In honor of Earth Day, I want to use my column this week to send a word to the girls about environmental politics and, well ... those special private lady times.
Close your eyes for a minute and pretend you're walking through a field. Mmm ... summer freshness. All right then. From the time we're small, we're taught that there's something about women that's a little nasty, a little embarrassing, even a little unhealthy. We bleed. Most of us do this every month. This is the most common thing in the world, but we're taught that should anyone ever find out we're menstruating, we're to be horribly ashamed. The catchword in menstruation is \discretion.""
Periods can be tolerated, but only if they remain hidden. So we sneak off to the bathroom with little plastic-wrapped packages covered with pictures of daisies. (Nope, no one knows what that is.) We swallow Advil and politely claim we have headaches. We spare ourselves and others the embarrassment of our biology.
Apparently though, our snatches can do more than just cause us a little social awkwardness. They actually have the power to DESTROY OUR LIVES. Yep, it's your best friend and worst enemy all wrapped up in one cute little furry package. ""Feminine hygiene ads"" from the 1920s used to feature fictitious stories about heartbroken women whose husbands divorced them because they didn't douche.
Today's ads use vaguely scientific terms, speaking about the need to remain sanitized and bacteria-free for ""our health"" and ""confidence,"" or they warn about the dire consequences should our inherent girly ickyness ""cause offense"" to others.
Yes, there is a point to all this. The basic principle of marketing is to create a need and then fill it. First you teach women that our bodies are naturally unclean, and then you cleverly turn around and sell us the means to ""fix"" that. And that means products! All kinds of them! It is not enough to just wear pads or tampons during our periods anymore. We should wear pantiliners all the time to stay ""fresher."" Pads should be changed constantly, and preferably saturated with chemical fragrances. Soap and water can't keep us clean. Nope, we need special and expensive douches, powders and sprays for that. And this is a problem. Here's why:
1. That stuff is really bad for you. Your vagina and vulva are actually delicate ecosystems. They maintain a certain bacterial balance that helps keep them healthy and clean. The chemicals in perfumed pads, feminine deodorant sprays and douches actually mess up that balance and leave you more vulnerable to things like yeast infections'which turns out, are the exact opposite of ""fresh.""
2. That stuff is really bad for the environment, which means it's really bad for you. Most commercial pads and tampons are whitened with bleach. There's no real reason for this, except to make them look nicer. However, overuse of chlorine-based chemicals in the processing of paper products has been linked to the rapidly growing incidence of breast cancer in women. The more of that stuff we make, use and dispose of, the more of it eventually finds its way into our water supply, which puts us all at risk. Plus, all of those pads, plastic liners, tubes and bottles, aerosol cans and cardboard packages eventually end up in landfills.
If you want to do something about this, you can buy nonchlorine treated pads and tampons, or you can switch to re-usable supplies like washable cotton pads, or ""The Keeper,"" a rubber cup that you wear inside your vagina like a tampon. The Keeper catches menstrual blood, and can be emptied, washed and reinserted every eight or so hours.
3. A crotch that smells like a Glade Plug-in ain't nearly as sexy as some of you obviously think it is. Think about it. Men have bodies, too. They sweat, they secrete and they don't always smell like a spring breeze. Still, you don't see products like ""Jock Fresh'the discrete masculine hygiene spray for those special manly times."" Those products are only targeted at us. Not because we need them and not because they make us any healthier, or more confident, or more attractive. Those products are targeted at us because it's really, really easy to make money by making women feel insecure. Advertisers have been doing it for years.
