A series of videos on YouTube have taken stereotypes to a whole new level. Not only is ‘Shit Girls Say’ sexist, but it has created an empire of homemade ‘Shit (insert proper noun here) Say’ videos stereotyping hundreds of categories. To name just a few, “hung over girls,” “Asian moms,” “boyfriends,” “hot girls,” “fat girls,” “single girls,” and of course we cant forget about “girls who are on their periods.”
In this two-minute video, this girl seems to suffer from every social construction created pertaining to menstruation. From her constant longing for chocolate, to her feeling as if she is dying, to her mood swings, this girl over exaggerates all of the symptoms she claims to have.
The point of this video is to get a laugh, I know. So why be so harsh? It’s funny, right? The typical menstruating female is supposed to watch this and say “oh my God, I do that too! Haha!” However, not all women experience menstruation in the same ways. This generalization of how women act while they are on their periods is only reinforcing the stereotypes that men gain their information from and that so many women are trying to fight every day.
I have a proposition for someone. I want to see a new “Shit Girls Say on Their Periods” video. Only I want this video to portray a woman who embraces menstruation. I want to see a woman feeling extra creative, or extra in touch with herself, or even extra sexual. Why does this video have over a million hits? As a society we need to start changing the way people think about menstruation.
Today, in vintage femcare advertising, we bring you Tampax’s idea of menstrual shaming, 1990s style:
But Tampax doesn’t understand menstruation as well as they think they do. Sure, it might be a little tiresome to have a Mariachi band follow you around everywhere for most of a week, but as I’ve indicated before, I love the idea of a musical celebration of my monthly miracle.
Tina Fey, true to her reputation for being feisty and transgressive, tells two amusing menstrual tales in her recent bestselling book, Bossypants.
The first is, appropriately for a “tell all” memoire, about her menarche. The story, familiar to thousands of other women, relates how her mother gave her a “first period” kit from the Modess company that contained two pamphlets, “Growing Up and Liking it” and “How Shall I Tell My Daughter,” and pretty much left her on her own. Fey’s humor derives largely from exaggeration and in this case she compares the Modess box stashed in her closet to a Freddy Krueger nightmare figure lurking in the dark: “Modessssss is coming for you.”
She goes on to describe the moment of the period’s arrival when she was ten years old and performing in a choral concert. She claims that her surprise was not so much that she got her period but that the fluid wasn’t blue as she’d been lead to expect from TV ads.
The second, and more interesting, story is about how as a writer for the long-running TV series, Saturday Night Live, she managed to get the Kotex Classic sketch on the air. Fey refers to it as “my proudest moment as one of the head writers of SNL.” (The anecdote was also published in the March 14, 2011 New Yorker.) The ad parody has become an SNL classic in itself and an indispensible inclusion in any discussion of the history of menstrual references on television.
The Kotex sketch is a send-up of the trend at the time for nostalgia sales pitches such as the Coke Classis campaign. Written by Paula Pell, it features women proudly flaunting their Kotex belts and bulging sanitary napkins, even in a swimming pool and while wearing low cut, tight evening wear. A man in the ad comments approvingly, “Them girls are Old School!”
Fey describes how the men at the studio who had to approve the scripts balked at selecting it. Their resistance was eventually overcome once the women explained the exact nature of the unfamiliar menstrual technology and how it was worn. As Fey puts it, “They didn’t know what a maxi pad belt was. It was the moment I realized that there was no ‘institutional sexism’ at that place. Sometimes they just literally didn’t know what we were talking about.”
Beyond the fascinating behind-the –scenes access that Tina Fey’s book provides to the working of an influential TV show – and lots of other settings as well – she has also offered a glimpse of the menstrual social gap, the chasm of ignorance that separates women and men when it comes to understanding even the most rudimentary details of menstrual management. In this case she was able to educate the men and succeed in producing a memorable – and perhaps even liberating! – piece of TV comedy.
Guest post by Michael Yazujian — Marymount Manhattan College
Photo by Caitlin Weigel (used with permission)
Caitlin Weigel knits and sells tampon cozies on her Etsy site, a website where people can sell crafts that they make. These cozies are perfect for women who are trying to avoid humiliation who are also fans of squids (and probably other tampon users as well). They may reinforce the shame and embarrassment that some women associate with tampons by concealing them, but they do so in a playful way that suggests the taboo be taken less seriously. The squids seem to be mocking society’s belief in tampon awkwardness with their googly eyes and promote a sort of tampon pride that you could show off to your friends. The reduction of shame through humor is not a new concept, but I believe that Caitlin Weigel has knit a useful weapon against the uncomfortable and serious manner in which tampons are viewed.
If you’ve been with us for a while, you might remember that we (and our fabulous readers) had a lot to say in the spring of 2010 when Kotex launched U by Kotex (or YOU.BUY.KOTEX, as we came to call it) and its “Break the Cycle” campaign.
In digging up a copy of the “Reality Check” video that launched the campaign for one of my classes this week, I came across this critique of “Reality Check” by an activist/artist identified online only as Annamalprint. She’s a menstrual activist after our own bleedin’ hearts!
The campaign has won many advertising industry awards, and has been credited with increasing Kotex sales by 10%, by the way. We can expect those neon tampons to be around for a while.
A friend shared this clip from stand-up comedian and actor Hal Sparks.
He leads with this “I disagree—vehemently—with the use of the word “pussy” to describe a weak person. Because the vagina is the tougher of the two genitals…. by a long shot!”
And later…”It bleeds every month and it won’t die.”
That puzzled reaction to menstruation is as old as time, say the cultural historians of menstruation. We know now, of course, that the monthly shedding of the uterine lining is no mystery. Nor does this regular occurrence suggest that women are necessarily witches or demons or otherwise intrinsically cursed or even blessed.
But his point is a good one.
It IS important to reframe the female body as POWERFUL. As RESILIENT.
And demonstrate how our language—especially the words we use to slur and to exalt—obscures this reality.
Thanks, Hal, for a good laugh and a better think. You are a REAL pussy.
Guest Post by Michael Yazujian, Marymount Manhattan College
I found this sketch the other day when I was on www.ucbcomedy.com. It is by a sketch duo called Klepper and Grey, who are originally from Chicago, but now live in NYC. It is very similar to the “Her First Period” sketch by the Frantics (posted at re:Cycling August 5, 2011), in that things that are considered socially unacceptable to be shared are being shared in such a friendly tone; the main difference is that in this sketch the information is being shared knowingly. Both sketches make you wonder how do subjects get to a point when they are considered rude or unacceptable to discuss, even though they are so common among so many people. Things like menstruation, sex, and bowel movements are all normal bodily experiences, but they certainly don’t make appropriate dinner party conversation, or topics to share casually with an acquaintance on the street.
I’d be interested to hear comments from others about what they think the increased public display of formerly private matters means, especially when it comes to the conventional menstrual taboos.
Crimson Tide, a.k.a. Cassie Taylor (Super Power: Epic Rage)
Are you following the PMS Adventures of Crimson Tide, Maxi Pad, and Tam Pon? After a paid medical trial went bad, these ladies developed extraordinary superpowers that manifest only when they’re menstruating — and since they’re roommates, their cycles are often synchronized.
Join Chella Quint and friends for some comedy readings that attempt to explore the why’s and the how’s of having grown up writing zines — from her 4th grade construction-paper and paper-fastener-bound school report on Benjamin Franklin to the latest issue of “Adventures in Menstruating.” New titles since her last visit to Bluestockings are Adventures in Menstruating #6 (deconstructing feminine hygiene advertising with wit, irony and brute force), The Venns (introducing the world to the great British pub quiz in a spoof research paper using charts, graphs and diagrams) and It’s Not You. I Just Need Space. (interplanetary letters of love and rejection). She’s also reprinting issues 1-5 of Adventures in Menstruating for a trip down memory lane. Collect the set!
Chella Quint is a comedy writer and performer living in Sheffield, England, but she is originally from New York. Fresh from performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, she’s looking forward to her annual trip home. Check out www.chellaquint.com
Joining Chella are
Jenna Freedman, Lower East Side Librarian author and Wrangler in Chief of the Barnard Library Zine Collection will be reading from her in-progress Orderly Disorder: Librarian Zinesters in Circulation tour zine, tentatively titled “Anything You Say on a Zine Tour Can & Will Be Quoted out of Context in a Zine-Tour Zine.”
and
James M. Parker, poet laureate of all the little people who live inside his head, is a NYC-based writer with delusions of grandeur. He’ll be reading prose and poetry from his chapbook, Spinning the Cube, including his contribution to Adventures in Menstruating #6.
From time to time menstrual references show up in TV programs, mostly on situation comedies and, unsurprisingly, they are usually played for laughs. The most common inclusions have had to do with menarche with menopause coming in second. First periods have provided laughs and plot material for the writers of DeGrassi, Roseanne, Californication, Seventh Heaven, The Cosby Show, Beverly Hills 90210, King of the Hill, and others. In nearly every one of these episodes the humor and plot tension derives, at least in part, from an exploration of male response to unwelcome exposure to the cycle: close encounters of the menstrual kind.
The most recent, and most daring, occurrence appeared in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 8, Episode 1) involving a girl selling Girl Scout cookies getting her first period standing in the foyer of Larry David’s home while writing up a cookie order. Rather than dashing off to find a woman to “take care” of the situation, as depicted, for example, in King of the Hill and Beverly Hills 90210, the protagonist rushes upstairs to get a box of tampons, left behind by his wife who has left him, and stands outside a bathroom door shouting instructions to the bewildered girl inside. Apparently she knows what the period is but has never been told how to use a tampon.
The episode is extraordinarily daring. Even the simple detail of having an older man hand a young girl he just met a tampon is startling, given the depth of social taboos requiring strict gender separation in matters menstrual. But to have him stand outside the bathroom door shouting instructions and reading the sheet packed in the box about placing the tampon in the vagina while the girl inside responds with confusion and frustration is risky indeed. But the most striking thing of all is that while both characters find the situation awkward, neither one is overly embarrassed, particularly the girl who calmly announces, “I think I just got my period for the first time.” Though she has apparently received little education about the technology, she is fully aware of what is happening in her body and accepts the fact that the adult she happens to be with when it happens is able to help her out. The fact that it’s a male, and a quirky older one at that, seems not to matter at all.
This indifference on their parts is both a source of the humor and, perhaps, an indication of a watershed in menstrual decorum. Or is that too optimistic a reading?
Readers should note that statements published in re: Cycling are those of individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Society as a whole.
