October 25th, 2009 by Elizabeth Kissling
We’re a week late in commemorating World Menopause Day here at re:Cycling. Sounds like a holiday right up there with Menstrual Monday, but it doesn’t sound very celebratory, from what I can discern.
I discovered World Menopause Day, observed annually on October 18, when a press release for GEM Keep it cool™, “the first ever, ready to drink wellness supplement for menopause relief made with natural and nature-identical ingredients free of the risks associated with hormones” showed up in my inbox yesterday. Cynic that I am, I wondered if this holiday was simply about selling products to middle-aged women, so I began poking around on the internetz.
I found that World Menopause Day has a venerable history: it was started in 1984 by the International Menopause Society (IMS) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Both are reputable, credible organizations with admirable goals, so I was easily persuaded that World Menopause Day isn’t all about marketing. IMS marks World Menopause Day by doing its best to spread the word about potential health consequences of menopause: Continue reading...
Tags: holiday, Menopause, menstrual education
Posted in Menopause | 1 Comment »
October 16th, 2009 by Elizabeth Kissling
Proctor and Gamble has just launched a new internet campaign in Singapore for their menstrual pads. The flash-heavy website tells why girls are Happy It’s Here :
Happy, confident, and loving life. You know what you want and where you want to go next. You feel wonderful about being a girl!
This is not a new product, but a new campaign for the pads known as “Always” in the U.S. Guess what they’re called in Asian markets.
Wait for it.
“Whisper“.
That’s right. P&G’s ad promotion “to instill a positive attitude in young Singaporean women about their menstrual periods, seeking to dispel some of the squeamishness toward the subject that persists in much of Asia” is for a product called Whisper, with all the connotations of menstrual silence that carries.
In fairness to P&G, the name change from the U.S. product pre-dates the new internet campaign by ten years. And I wanted to give them a break after reading this quote in the Wall Street Journal article about the new campaign: Continue reading...
Tags: FemCare advertising, internet, menstrual education, pads, Procter & Gamble
Posted in FemCare, Internet | 5 Comments »
September 21st, 2009 by Chris Bobel
Ever-alert Liz Kissling drew my attention to this post on Nicholas Kristof’s blog (he’s the co-author of Half the Sky - check it out)
Kristof picked up on the does-menstruation-keep-girls-out-of-school buzz that researchers and on-the-ground development workers have been asking for some time. This is the same link that opportunistic P&G picked up in 2007 with the launch of their cause marketing campaign “Protecting Futures.” The campaign involved Always-brand pad distribution, school bathroom construction and health education, yet, as far I can tell, “Protecting Futures” has ended with a whimper…I can’t find a thing about it on the web, save dated references.
Maybe the campaign has slipped into obscurity because the girls lack commercial products–girls miss school causal connection is being weakened by research like the study cited by Kristof.
Researchers Emily Oster and Rebecca Thorton supplied girls with menstrual cups (note: not single use pads) and measured whether their use of cups had an effect on school attendance and grades. Nope, they found, makes no difference; the girls with and without cups missed about the same number of days and performed about the same in school.
In a way, their findings didn’t surprise me. Continue reading...
Tags: FemCare advertising, Global South, menstrual education, Menstruation, Procter & Gamble
Posted in FemCare, Girls, Menstruation, New Research | 6 Comments »
September 17th, 2009 by Elizabeth Kissling
Nearly 20(!) years ago, I conducted research for my doctoral dissertation about how and what girls learn about menstruation. I researched the literature and interviewed girls ages 11-16 about what kinds of information about menstruation they received and the sources of their menstrual knowledge. Among my findings, I learned that even girls who had received adequate menstrual education from school and parents did not consider themselves prepared for their first periods. They wanted to know more about what menstruation would feel like – not more about ovaries and hormones (although research and anecdotal evidence suggests their knowledge in that area is not as well-developed as they believe). They had serious questions about whether it would hurt, how often they would need to change their menstrual pads, and other phenomenological questions about the experience of menstruation. This kind of information is seldom part of formal menstrual education, but the girls in my study found ways to seek out this information, often through girlfriends and sometimes through popular culture sources, such as teen magazines.
These issues are even more important to girls with autism or other special developmental needs. This morning I stumbled upon this discussion at change.org about how communication with one’s daughter about what to expect at menarche is even more critical for autistic girls: Continue reading...
Tags: autism, blood, Communication, Menarche, menstrual education, pads, tampons
Posted in FemCare, Girls, Menarche | Comments Off
September 13th, 2009 by Elizabeth Kissling
Tags: Celebrities, menstrual education, Menstruation, television
Posted in Media | Comments Off
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.
RSS 
