Blog of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research
Monday morning: A friend tips me off that Joan Rivers’s on-TV use of the word PERIOD was bleeped! Yes, dear reader, somewhere, a censor deems even the innocuous euphemism for MENSTRUATION unsuitable for television.
Uh…speechless.
[You can view the clip at Jezebel.com, my friend's source for this sad information.]
The Jamaica Observer has published a list of menstrual myths, apparently as a public service to its readers. Among the fallacies:
And if you happen to be from New Jersey and of Italian descent, stay away from the tomatoes.
I’m surely not the only fan of Amy Poehler and Parks and Recreation around here, am I? (Oh, Amy Poehler, have you been reading my mail? Leslie Knope is more like me than I care to admit.)
As I’ve written elsewhere, menstruation is seldom mentioned or represented on television outside of femcare advertising. The one notable exception has been when a girl’s menarche is played for laughs in the family sitcom. Now there’s another exception, in last week’s episode of Parks and Recreation.
In this episode, Leslie brought together all the surviving Directors of the Pawnee Indiana Department of Parks and Recreation, hoping for some inspiration for the catalog copy she needed to write. Instead she found a lot of bullying, misogyny, and other bad behavior.
In clip at right, the oldest of the former directors advises Leslie to stay away from leadership roles because the intellectual demands will interfere with her reproductive abilities. Leslie politely dismisses this by explaining that times have changed, and she aspires to greatness. But more importantly, she turns off the tape recorder, letting viewers know that this retrograde attitude is so unacceptable that she won’t be recording it for posterity. Having such views expressed by the oldest character also makes them easy to dismiss.
In the grand tradition of Ms. magazine, we present the latest installment of SNL’s “Classic ESPN Women’s Sports Tournament” with NO COMMENT.
(OK, if you really want to know what we think, see our previous posts about this misogynist series. We’re just too tired to say it again.)
If you watched the Super Bowl this year, you likely saw the new Dodge Charger ad “Man’s Last Stand.” If not, drop what you are doing and watch it right this minute and sound the gender panic alarm!
There’s a crisis!
Masculinity is endangered! The women are taking over!
Men are-day in and day out–emasculated by the nagging, demanding, self-centered women in their lives and their trivial concerns (vampire lust! hairless sinks! fruit for breakfast! civility toward family members!)
It is so bad out there, apparently, that men need to recapture their manliness by “driving the car (they) want to drive.” (I don’t know what’s more offensive here, women-as-problem or car-as-solution)
The blogosphere and its environs is a-buzz with the work of MacKenzie Fegan who found, in her words, the commercial uh….“oft-putting”. She posted this response. Not sure I would have chosen the same complaints to highlight, but I did cheer with this dig:
“I will get angry and you will ask if it’s that time of the month.”
Crisis? If only there were one and that tired old excuse for not taking women seriously was on the way out!
Four years ago I published an article in Sex Roles (March 2006) about the twists and turns of the media coverage of a scandal that came to be known as “Camillagate.” It concerned the publication of a surreptitiously recorded phone chat between Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, and his lover, Camilla Parker-Bowles, that occurred in 1993. The reason the mild sex banter between two horny middle-aged royals got so much attention was that at one point they made joking references to tampons in an erotic context. The exchange was widely misreported with a distorted claim that Charles expressed a desire to be transformed into a tampon. It even became the basis for a skit on Saturday Night Live (only a small portion of it is available now online).
At the time I predicted that Charles would never get away from the tampon association. What I could not predict was how nuanced the forms of mockery would be. Who could possibly have guessed that the story would play out as a means of bolstering George W. Bush’s faltering reputation by contrasting his macho style with the more effete image of The Prince of Wales?
Word on the street is that Apple is introducing their first tablet computer today. With their usual flourish, they’ve named it . . . wait for it . . . the iPad.
ETA: The ladies at Jezebel have published more than one compilation of period-related iPad jokes. A sample:
Are you there, God? It’s me, Marketing.
Don’t make fun. The iPad is the technology of the future. Period.
Can I get a scented iPad for when my data feels not-so-fresh?
Edited again to add: The Week has an interesting comparison of historical femcare slogans and Apple slogans – more similar than one might expect.
[Video via Lunapads]
Guest Post by David Linton, Manhattan Marymount CollegeA short item in the February 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine captures, yet again, how nervous some folks are about any mention of matters menstrual. The piece referred to the publication of a list of words and terms that were blacklisted from use in crossword puzzles and other word games by a British computer program called Crossword Compiler.
Among the partial list of problematic terms, along with others such as bollocksing, bonk, clitoridectomy, fanny, nooky, ruttish, sapphic, sexy and shtup, was the word “catamenial.” This rather arcane term is one of the more obscure references to the period, more likely to appear in medical or, surprisingly, broadcasting documents.
For the first 25 years of commercial TV’s existence in the US, the National Association of Broadcasters specifically banned the advertising of feminine sanitary products. It was not until 1972 that the ban was lifted and a year later, 1973, the first mention of the menstrual cycle appeared in a ground breaking episode of All in the Family.
First, it was Tampax, and then it was Vagisil. But it’s good they didn’t leave out Summer’s Eve. And I expect Midol (for those irritating PMS-y women) and something about menopausal women’s hot flashes (can’t they control themselves with hormone therapies?) to be next. Although probably SNL writers aren’t savvy enough yet to even contemplate what menopause is or how they feel about it, so they’ll probably stick with skits that revolve around women’s body parts and younger women’s reproductive experiences.
I was frustrated with SNL’s skit about ESPN’s coverage of a women’s billiards tournament, “Tampax to the Max Tournament of Champions” (see my blog post about it). I was disgusted and concerned that SNL writers revised this skit for a second airing, to include a spoof about women’s yeast infections during a Women’s bowling tournament, “Vagisil Superstars of Bowling Tournament”. After seeing the second skit, I (along with many other critics) knew that the power of the skits was not in jokes about women’s menstruation alone but, rather, in jokes about the disgusting nature of women’s bodies more generally.
The feminist blogosphere has been buzzing lately over all the decorations available for ladyparts. We chimed in ourselves on the labia dye, My New Pink Button. Now, via Broadsheet, we learn of “vajazzling”, or bedazzling one’s vajayjay. Actor Jennifer Love Hewitt, star of The Ghost Whisperer, recently announced to George Lopez and his talk show audience that her “precious lady” now “shines like a disco ball” because it is covered with Swarovski crystals.
Note that I used the term “vajayjay” above only because that is the term used by Love Hewitt in advocating the practice of vajazzling. (She says all women should vajazzle their vajayjays, and has an entire chapter of her new book dedicated to the topic.) Perhaps I take things too literally, but I understood vajayjay = vagina, so when I read Mary Elizabeth Williams’ Broadsheet article, I had a lot of questions. Like, WHY? why put crystals in your vagina? No one but your gynecologist will see them! And doesn’t it hurt? Aren’t crystals sharp? And what, exactly, does one use to ATTACH Swarovski crystals?
Of course, Jennifer Love Hewitt isn’t putting crystals in her vagina. She’s decorating her vulva. But cutesy terms like precious lady and vajayjay obscure women’s anatomy even more than Swarovski crystals and pink colorants. Vajayjay entered the pop culture lexicon because network censors would not approve a Grey’s Anatomy script using the word vagina too many times:
Shonda Rhimes, the creator and executive producer of “Grey’s Anatomy,” who brought the word into full public view, never intended to promote a euphemism or slang term for the female anatomy. Rather, she fought to use vagina in the script.
“I had written an episode during the second season of ‘Grey’s’ in which we used the word vagina a great many times (perhaps 11),” Ms. Rhimes wrote in an e-mail message. “Now, we’d once used the word penis 17 times in a single episode and no one blinked. But with vagina, the good folks at broadcast standards and practices blinked over and over and over. I think no one is comfortable experiencing the female anatomy out loud — which is a shame considering our anatomy is half the population.”
When grown men start referring to their penises as “pee-pee” or “winky”, I’ll consider vajayjay an acceptable label for my vulva. As for vajazzling, I’m with Madeleine and the other Lunapad ladies:
At the end of the day, for all the language of self-love and empowerment used in the marketing copy for these products, I still can’t get around the underlying implication that our vulvas are not in fact just fine, thanks, without smelling or looking any different than they already do. To my way of thinking, even planting a seed of doubt of this kind in a woman’s (let alone a girl’s) mind about her bodily self-esteem is to perpetuate a dangerous climate of self-loathing against which most girls and women will struggle at some point during their lives.
Readers of re:Cycling know that we love menstrual humor – we’re always willing to mock femcare adverts and can even laugh at ourselves. But, honestly, what’s funny about repeating the names of feminine hygiene products? It wasn’t funny when SNL had their fake sportscasters say “Tampax” over and over again in October, and repeating the same skit with Vagisil last weekend wasn’t funny either.
The show has a history of having a writers’ conference room that resembles a men’s locker room, and it appears that little has changed since the days when John Belushi would run around the set ranting about how “Women aren’t funny.” I wonder if he would think vaginas are hi-larious the way the show’s current staff does.
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