Crime drama victims don’t leak blue liquid when they get murdered – and neither do real women having a period. So why is OK to see one on TV and not the other?

article by Janet Street Porter

In our gender-neutral world, there are still some taboo topics that make people start talking in a whisper.
Menstrual blood, for example.
It can’t be shown in television advertising, even though monthly bleeding is something that happens to almost every woman.

One in five of us have to cope with heavy periods and up to 70% have taken time off work as a result.
But - because no one want to speak out about what it is really like, how unpleasant and debilitating the experience is - we usually lie and ring up our bosses claiming we’ve got a stomach bug.
The difficulty of admitting that blood is leaking uncontrollably from your body and your womb is renewing itself, a perfectly normal process!

Why is the whole subject so fraught with shame, embarrassment and anxiety?
Up to now, television advertisements for sanitary towels (a horrible expression as if we need to clean up dirt) and tampons used blue dye to simulate the flow of menstrual blood, as if anything resembling the real thing was as shocking as a decapitation in prime time.
A new campaign (only available digitally, God forbid it’s beamed direct into your living room and children might see) for Bodyform towels shows a red liquid on the pad, and a small amount of the stuff dribbling down the legs of a model.

This imagery - designed to normalise periods - has caused outrage, with critics carping that it is ‘gross’.
Another woman wrote ‘no one looks forward to their period… (they) shouldn’t be celebrated’.
I want to scream at the double standards we put up with in modern life.
Even pads for incontinence are shown in television advertisements as if they are a way to make new friends and have fun, whilst driving around in a whacky car.
Women wet themselves (men have weak bladders too), and thankfully there are products which make this nuisance easier to live with.

Britain is petitioning the United Nations to start using the term ‘pregnant people’ rather than ‘women’ because the word woman excludes transgender pregnancies, where babies are born to women who have transitioned to men, but kept their wombs and ovaries. There are only two known cases in the UK.
Is it really so embarrassing to put your hand up and say YES I AM A WOMAN AND I MENSTRUATE RED BLOOD?



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5017673/JANET-STREET-PORTER-menstrual-blood-taboo.html

As a woman, I have  an issue with this.   I feel women aren't defined by their periods, and as such it's a very personal feminine but private issue.   It's bad enough when these products are plastered all over prime time TV without it being depicted in all its bloody glory.  It's totally unnecessary and Bodyform are, in my opinion, doing this not for the benefit of women in general, but for their own marketing money making ploy in particular.

Most women know all about sanitary products, where to get them, how to buy them.   We don't need/want our most private bodily functions, dragged into the light of day  depicting us as leaky, smelly creatures in the name of advertising. 

What next?   Showing shit on bog roll?   

Street Porter is trying to say that women are ashamed of their periods.  Wrong.  The majority of women don't think of it that way.   To them it's something to be endured each month, quietly and with as much dignity as possible.   

These adverts don't do us any social favours.  They won't stop certain people being disgusted or embarrassed, it'll just make them more so.   And those stupid enough to think that Bodyform are pioneering women's rights and breaking boundaries blah blah.  Anyone with half a brain can see this is just another moneymaking boardroom stratagem thinly disguised as being 'right on'.

I like Janet Street Porter, she usually talks a lot of sense, I don't agree with her on this though.
Its not about a subject being taboo, its about a normal bodily function that every woman deals with for decades...naturally and without fuss.
We don't really need to see red blood on a tampon or pad, or blood dribbling down a models leg...I think we all know where its coming from

Ads like this don't benefit anyone, they are surplus to requirements, and just as HT said, are being used to promote the company not to help or advise the users.