Apparently tampons have a long, rich history. According to tampon experts Tampax and Wikipedia, women fashioned early versions of the tampon out of wool, plants, paper, and wood thousands of years ago. All I can say is I’m glad that I live in the 21st century because those all sound like unfortunate options. Sometime in the 18th century, doctors began using cotton plugs in surgery and on the battlefields to soak up blood long before tampons became a mass-produced, marketable good. I also read this on a BuzzFeed article, so I guess they sometimes gets things sort of right.
The first version of the modern tampon we all know and love tolerate, however, wasn’t invented until around 1930, when a male doctor decided he should create an alternative to the bulky, uncomfortable pads his female patients had to wear. He was a ~dedicated~ doctor. And rumor has it, he invented tampons without any knowledge of the more #basic tampons women had been using forever. I guess he actually thought women hadn’t already realized that they could stop the bleeding by plugging the hole? But his design involved cotton and cardboard instead of leaves, which sounds more sanitary, so I supose his idea was still pretty helpful. Plus he got it patented and now they’re sold in stores and the rest is history.
So we’ve been using tampons for thousands of years, and they’ve been a commercial good for close to 100 years. Seems like we should be used to the idea of them now. While most women are pretty comfortable with the idea of both buying and using tampons, society and many men remain squeamish about them. Why? I’ve thought about some of the features of tampons, but none of them seem to be valid reasons:
Tampons are made of cotton and plastic. These are not alarming materials. This cannot be why.
Tampons come in wrappers. But Twinkies come in very similar packaging and people don’t hide their faces when they buy Twinkies.
Tampons come in brightly colored boxes. Okay, to be honest, this sort of bothers me. Like, we’re not selling candy here, people (even though, yes, the plastic wrapper is strikingly similar as aforementioned). And they’re definitely not subtle items to carry through a store, which can cause an uncomfortable situation for some people. But there’s a solution to this! While some boxes may seem unnecessarily pink and gaudy (I’m looking at you, Playtex) the U by Kotex line is just screaming “Hey men, buy me!” I mean, it has the black packaging that seems to be the universal sign that a product was designed for men. Don’t believe me? Let’s just have a look at said packaging:
Tampons were invented by a man. Wouldn’t this make them a celebrated item? Men could totally lord it over us that some dude was the genius who invented tampons. And if it got them to use the word tampon without blushing, I’d be cool with not telling them about the whole “Umm, we actually came up with the idea first” thing.
Tampons are used by menstruating women. Wait. This is probably the reason! Does society not realize that we shed our uterine linings every month and that it is just a fact of life and that not talking about it doesn’t make it just stop happening? News flash: it happens. And tampons are a wonderful thing that let us live our lives even when there is blood falling out of our bodies. They’ve been around forever and I don’t see them going anywhere anytime soon. So let’s all just take a deep breath, scream “tampon” as loudly as we can, and never be weirded out by them ever again.
