In the interest of honesty I must disclose that I totally just stole that title from someone on TWoP. And the whole idea to actually write down this rant that's been living in my head for two months was sparked by tripleindemnity's tongue-in-cheek Cheez Whiz defense. So, really, I have no inspiration of my own tonight. None.
Be that as it may, when Mr Indemnity was going on about Cheez Whiz being an all-American, properly hygienic foodstuff, I was going to tell him that he sounded like a 50's advertising copywriter on crack. Which I'm sure was his intention. Totally. However, I was distracted from that line of discourse by the phrase "modern hygiene" pinging this latent rant.
Have you seen those commercials? One of the big feminine product manufacturers is donating a portion of your tampon-buying dollars to provide poor teen aged girls in Africa with sanitary supplies so they don't miss school while they are menstruating. It makes me so angry I want to spit.
Dudes. Women have been menstruating for many hundreds of thousands of years before you invented your landfill-clogging wares and yet somehow they managed to figure out how to deal with the eventuality. If these girls are unable to go about their normal business when they have no tampons or money to buy tampons, it can only be because they have been brainwashed by your self-serving money-grubbing Western corporate shilling that the traditional way of dealing with the situation, used by their grandmothers and our grandmothers, is non-modern, unhygienic, and gross.
It reminds me far too much of the Nestle formula controversy in the 70s, with Third World babies dying of malnutrition or dysentery because of greedy multinational corporations convincing their mothers that what they had been doing for millenia (i.e. breastfeeding) was inferior to modern technology. Feh. And double feh.
xoxo
1 comment:
Years ago, I worked in the museum world, which has a tendency to a very rich white-bread view of the universe. A then-new living history museum upcountry included in their interpretation that farm women went to bed for five days a month, having no other way of dealing with menstruation. Having studied the region, and coming from more low-down ancestry, my reaction was "get real!" Rich folks can have such little affectations. The rest of the world does not, but the corporate megaculture still sells this rot as truth if it boosts their bottom line. (How did I miss this one?)
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