A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.

Girls Eat Their Tampons

What this meme means

The meme “Girls Eat Their Tampons” grew out of a playful TikTok trend in which young women on camera claimed they eat used tampons to “replace the lost blood.” The format runs on the absurdity of the claim and the reactions of puzzled viewers, not on any real behavior.

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What happens on screen

The screenshots show a black-and-white clip from a vertical TikTok player: a young woman with long loose hair looks into the camera with a sly half-smile and delivers two lines, shown as subtitles. First she asks why boys don’t believe that girls eat their used tampons. Then she “explains” that otherwise the body would supposedly “die from lack of blood.” The video’s author caption and the like and repost counters show that the clip gained considerable reach in recommendations.

The facial expression and intonation are deliberately serious, and that is what creates the comic effect. The claim is so absurd and physiologically wrong that it reads as trolling rather than a confession. The woman in the video is not named and does not appear as a target of mockery. She is one of many participants in a flash mob that consciously plays on others’ gullibility.

Origins: from a fake post to a flash mob

The roots of the joke go back to the early 2010s, when a post circulated in the English-speaking internet about a woman named Giovanna Ploumen, who was accused of eating tampons. The story was quickly identified as a hoax and became a textbook example of a viral fake, one that grew its own memes and parody videos.

Several years later, now on TikTok, a similar storyline was revived as a mass flash mob. Dozens of teenage girls began posting similar clips in which they deadpan “confessed” to eating tampons to “replace blood.” The format was a self-ironic answer to skeptical comments from boys online, and it quickly spread across the platform as a recognizable template with distinctive subtitles.

Why the joke worked

The meme’s core mechanism is the mismatch between the calm, confident delivery and the outrageousness of the claim itself. A viewer unfamiliar with the context loses their footing for a few seconds: is this a prank, trolling, or someone’s genuine misconception about physiology? It is exactly this uncertainty that prompts reposts with surprised or indignant comments.

The joke also plays on a gender contrast. The address is formally to “boys,” who supposedly don’t believe in the habit, though the habit itself is invented from start to finish. This turns the clip into a kind of test of the audience’s credulity rather than a credible confession.

How the meme is used in captions

In posts and reposts, the meme is most often accompanied by short ironic comments such as “when the girls pranked the whole internet” or “and I actually believed it, shame on me.” Such captions mark the moment the prank is exposed. The reader effectively admits to having believed the absurd claim for a second.

There are also variants where the meme is used more broadly, as a metaphor for any ridiculous viral hoax that part of the audience somehow believed, with no direct connection to the original tampon theme.

The meme’s place in the history of internet hoaxes

“Girls Eat Their Tampons” belongs to a family of pranks built on a false physiological claim delivered with a completely straight face. Such formats periodically revive on new platforms. What began as a text post turned, years later, into a short video with subtitles adapted to TikTok’s language.

Sources differ on who launched the video version of the flash mob and when. No clear date or name of the originator appears in open materials, so the exact moment of the joke’s renewed spike on TikTok remains unestablished.