Please Do Not Buy Feminine Wash at The Dollar Store

Now there's a title. 

So I've been watching these TikTok compilations on YouTube because they're actually a good source of cleaning inspiration. There are lots of videos of people organizing the fridge, cleaning the stove, scrubbing the bathroom, etc. and every once in a while someone even has a useful tip. This desire to keep my apartment clean has led me into a series of algorithm directed rabbit holes that venture down into the world of cleaning culture. There are videos on every platform that talk about cleaning from an entertaining, educational, and even therapeutic way. 

The internet is all about spectacle and some of these aforementioned cleaning videos veer into a kind of excess that is both fascinating and concerning. There's an infamous TikTok video (which rumour asserts has been banned from the platform) of someone using at least four different chemicals to clean a toilet. This is not only wasteful but also has some serious potential to gas you to death. The cardinal rule of cleaning is that you don't mix cleaner types and there's rarely any need for more than one cleaner on a given surface anyway. A regular bottle of that blue gel-bleach works just fine and there's no need to risk making a chemical weapon to keep your bathroom in order. There's another unfortunate video of two young women cleaning up after an especially messy roommate. They have to clean his mold ridden room before a new roommate can move in and they resort to mixing bleach and vinegar to get the job done. They don't seem to have hurt themselves but chlorine gas can really fuck you up. 

But you're not here to read about household cleaning, you're here to read about vagina cleaning. I mean I'm going to connect the two, but let me keep things moving. 

The cleaning compilations eventually led to Dollar Tree haul videos where people show off all the random crap they just purchased at their local dollar store variant. Some of these videos are helpful tricks on how to get the most out of cheap products when you're on a budget, but most are just people buying in excess for the sake of content. As much as the conspicuous consumption is hard to watch, there is a kind of second-hand dopamine rush to be gained from watching someone bring home new shiny things. Well, there is until you see something completely asinine - why would you need a special devilled egg tray? Just use a plate. 

Where this starts to get really worrying is the beauty and skin care hauls from the Dollar Store. Not because cheap makeup and lotions are poisonous - most are just fine - but because not one, but several of these videos recommend buying feminine wash and wipes. Apparently you can get a great discount on a packet of perfumed wipes to make your genitals smell like coconuts or forest fruits if you head on down to the local 99c store. 

If you have a vagina you really just need to leave it alone. Unless that soap is some kind of prescription keep it out of there. Nothing should be going inside and even the vulva just needs a gentle once-over with regular mild soap. The vagina is home to its own happy little ecosystem and it doesn't need anything scented to help it along. I hate that we still live in a world where we are made to feel that women's bodies have an inherently offensive odour that can only be cured with more consumerism. 

These videos all have comments where someone warns that douching and scented wipes are not necessary or good for your bits but these comments all have replies from people who claim that they wash all the time but still stink. This is either a) shame imposed by the patriarchy, or b) a recurrent yeast infection from driving all the good bacteria away. Even if you're menstruating you shouldn't be scrubbing around with perfumed wipes, soaps, or even panty-liners.

Additionally, while I'm in the mood to be outraged, there was another video where a girl expressed her delight at finding a mini razor small enough to keep in her purse. Not her travel bag. Her purse. Like she's going to need it on the train or something. Are we expected to shave midday now? The pandemic has caused most of us to forget that shaving is even a concept but were we expected to be that hairless in the time before? Should I have been nervously excusing myself from dinner to get rid of the 5 o'clock shadow on my legs? 

The thing is, these aren't beauty rituals - they're cleaning rituals. These videos also aren't just about individual hygiene proclivities, but insight into the idea that women's bodies require constant specialized cleaning with special products. We are uniquely unclean as women and we had better reign ourselves in and keep our bodies under control. We should keep consuming product after product not just to be pretty, but to just be regularly and boringly clean. We have to get rid of the hair and the wrinkles and the odours and the discharge just to be acceptable to men who don't even wash their asses. The exhaustion of it all. 

As a white cis woman, I won't veer too far out of my lane here, but the idea that women are just kinda ~gross~ seems to extend across to my comrades both trans and cis and any race or class. Of course, I'm probably seen as less gross than people who are far more marginalized by white supremacy. Notions of uncleanliness, contamination, and degeneration are some of the key tools of racism - that's what eugenics are all about. I can't get mad at the videos that recommend dollar store cleaning wipes for your bits because many people face very real consequences for not being perfectly pristine at all times. Women are shamed and even subjected to violence for not living up to these standards. The women and girls who make these videos aren't con-artists working on behalf of Big Douche - they're just trying to help each other out. 

The other point of concern for me is that way that consumption and cleaning are tied to adulthood. That you prove your maturity but having a kind of hygienic mastery over both your internal and external space. I'm sure that passing tips and hacks on to others is an efficient way to prove that you have this kind of mastery. I'm sure that telling people not to buy those Dollar Tree wipes serves the same purpose. 

I'm just tired. I'm tired of the ways that my body is made into a public project over and over again.  I'm tired of the ways that no one - not even other women - will leave us and our bodies alone. 

I Can't Dress My Way Out of This

What are new years resolutions to grad students? What are my options? Write more? Read more? Publish more? Burn my heart out and become a research machine? All we have to give ourselves are admonishments to work more and produce more. So, in my defeat, I decided to sign up for one of those academic support websites because my supervisor offered to pay for it. 

Some of it seems all well and good - support forums, writing workshops, daily check-ins. All harmless if a little banal. Well, it looked that way until I ventured into one of those listicles about how to survive academic life from grad school to tenure. 

I've read hundreds of these. They're on Reddit and Facebook, they're on blogs, they've been written out as Medium articles, and they're even passed around in academic writing groups. I, like everyone else, consume them knowing they don't do any good. They're just survivor-bias dolled up to look like a viable path to jobs that don't exist anymore. Every one of them is the same even though they like to take on different characters - you have the bootstrap guy with rich parents, the follow-your-passions guy who was tenured in 1962, and the you-come-first-self-care lady who wants to sell you a book. 

The list I found on my pricey little writing site was essentially the first type and these are always especially rich when they're written by women. Oh you've never taken a personal day Jan? Good for you for evading the care burden foisted onto the rest of your female peers. I'm sure you've worked so much harder than the rest of us. This list was nothing special, but it had a line that made the whole project of academic self-help turn from generally boring to actively mocking for me. The eighth bullet point advised me with: "Don't start dressing either like a character out of Kafka or a like a hooker."

And you know what? Fuck it. 

That's all it is in the end for women isn't it? Aesthetics. Sexual aesthetics. This site appears to be made up almost entirely of women and here we are giving each other tips for surviving a system we did not make and it all boils right back down to whether or not we're just whores in the end. This was a recommendation for what to do after you earn tenure. You can be a tenured professor and you are still at risk of looking like a hooker and nothing else. It all just dissolves away if someone sees you as sexually promiscuous. Have we really come a long way at all, babies?

This is not to mention the umbrage I take at the idea that hookers are somehow antithetical to education. Are there no knowledgeable hookers? Can women not have both a sexuality and something else to do or are our sex lives still that all-consuming? Here were are selling our intellect and our personal time for barely a living wage and we're going to pretend we're better than sex workers? As if capitalism doesn't make whores of us all? I imagine I could learn far more far better from a hooker than any uptight ~professional~ who doesn't have the courage to realize that we've always already been seen. That modest skirt suit won't save you from anything and nor should it. We shouldn't have to put up such a feeble defense against the students and faculty that harass us. They hate us already and buttoning your blouse won't change their mind. 

If the whole thing is really this fragile can I even avoid being mistaken for a hooker? If it's already a binary between depressive caricature and prostitute does it actually matter how I dress? Why is any of this my fault? Do you really expect me to be so naïve as to think I can dress my way out from under the patriarchy?

And you know what? I am naïve. I really thought that hanging around academia was the best way to live out a feminist life. A place where I could teach and write for the movement. I've been a fool to think that this world was any less damned than the next. This is just one more place where women line up to spit on each other and then convince themselves that it's for our own good. 

Any woman who advises another not to dress like a whore is deluding herself - the world already sees us that way and no amount of respectability will make it go away. Call me defeatist and call me bitter, but I refuse to buy misogyny sold to me as power or safety. 

Dress how you want and let the whole thing burn.