What Happens When Women Try Tightening Their Vaginas At Home With Vinegar

Since time immemorial, women have been putting things up inside of our vaginas. From jade eggs to wasp galls to stone dildos and everything in between, there is nothing we will not attempt to put into our vaginas.

We do this for different reasons, but mainly we do it because women's vaginas are allegedly always failing us in some major way.

Historically, we consider our vaginas to be either dirty and unclean or loose and unappealing due to childbirth, or maybe even all of the above.

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So there's pretty much nothing women won't try in order to make sure our vaginas are in tip-top shape for our sexual partners. Or just, you know, for society in general.

If you doubt me, never forget that there was a very real period of time during which women regularly ATTEMPTED TO CLEAN THEIR VAGINAS AND PREVENT PREGNANCY USING ACTUAL LYSOL, because the cosmetic industry (and people doing their damnedest to sell Lysol) told us that what we were packing between our legs was so god-awful that it literally needed to be BURNED CLEAN WITH FIRE. 

No thanks.

More currently, you can still go to your local pharmacy and buy vaginal douche, a product that is just as demoralizing as it is totally unnecessary.

Women mostly douche nowadays because they are embarrassed about the way their vagina smells.

What most of these poor souls don't realize is that their vagina, self-cleaning oven of wonder that it is, is perfectly balanced via its own levels of bacteria and PH. Introducing the artificial smells and ingredients of a douche is a recipe not just for WORSE smells but for a whole other world of woe: I'm looking at you, yeast infections. 

Another strange practice that isn't as bad as bleach, if only because IT IS NOT LITERAL BLEACH, is the concept of a taking a vinegar bath.

Vinegar baths, which have been a common practice for hundreds (if not thousands of years), consist of women sitting in vinegar with the belief that in so doing they will tighten their both vulva and their vaginal opening.

Another way some women attempt to getting the vinegar into their bodies and thus all the better to tighten their vaginas is by drinking a few glasses of "vinegar water" on the daily.

So, is there any science to this? Absolutely not.

If you sit in a bath with just a cup full of vinegar added to the water, it's going to burn like hell.

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And yeah, when you get out of the water it might feel like your vagina is tighter, but that sensation will only last for a couple of minutes at most.

So, why do women believe this old wives tale that vinegar is the fountain of youth for vaginal rejuvenation?

Picture your skin when you first get out of the bathtub after a long soak. When you spend an extended amount time in the water, your natural oils get rinsed away, leaving your post-bath skin feeling tightly pulled. That tightness is shockingly NOT a sign that your Calgon has magically transported your skin go back in time.

Rather, it's a sign that your skin now needs hydration, something you often treat immediately with moisturizer.

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Vinegar itself is also known as an astringent, which means that it causes your skin and other body tissues to contract. The effects of an astringent are temporary at best and terribly drying at worst.

If you strip away the essential oils of your face, that's one thing, but stripping away the natural lubrication coating your vaginal opening and your vulva can have deeply harmful effects.

If you use vinegar to tighten your vagina what you will wind up with is a dry and irritated vagina. A vagina that's dry and irritated might feel "tighter" temporarily to your partner, but it's also going to leave you more prone to micro-tears, which in turn can lead to painful infections.

If you want to tighten your vagina, please do not try to tighten it with vinegar.

Instead, concentrate on strengthening your pelvic floor using vaginal weights.

Or you could even just by performing vaginal strengthening exercises like Kegels.

I also think that it's worth mentioning that your vagina is powerful.

It literally gives life. It's also a muscle, one you use frequently even if you aren't always aware of it. So be wary of a man who makes you feel like your vagina needs to be tightened in the first place.

Let he with the tiny penis cast the first stone. 

Rebecca Jane Stokes is a sex, humor and lifestyle writer living in Brooklyn, New York with her cat, Batman. She hosts the sex, love, and dating advice show, Becca After Dark on YourTango's Facebook Page every Tuesday and Thursday at 10:15 pm Eastern. For more of her work, check out her Tumblr.