain or lose. It is a social construct designed to police women and those with vaginas, and prioritise penetrative sex.
Sex does not make you ‘dirty’, nor does the absence of sex make you ‘clean’. It all means nothing. Virginity is not something you gain or lose. It is a social construct designed to police women and those with vaginas, and prioritise penetrative sex. Many women’s desire to make their vaginas ‘virgins again’ is an attempt to achieve the unattainable patriarchal definition of womanhood. To (always) be good, virtuous and perfect.
Undoing centuries of thought around virginity and sexual purity will not happen overnight. But on TikTok, at least, the work can start to be done by ensuring that young people aren’t getting dangerous misinformation about their bodies. “We need better comprehensive sex education and TikTok to improve 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 educational perspective for using proper sexual anatomy terms like ‘clitoris’, ‘vagina’ and ‘penis’”.
As a result, Lee says, these policies force content creators into using slang terms that can “perpetuate harmful misunderstandings around our bodies and sex. Companies like Tiktok and Instagram must work with experts in this field to create better policies around sex education content on their platforms.”