Reaction to Virgin Island’s ‘vagina sniff’ moment doesn’t pass the smell test

Personally, I’m glad Bertie sniffed his finger and said those words out loud (Picture: Channel 4)

‘I’ve just been sick into my mouth’.

This comment was left under a Channel 4 Instagram video of contestant Bertie on season 2 of Virgin Island. In the clip, Bertie was examining the genital anatomy of his intimacy coordinator Kat – and when I realised that the Instagram comment had been written by a woman, I felt upset and disappointed.

After all, Kat had simply been trying to help Bertie understand what her vulva looks like, giving him a free education that, if we’re honest, many men desperately need.

It’s an undeniably unusual scenario: a woman sitting naked on TV, asking a man to insert his fingers into her vagina and feel around. But it was what Bertie did next that provoked the most visceral reactions.

‘I’m just curious’, he said to Kat giggling, sniffing his fingers after pulling them out of Kat’s vagina.

‘Okay, it doesn’t smell of anything’, he concluded.

And because of this, people were very unhappy.

‘I’m gunna be sick’, read another comment, this time on Channel 4’s TikTok.

I felt sad to see this response, because I wholly believe that adults need a better understanding of sex and intimacy, and this was a perfect example of it.

Because reacting as if smelling vaginal discharge is something vomit-inducing is childish – it conflates female genitalia to something disgusting.

(Picture: Channel 4)

It’s these kinds of attitudes that prove that vaginas continue to be truly misunderstood, and that can lead to them becoming a source of shame and embarrassment. 

As a teenager, I wasn’t accurately taught what vaginal discharge looked or smelt like. When I saw white discharge in my underwear, I had no one to turn to. 

I thought there was something wrong with me – so instead of putting my underwear in the family wash basket, I would hurriedly and secretly clean them myself in embarrassment.

We should always be exploring, touching or smelling our vaginas

It wasn’t until a good few years later, in my early 20s, that a friend talked about discharge openly to me and I first realised I was perfectly normal.

Another revelation came much later, in 2015, when I watched a film called Obvious Child starring Jenny Slate, where she sleeps with a man, and then pulls apart her underwear that has stuck together from leftover excessive discharge.

It was finally becoming clear to me how common discharge was. 

And it wasn’t until I researched it myself years later still, that I realised it wasn’t true when a boyfriend said he didn’t want to go down on me because vaginas ‘smelled’.

There’s a lot of love for cast member Bertie already (Picture: Channel 4)

Our nether-regions have been made to seem disgusting by patriarchal systems in order to contain women as an inferior gender – and that’s outrageous, because, quite frankly, they are absolutely gorgeous.

And if something does smell, it means you should go get yourself checked, not hide behind the shame that has been unfairly concocted.

Personally, I’m glad Bertie sniffed his finger and said those words out loud. Because the reaction that followed shows how we still look down on vaginas – and, it seems, still consider them smelly or disgusting. 

People claiming they ‘want to be sick’ obviously do not understand the female anatomy. This free lesson that Bertie got was aired on TV, reaching hundreds of thousands of people who desperately need to understand that there is nothing wrong with our bodies.

We should always be exploring, touching or smelling our vaginas. 

We’ve been told our vulvas need to look, smell and be a certain way (Picture: Getty Images)

And we should respectfully and consensually, be letting others explore us too. Their curiosity shouldn’t be interpreted as perversion, as Bertie’s was. 

When we have that kind of open and accepting curiosity, we don’t end up hyper-focusing on non-issues like smell, colour or shape. 

It is, ultimately, a marketing ploy – female hygiene products have been created off the back of these falsehoods. These products change the pH balance on our very self-regulating genitalia, and can often cause more issues than it’s worth. But nonetheless, these products have been marketed to people who have been told they are unclean.

Insecurities about the ways our vulvas look have been similarly exploited and commodified with everything from bleaches to labial surgery.

And it’s absurd, all of it.

We’ve been told our vulvas need to look, smell and be a certain way – a perfect eco-system for the pleasure of men. But the reality is that we absolutely do not need to do anything to our genitalia.

We need people, especially other women, to unlearn the repulsion we’re taught to associate with our bodies.

And we should respectfully and consensually, be letting others explore us too. Their curiosity shouldn’t be interpreted as perversion, as Bertie’s was (Picture: Channel 4)

We are perfect as we are.

Thank you Bertie for telling the world that a healthy vagina does not smell. 

I’m not disgusted by him. I’m delighted.

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