dear asking for a friend, i am the mother of three teenage daughters. recently, i overheard the oldest, who is 18, talking to the youngest (13) about using a tampon to get drunk. apparently teenagers are soaking tampons in vodka and putting them in their vaginas to get drunk faster. is this a thing? please, please, please tell me it’s not.
dear alcohol-is-not-for-vaginas ,
we at asking for a friend can sense — and completely understand — your desperation to confirm this as simply a weird urban myth so you can put it behind you. unfortunately, a quick survey of the twenty-somethings in our newsroom tells us that the appropriately named ‘vodka tampons’ is in fact a thing . but even if it were the stuff of legend, the fact that your kids are talking about vodka tampons has us at asking for a friend feeling a sense of urgency to explore it further.
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obviously, vodka-soaked tampons are a bad idea for a whole bunch of reasons, but your teens should probably know that the risk/reward ratio is highly tipped towards risk with virtually no reward. according to nasello, a tampon can swell up to three times its size and is designed to hold on to fluid that is absorbed, which means you won’t get any sort of high. plus, it burns . it’s worth saying again — it burns .
so alcohol-is-not-for-vaginas, we leave you with this. are vodka tampons a thing? possibly, although nasello says she has never seen a case of an alcohol-soaked tampon-related injury in her 30 years of practice. are they risky? yes. if you are asking us for advice and we think you are, it’s time to have a chat with your teens outlining in detail the complications and worst-case scenarios of putting alcohol-soaked anything near their nether regions. after all, no kid wants to end up in the hospital having to explain burns to their vagina or anus, or worse suffer a life-threatening infection.
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