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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Do women really need uplifting messages from their menstrual products?
Sep 1, 2004 | Tampons have kept their silence for 4,000 years, huddling in cabinets, hiding in handbags. But recently, tampons have found their voice, and this is what they're singing:
When I love my body, my body loves me.
Set your standards high and don't settle for less ... you can have it all and more!
My secret sauce is my secret power source!
Dittie, a brand of feminine products that went on the market in May, has transformed the tampon from a lowly receptacle for menstrual blood to a bona fide medium. Printed on the wrapper of each tampon or pantyliner is one of 120 "ditties" -- as in little songs -- that carry a patchwork message of pop feminism, image consciousness, brand identification and celebrity role models.
"We don't consider Dittie a brand," says 43-year-old company president Barbara Carey, a longtime entrepreneur who last created Hairagami hair accessories. "It's a movement. It's a culture of women coming together. It's a friend there in the bathroom with you."
Dittie is a private company based out of a small office in Orinda, Calif., whose doors have been replaced with bathroom stall doors. Always embarrassed to buy tampons, Carey usually asked her husband to buy them for her. But one day, Carey had to visit the feminine aisle for the first time in years; the idea for Dittie came after she noticed the medicine-like look of most tampon packaging.
"Tampax looks like Lactaid. Playtex looks like Benadryl," Carey says. "These large companies treat you like you're sick. I'm not sick! Why couldn't a tampon make you feel good?"
If a perky pep talk seems odd coming from a tampon, it's because they have always been expected to shut up and stay out of sight. Dittie's mission runs counter to the entire 80-year history of feminine-product advertising, which has been based largely on shame and obsessive secrecy. In the United States, tampons are marketed largely on their power to hide the very fact that women menstruate. Many ads don't even mention menstruation.
"Concealment assured when this new sanitary pad is worn under filmy frocks," boasted one 1929 Kotex ad. (The photo shows a pair of beaming flappers.) Down through the years, the styles have changed, but the theme of concealment has remained: gymnasts in leotards, beachgoers in bikinis, an unending parade of white pants -- and not a spot in sight! In a 1992 Kotex ad, a teenager talks about her "totally hot lab partner," and she vows she'd "change schools if he knew" that she was menstruating. Dittie claims to be proud of the cycle, the blood, the whole shebang -- in a very posed, stylish way.
"In other cultures, with menstrual huts and so on, they make [menstruation] the most obvious thing in the world," says Harry Finley (yes, he's a man), who founded the Museum of Menstruation 10 years ago and serves as its director. "In the U.S., it's not to be detected. Advertising for feminine products has always played to fear and shame."
"My first reaction is, it's about time," says Dr. Susan Basow, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, whose research covers gender and body image. "A lot of the [messages printed on the] Ditties seem more about thinking of the body in positive terms and less about pleasing others -- which is the focus of all advertising. I think these might sell -- it's not your mother's tampon."
