There is no escaping pink. Not even in one explainer video to use a new period product. Of course, in the name of removing taboos, it is uncensored and can therefore only be accessed after you have confirmed that you are of legal age. Can enlightenment be porn? So the 32-year-old actress Lina Bembe sits in front of a screaming pink wall, spreads her legs and shows how a menstrual cup works. is the author of the wholeThe Female Company. The Stuttgart start-up is one of those companies whose websites contain the menu item “Our Vision”. In accordance with this vision – “A world without taboos about the female body” – the Swabians produced the advertising, forgiveness, educational film for one of their core products in 2020.
A shot glass-sized container made of silicone, a menstrual cup solves a problem most women probably don’t even know they have. Conventional period products, which 96 percent of German women prefer, are used once and thrown away. In this way, one person creates around 175 kilograms of waste in five years, after 30 to 40 years. For the entire German-speaking area, this amounts to 125,000 tons – per year. There are also other environmental impacts such as transport emissions and water consumption in cotton production.
If you don’t get a stomach ache there, you’ve never loved our planet. A splendid market of companies with visions is now vying for everyone else’s favor. On the website of Happy Monafor example, you can get paper-packed organic tampons and blog articles like “What do period products and sex have in common?” There, an Andrea tells stories about the connections between organic hygiene articles and female pleasure. At Selenacare you get period underwear in different designs and absorption strengths as well as the founding story of a father who “felt responsible” for “the footprint his generation left on the world.” The online retailer with the memorable name Strawberry week shopprompts the potential clientele immediately, the previous ones Garbage balance of one’s own menstruation to calculate before claiming absolution in the form of lovely dotted cloth bandages.
On the one hand, there is nothing wrong with wanting to make your personal hygiene more sustainable and switching to appropriate articles. The speech about this article, however, is a cheek.
Admittedly, it makes sense to market a product that is characterized above all by its positive ecological balance accordingly. But this is not about any product and therefore not about any kind of marketing.
Now also environmental shame
Few topics are as shameful across epochs and cultures as menstruation. Even Aristotle saw it as proof of the inferiority of the female sex. The Abrahamic writings exclude menstruating women from ritual acts, even entering a house of worship, because of their supposed impurity. It was not until 1979 that the theory of the “menstrual poison” that western scientists suspected in the blood was disproved. In South Asia, according to one Unicef-Analyse around a third of girls do not go to school during their menstrual period. One Dutch study found an average of nine workdays lost per person per year due to menstrual symptoms. It is still common here today for women to wait for men to leave the room to ask for a tampon. Now a new shame joins in: environmental shame.
Even in an ideal world, it would be unreasonable to have to menstruate. All modern comforts are of no help: It is not pleasant to bleed month after month and at the same time to be exposed to all sorts of irritating side effects. In this situation should those affected please save the world? Tampons of all things, which millions of women make the most annoying part of being a woman a little more bearable, are five kilos of waste a year too much? If they are, believe the pink statistics of the menstrual cup pioneers. Because for all the feminism on display, at its core is one of patriarchy’s oldest practices: making women feel guilty about having bodies.
