There are innumerable horrors hiding in the bathrooms of straight guys everywhere. Just ask the MEL staff, who’ve collectively found stacks of yeast infection medication (an ex wife’s), a pile of dirty dishes, and most disturbingly, absolutely nothing at all. But where once these frightful sights were mere anecdotes for chic dinner parties, now they’re plastered all over the internet for the whole world to see.
By this I mean there’s a new trend on TikTok. This time, it involves girls sneakily rating the bathrooms of the guys they’re about to — or just did — hook up with. They all follow the same pattern: a girl is whispering in a nondescript bathroom, as she films the variety of everyday items, beauty products and (often gross) idiosyncrasies she comes across. The #RatingBathrooms hashtag currently has over 63 million views.
Although it’s hard to confirm the authenticity of each bathroom, as some weird things could have been added for viral effect — for example, this bag of taxes in the bathtub — the videos are still pretty believable, whether staged or not. Also, while some of the ratings seem to be of strangers’ bathrooms, others belong to the husband, boyfriend or roommate of the TikToker.
The clips are simultaneously bizarre and nauseating. Alongside using the bath to store paper, the guy in the aforementioned clip also keeps model cars filled with syringes on his windowsill, and has a bust of Jesus looking down at the toilet. In another, gag-inducing clip, one guy has a very used electric toothbrush by his sink, the base of which is caked in a layer of grime.
It seems the trend was started by a creator named @alenashops, who has several ratings on her TikTok. Her first video, which has nearly six million views, sees her rank the products in the bathroom of an investment banker. As her posts go on, they evolve from product ratings to general bathroom ratings. In this clip — in which, for the first time, she rates the bathroom before hooking up the guy — she finds several half drunk beer cans, empty toilet rolls and bottles after bottles of CeraVe facial cleanser. In a scandalous turn of events, someone commented on the video: “I think you are at my ex’s place lmao [because] I bought him all those products, and that is his toiletries bag oop. FYP really said this is for you.” She even flipped the format on its head in this video, and asked the guy she hooked up with to rate her products.
Some of these ratings don’t quite go to plan, however, with the girls finding products that don’t exactly fit in with their hookup’s supposed single-guy narrative. Take this video, for example, in which the TikToker finds a face roller, a scrunchie and various women’s skincare items. Or this one, where the creator stumbles upon a whole cupboard of women’s skincare products, as well as a lacy black bra. Both of these TikTokers seem to have boyfriends, though — so they could either be polyamorous or, more likely, just pretending to be shocked by the discoveries of their own items for TikTok likes.
Of course, being a disgusting little gremlin isn’t a gendered thing — anyone can have a filthy bathroom — but, you have to admit, it is mostly single, straight guys who don’t know how to live (see: the barren bachelor pad). So, if you want to hook up, but don’t want to be mercilessly derided on the internet, put the taxes in a filing cabinet and clean your shit up!
Brit Dawson
Brit Dawson is a London-based journalist who mostly writes about sex, women's rights and sex work. She is also the staff writer at Dazed.
