Grown woman that I am now, increasingly low on fucks to give, I breezily dismissed this tinge the other day, reminding myself that I am a 48-year-old lady and there’s nothing wrong with being Seen In Public Buying Sanitary Products!!!!!! But. I also knew that my next stop (after the giant Advil) would be to the pharmacy counter, where I could comfortably pay for my tampons along with my prescriptions. In other words: no risk of enduring a teenage boy checker awkwardly pawing my buy-one-get-one-half-off boxes down the conveyor belt.
So, despite having endured all various indignities that come along with being a midlife woman, including but not limited to menstruating for more than three decades, giving birth, and breastfeeding in public, I was still, at least as of this very week, a little self-conscious buying these completely boring, basic necessities.
In the name of Tampon Tim I say, never again! Upon seeing that meme and the ensuing nonsense, I felt the last vestiges of pointless embarrassment leave my body.
There was, of course, nary a sanitary pad in the bathroom of my liberal do-gooder high school, this sort of thing not having yet permeated even the progressive mindset of a very forward-thinking institution. There were certainly no tampons laying around the boys’ bathrooms, where the sight of them might have, after about 12 seconds, become entirely commonplace and unremarkable.
And if they were commonplace and unremarkable, good golly, what then? How different might my early mortifying experiences have been? Certainly not totally un-embarrassing—nothing to do with being a 14-year-old girl is embarrassment free, I know that! And how different might so many experiences involving my period, or my body in general, have been? If we weren’t embarrassed about tampons, or periods at all, might we also—gasp!—not be embarrassed to talk about perimenopause, or our pelvic floors, or symptoms like abnormal discharge or peeing when we laugh (haha, just another “normal” thing we have to live with!)—symptoms that are distressing at best, signs of something deadly at worst?
I almost can’t imagine it!
Almost.
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