teens

Teen Girls Are Trying to Convince the Internet That They Eat Their Tampons

Tampon hoax on Tik-Tok.
Photo: Getty Images, Tik Tok

There is no better place to sit back and enjoy the sheer brilliance of teen girls than on TikTok, where VSCO girls and e-girls alike call for general strikes and create award-worthy short films. When teen girls come together, they become even more powerful, as evidenced by some truly exquisite new TikTok content: a nonsensical hoax in which teen girls are claiming that they eat their used tampons to reabsorb any blood they’ve lost.

This TikTok trend started, as they pretty much all do, with one sharp-minded (and probably slightly bored) girl. A few months back, 18-year-old Caroline Majcher uploaded a video in which she performatively complained about how “guys are so clueless.” Then, she offered her evidence for this claim: that they “had no idea that girls eat their tampon after they’re done with it to reabsorb all the blood that they just lost.”

While this piece of high art is objectively hilarious, it didn’t exactly garner widespread acclaim when Majcher uploaded it. But in the past week, something beautiful happened: Other teen girls, none of whom appear to have been in on Majcher’s joke, started to post their own versions of the tampon-eating videos. “Why do boys still not believe that we eat our tampons to reabsorb the blood we lost??” reads the text on one video. In another video, one TikToker wrote, “Why don’t any of the guys believe us?” In the comment section under the latter video, one user responded, “Boys will never understand.”

Okay, but … do they? As in, are some teenage boys so gullible that they actually believe girls eat their bloody tampons? Majcher said in an interview with BuzzFeed News, “I thought I could probably make up a lie about girls and any boy would believe it,” but it’s not exactly clear they do. There are some TikTok videos of boys responding to the hoax, but it’s difficult to discern if they’re genuinely convinced or just playing along with it.

In fact, after doing a deep dive into this mad hoax, I don’t even know if I want puberty-aged boys to believe the unhinged claim. It would probably bring the teen girls immense happiness if they did, but for the sake of teen boys’ health, I hope they don’t.

Teen Girls Attempt to Convince Internet They Eat Tampons