You gotta get ’em up there, girls!
Did you know that women menstruate? How gross is that? Let’s never mention it again.
Offensive, crude, vulgar, unnecessary, embarrassing and grotesque. That’s Tampax’s current television ad – now banned – according to complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland.
The advertisement features the host of a talkshow called Tampons & Tea asking her studio audience how many of them ever feel their tampon. When her guest, a young woman, raises her hand to indicate that she does, the host tells her that she shouldn’t and that it might mean her tampon is not in far enough. “You gotta get ’em up there, girls!” the host says. The ad then shows how to insert a tampon correctly – “Not just the tip, up to the grip!”
But that’s the Gateway to Hell they’re talking about so casually!
So what’s the big deal? The ASAI has prohibited the ad from being shown again in its current form after it received 84 complaints. The authority rejected claims that it demeaned women, was unsuitable for children and contained sexual innuendo, but it did accept that the advert caused widespread offence. Catholic Ireland, how are you?
Flourishing, it seems.
Procter & Gamble, which makes Tampax – and in the United States is using Amy Schumer to talk about tampons and vaginas – says the ad was created in response to findings that suggested 42 per cent of women who use applicator tampons do not insert the applicator correctly and that 79 per cent experience discomfort while wearing tampons. So people clearly require more guidance, particularly as this isn’t a topic necessarily taught in schools or spoken about at home. Hence the need for “You gotta get ’em up there, girls!”
Some viewers told the ASAI they found the messaging in the Tampax ad, which is for its Pearl Compak range, “provocative” or “suggestive”. I’d say it’s refreshingly plain-speaking and informative, as well as a welcome alternative to traditional menstrual-product advertising. Ads showing women rollerblading in white leotards on the first day of their periods are far more offensive than this one. And don’t get me started on the ads that substitute an unidentified blue liquid for blood.
It’s a good ad – funny, straightforward, helpful.
Ciara Kelly is even better.
From the complaints about vulgarity etc., you’d think the ad shoved a tampon in a real live person or something. But it wasn’t even a diagram of a person! It was a closed fist. A tampon going into a closed fist is …grotesque?? Goddamn catholics.
The mistake they made was in putting it on TV. The only people I know who watch regularly are the elderly, and those are both the demographic which finds any mention, however oblique, of human biology to be highly offensive, but are also the demographic most disposed to complain. 84 complaints. And those outweigh the thousands of people who watched it and either thought it ‘meh’ or actually found it helpful because…
God knows.
This also underlines for me the revolting assumption in society that anything about a woman’s secondary sexual characteristics is always considered in the light of what men consider sexually arousing. Women breastfeeding, using a sanitary product that involves insertion into the vagina, smear testing, wearing a bra, not wearing a bra, and so on.
And none of the TRA’s that insist they should be allowed into women’s spaces will ever, ever understand this. They find objectification validating and arousing.
Exactly.
I rembember reading in a book about Kubrick’s 2001:A Space Odyessy , how at the time the movie came out, somebody wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper saying how they found the “Starchild” at the end of the film to be “obscene.” They must have thought “Well, to make a baby, there has to be sex. SEX! OHMYGODSEX!”
No sex on the screen, but plenty in their head it would seem.
Some people deserve to be offended.
Hope this works: