Guest Post by Heather Dillaway, Wayne State University
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.
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