What if men had periods? It’s a question still worth posing

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/what-if-men-had-periods

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It has passed a Nasa wind test. It has a 68C heated therma-core. Scientists have spent years devising its cross-hatched reinforced Kevlar skeleton and its Twistatec (©) technology which “allows for easy insertion”. What is it? A manpon. And what is a manpon? It’s what tampons would look and be like if men had periods.

In a trilogy of rather brilliant short films, WaterAid imagines how different society would be if it were men who lost the endometrium of their wombs every month. An accompanying survey of 2,000 people found that 78% thought the world of sport would change if men had periods; a quarter thought white sportswear would be banned and that men would brag about their periods; 21% thought that bookmakers would factor menstrual cycles into their odds.

The films bring this alternate reality to vivid life. Around the office photocopier, men compare flows: the heavier the better. In WaterAid’s second film, football commentators talk blithely about a player being the most likely to score because he’s “on day two of his cycle” and “right in the optimum performance zone this month”. Wait, there’s an optimum performance zone? I’ve come to the end of my menstruating life without realising that, and I haven’t realised that because there is nothing blithe or casual in how we talk about periods.

I’ve written for a few years now about the dreadful state of things in the developing world, where girls leave school because they don’t have a toilet or sanitary protection, and use sand or rags, or sell sex to buy pads. This is the serious point behind WaterAid’s satire: a petition to provide latrines or toilets for the 1.2 billion women who don’t have one. They have been timed, too, to appear just before Menstrual Hygiene Day, which is today. This satire isn’t new: Gloria Steinem’s wonderful essay If Men Could Menstruate still resonates, nearly 40 years after it appeared in Ms Magazine (“Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood. Gifts, religious ceremonies, family dinners, and stag parties would mark the day”).

Within the security of such luxury, it’s easy to laugh at Menstrual Hygiene Day

But the films are still powerful, not least because they make me think about things nearer to home, where I do have a toilet, and always have had, and have always been able to buy sanitary pads or tampons – though they are, ridiculously, taxed, while disposable razors are not. Within the security of such luxury, it’s easy to laugh at Menstrual Hygiene Day. Yesterday was International Otter Day. But WaterAid’s ads should puncture such smugness. Instead, as well as all the daft images of women running along beaches in white trousers, and the notorious but now rarer blue liquid, the message is still: Hide! Disguise your tampons as sweets, and your pads as gift-wrapped packages. I looked on the Tampax website for its latest advertising, and once its clunky player actually worked, I saw an advert showing a high-jumper being confronted by the cunning Mother Nature – a mature, beautiful woman dressed in witchy green – before leaping over a high jump to a voiceover of beating your obstacles.

My period can be annoying, painful and inconvenient. But it’s not an obstacle. I don’t need to fight Mother Nature or jump high-jumps. But I do need sanitary product manufacturers to develop an ounce of the wit and warmth of WaterAid’s ads. And I’d like them to fix the many ways in which we, in our secure world of privacy and plumbing, are still getting periods colossally wrong.

In the US, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney has been trying for years to get a bill passed that would require tampon manufacturers to be more transparent about the chemical content of their products. There is no data, she says, that proves tampons are “unequivocally safe”. The Robin Danielson Feminine Hygiene Product Safety Act is named after a woman who died of toxic shock syndrome (yes, that still exists), and wants independent testing of all sanitary products (or anything that goes near or in the vagina, though that’s not in the text) done by the National Institutes of Health. Although the US Food and Drug Administration requires tampon manufacturers to report dioxin levels, there are other byproducts of tampon manufacture that are of concern. I’ve written often about the absurdity of half the world using dry toilet paper to cleanse the dirtiest part of our bodies; that’s almost dwarfed by the leeway given to an industry that makes products that are inserted into or used near one of the most absorbent parts of a woman’s body.

You won’t read about this in adverts for “feminine hygiene” (because of course having periods makes us dirty). Nor will you see any reference to the fact that women throw away, on average, 125-150kg of sanitary products in a lifetime, adding up to 200,000 tonnes of sanitary waste per year. Tampons and pads make up 10% of things flushed down toilets, a fact that makes wastewater workers despair, as well as beach cleaners: in a 2010 Beachwatch survey, for every kilometre of beach, 22.5 towels, panty liners or backing strips were found, and 8.9 tampon applicators.

So laugh at Menstrual Hygiene Day if you want to. And definitely laugh at WaterAd’s brilliant ads. After that, let’s start to seriously clean up periods, and I don’t mean fragrantly.