Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

by Rose George

Today, the average woman in an industrialized country with access to a wide variety of sanitary choices for her menstrual period might use 11,000 to 16,000 sanitary products in her lifetime. Persuasive data on how many women use what are scanty, but a Euromonitor survey of American women aged twelve to fifty-four found they bought on average 116 pads a year, but only 66 tampons.23 Worldwide the absorbent device of choice is definitely external. Insertion taboos stop many women from using tampons: the only thing you insert in there should belong to your husband, and it’s not a tampon. The choices, then, are cloth or a sanitary pad, or towel, or napkin, or whatever we are supposed to call them. Feminine protection (from what?). Feminine hygiene (are we dirty?). Feminine Needs. Feminine Care. Feminine Accessories, as if tampons were earrings. I’d love to see a shop or supermarket that dared have an aisle called Menstrual Products. Blood Absorbers. Plugs and Wads. But plain speaking and feminine hygiene have never been comfortable companions. The advertising of sanitary products on TV and radio in the United States was banned until 1972. Despite one letter writer asking the agony aunt Dear Abby in 1984, “Please tell me what can be done to stop the advertising of personal feminine products on television,” the word period wasn’t spoken on American television until the following year, when a young Courtney Cox starred in an ad for Tampax. The company used the scandalous word, its...