I’ve been tinkering this week with the layout of the blog. Let me know if this is an improvement or not.
I spent an hour and fifteen minutes in Tuesday’s Women’s Studies class lecturing on masturbation, menstruation, and tampons. (If that don’t got your attention, don’t know what will!)
As I’ve written before, much of my Women’s History course focuses on shifting attitudes towards American women’s bodies. Tuesday, we spent a fair amount of time reviewing the 19th century panic about women’s sexuality (spurred by the medical "discovery" of the clitoris by the medical profession). I blogged a year ago about some of the unhappy consequences of this panic over young women’s masturbation.
We then connected to this to the history of, of all things, the tampon. The modern tampon was patented in 1931 by a Dr. Earle Haas, who later sold the patent to what would become the Tampax company. The first commercially marketed tampons appeared on the market five years later.
What does this have to do with women’s sexuality? One thing is at least anecdotally evident: cultural background and openness about sexuality seems to play a critical role in whether or not young women begin to use tampons soon after menarche. My Asian and Latina students (who comprise two-thirds of my female students) are extremely unlikely to have been encouraged to use tampons when they began to menstruate. Most tell stories of mothers who insisted on pads, often claiming that the tampon was only to be used by women who had lost their virginity. One gal shared that she began to use tampons when she was on the her high school dance team where the uniforms made them essential; she told of the horrified and amazed reactions of her friends, who were entirely Hispanic. At the same time, "white girls" seemed much more likely to use tampons in early to mid-adolescence. Many of these students are stunned when they hear the myths that their classmates from more culturally conservative backgrounds were raised with.
This jives with the info in this 2000 Wall Street Journal article. According to company figures:
While about 70% of women in the U.S., Canada and much of Western Europe use tampons, usage falls to the single digits in a handful of countries such as Japan and Spain, and it’s not even measurable in much of the world. Just 2% of women in Mexico, as throughout most of Latin America, use tampons.
Those figures seem to match the ethnic disparity I see in my classroom.
Religious and cultural taboos are a hurdle: There is a persistent myth in many countries, for example, that if a girl uses a tampon, she might lose her virginity. "Everywhere we go, women say `this is not for senoritas,’ " says Silvia Davila, P&G’s marketing director for Tampax Latin America. They’re using the Spanish word for unmarried women as a modest expression for young virgins.
This concern crops up in countries that are predominantly Catholic, executives say. In Italy, for instance, just 4% of women use tampons. The Roman Catholic Church says it has no official position on tampons. Nonetheless, some priests have spoken out against the product, associating it with birth control and sexual activities that are forbidden by the Church. Indeed, Tampax faced objections from priests in the U.S. when it introduced tampons in 1936.
In many countries, women aren’t accustomed to spending on themselves, particularly for something they’ll throw out — and that costs a bit more than pads. Women must also understand their bodies to use a tampon. P&G is finding that in countries where school health education is limited, that understanding is hard won. P&G marketers say they often find open boxes of tampons in stores — a sign, P&G says, that women were curious about the product but unsure as to how it worked. (Bold emphasis is mine).
What I argue in my course is that tampon acceptance is linked to broader issues of acceptance of women’s bodies. The real threat of the tampon is not that it will take a girl’s virginity! Rather, it’s that a woman who learns how to use it must of necessity gain some knowledge of how she works "down there." Denying young girls access to tampons is a small but tangible way of keeping them ignorant of their own bodies. In that sense, I argue, cultural hostility to tampons can be linked to cultural hostility to female masturbation. When a woman uses a tampon, she rejects the idea that her body is something of whose processes she ought to be unaware; when she masturbates, she discovers not only pleasure, she discovers that her body truly belongs to her.
I’m always careful to check in on the comfort level my students have when we talk about these things. Discussion of masturbation and menstruation, clitorises and tampons can be overwhelming in any setting, even more so with a male college professor leading the class. But by God, it’s necessary! One young woman wrote in her journal this week: "It was a very interesting discussion. I didn’t know we had a clitoris, or knew it was a word. I think it’s a good thing to talk about." (Emphasis mine.) She’s not the first to write something like that. Remember, these are college students, but they come from many different backgrounds and many parts of the world.
I try and choose my words carefully. I don’t make assumptions or give direction to my students as to what they ought to do. What kind of sanitary products to use, and whether to masturbate or not, are, of course highly personal decisions that should be made without professorial suggestion. Choosing a tampon over a pad is not an inherently feminist act. One could also be a feminist and choose not to masturbate for spiritual reasons, a point I acknowledge. But ignorance and shame are never, ever congruent with the spirit of feminism. They are the twin evils that we are struggling against.
But whatever our spiritual orientations, it’s vital in gender studies that we teach the history of the body. It’s equally vital that we challenge our students’ cultural and sexual assumptions, even if, on occasion, we need to acknowledge some embarrassment when we do so. (I always say it’s okay to laugh and it’s okay to blush.) Above all, I want my students to continue the conversations that we begin in class with their friends and with their family members. On topics so sensitive (pun intended), the best discussions will happen in more intimate settings than the classroom. It’s my fervent hope that what we do in the class will stimulate many good cross-generational, cross-ethnic talks among women — and men.