Tighter, For Him

Someone in a Pure Romance boardroom looked at the vagina—specifically its lived-in condition after years of actual sex—and thought: we can fix that. The result is Like a Virgin, a tightening cream that costs about twenty-five dollars and promises to undo what time and a healthy sex life have done. You apply a small amount internally, the alum in the formula contracts things, and supposedly everything feels newer. Tighter. More like the version that existed before anyone got involved.

The marketing copy is almost admirably honest about its own logic: it makes you feel tighter for him and makes him feel bigger. Two insecurities addressed simultaneously, one astringent paste, twenty-five bucks. That’s efficient. There’s also something clarifying about a product that names itself after a Madonna song and just gets on with it—no clinical euphemism, no wellness language, just the direct implication that virginal tightness is the benchmark and everything since has been a decline requiring correction. I’ve thought about this from every angle I can manage and I still can’t find the version of that premise that isn’t a bit fucked up. Though I’ll also admit I’ve probably benefited from the insecurity it sells, which is its own uncomfortable thing to sit with.

The alternative—Yoni Yoga—has its own flavor of absurdity, wrapped in more respectable language. Ultimately it’s not my call. But the premise that a sexually active body at thirty needs resetting to something it resembled at seventeen is something I’d push back on whether the product existed or not. If you’ve landed elsewhere, Pure Romance is ready for you.