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Feminine Hygiene Ad Finally Mentions Blood

7 July 2011
by Bridgette P. LaVictoire

Advertisements discussing anything to do with female hygiene tend to be rather awkward affairs that seem to dance around the issues involved including, quite honestly, why we need to advertise for a product that the majority of women are going to need at some point in each month. To make this worse, well, they don’t get right down and explain what their products are actually suppose to do like, well, collect menstrual blood.

Well, one company has now decided to break from that. The Maxi-pad company Always has decided to actually reveal what sanitary napkins are suppose to be for rather than, well, assuming that women bleed blue, antiseptic looking, dish detergent coloured liquid. Yes, they are finally going to advertise that the sanitary napkins are used to trap menstrual blood.

This has been a big taboo up until now. Of course, at one time, the idea that an advertisement would discuss women’s periods or men’s erectile dysfunction were pretty much taboo on television. Huffington Post mentions “in what advertising expert/blogger Copyranter describes as a ‘historical advertising move,’ an ad for Always ultra thin with Leak Guard protection shows a hygienic looking pad with a red spot in the middle.”

Of course, what the ad shows is a pin-sized droplet of blood, and is certainly not anywhere near accurate as a woman can go through quite a number of sanitary napkins or tampons in a single period, and estimates are that an average woman will go through 16,800 in her lifetime.

The Huffington Post also noted “Still, there is a history of advertisers using idioms and “subtle” imagery to avoid directly marketing products that the public might find off-putting. In Elissa Stein and Susan Kim’s book Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation, the authors explore the stigma of the period, writing that menstruation is often ‘hidden in a figurative box (scented, of course), stuffed deep inside the great medicine cabinet of American culture: out of sight and unmentioned.’”

There are indications that menstrual blood was once considered to be sacred to many cultures, though.

The Huffington Post also relates

As Tina Fey notes in her comedic memoir Bossypants, this advertising could prove confusing to your average pubescent teen having her first period. Fey writes of her own menses, “I had noticed something was weird earlier in the day, but I knew from the commercials that one’s menstrual period was a blue liquid you poured like laundry detergent into maxi pads to test their absorbency.”

Unfortunately, the Always ad only appears in print, is not coming to a television near you, and we are all going to still be tortured by these commercials that seem to assume that women are very happy while having their periods rather than being cranky, bloated, and grouchy.

Though, it should be pointed out that they actually make for nice sanitary and sterile ways of catching blood after an orchiectomy too. Well, after the initial bleeding is done.