I have to say, I really have some very keen friends within my Facebook network. For instance, Modupe Liston, a Milwaukee activist, posted a very poignant thought on her wall, “How come there is not an organized women’s movement against the absurdity of high prices for feminine hygiene products such as tampons and pads?”
Excellent observation.
Always Ultra Thin Overnights with Flexi-wings has been my staple product since they were invented. I’ve never been a tampon girl as I have developed an abnormal fear of Toxic Shock Syndrome, thanks in part to my reading of the insert from a pack of tampons as a child (long story). Yet over the last couple of years, I too have noticed that my beloved sanitary napkins has begun to slowly creep up in price. It’s not like an item that I can go without – unless I plan on taking up residency inside a menstruating hut, like the Dogon women of West Mali, for one week out of a month. Actually, that wouldn’t be a bad idea if the hut came with cable television and dark chocolate chip cookies. But alas, I don’t own a hut but I do have bills, which means that my hemorrhaging A$$ has to get up and go to work.
Anyway, the average cost for my necessity ranges between $7 to $9, depending upon the size of the package I get. Since I tend to flow on the heavy side, I go through about four to five of those suckers a day, which means that I use about a pack of around 36 in a month’s span. Based upon my rough estimations, my Aunt Flow costs me about $84 dollars a year, which means that I have paid thus far around $1260 since I was 15. And by the time I’m relieved of my womanly duty (i.e. menopause), I will have spent over $3000, just on sanitary napkins. Of course, this cost does not include inflation. Nor does it include the cost of party-liners, PMS relief, chocolate chip cookies and Victoria’s Secret panties that my aunt ruined. If we factor in these additional expenditures, we are probably looking at an additional $5000 over a lifetime. That is almost $10,000 of my hard earned money, which I have no say-son in.
The fact is that owning a vagina is pretty costly; from the pap smears, to infections, to the birth control, to actually giving birth, to menopause, woman must absorb certain costs that are exclusively spent on maintaining our natural, biological function. And who get’s rich off of this? Well since it is the elite that runs things and majority of the 1 percent are not women, let’s just say it’s men. And in a lot of ways, they have us by the…ahem…lady parts.
Like last year when the world was overcome with a mysterious scarcity of O.B. tampons. The shortage not only left shelves bare from New York City to as far away as New Delhi, India, but also spawned a black market – red market to be more exact – with some crafty opportunists hustling the non-applicator tampons via EBay, at as much as $150 for four boxes. Then there is the tampon-less plight of the young women in remote parts of Africa and Asia.
Thousands of those young girls regularly miss school because they can’t afford the convenience of feminine hygiene products. And then what about the sisters on lockdown, who have to suffer through budget cuts, which means that women-specific products like tampons and sanitary napkins, are among the first to go. According to a recent article in Ms. Magazine about the shortage of feminine hygiene products in some of our nation’s prisons, “Women described to me the discomfort and smell, especially in the summer, of living in close quarters with other women who are often menstruating simultaneously.” Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.
And how can we forget about how many first world countries level a tax on feminine hygiene products. In Canada, which recently instated the Harmonized Sales Tax, feminine hygiene products are taxed at 5 percent. This means that women have been unfairly penalized by an estimated $69 million dollars per year since the law was enacted in 2010. After some outcry, certain parts of Canada began offering tax rebates for feminine hygiene products including tampons and maxi-pads. Closer to home, several states in the union have longed taxed feminine products as they are seen as luxury (non-essential products). But if you ask me, there is nothing luxurious about having your friend pay an unexpected visit while you’re wearing white pants in the middle of a board meeting.
According to “Feminine Hygiene Products: A Global Strategic Business Report” created by Global Marketing Strategies, the feminine hygiene products market, remained more or less unfazed by the recent spikes of surging raw material costs but the cost of fuel prices could be behind the rise in our tampons and sanitary napkins. However, there might be something more telling afoot. According to the same report, which profiles 134 companies including feminine hygiene heavy weights like Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Playtex Products Inc., and Procter & Gamble, future projection suggests that the global feminine product market will reach an estimated $15.2 billion by 2017, thanks in part to more focus on “private label versions” and a new customer base. Written in the report: “The steadily growing population, rise in the number of working women and subsequent increased demand for convenient disposable items, maintenance of health, and hygiene standards and rising awareness among women in rural areas stand out as strong market fundamentals that will help nail down growth patterns across the world.”
With more women leading physically active lifestyles and walking around with higher disposable incomes in their purse, this has meant new opportunities for the market to both maintain, if not grow their customer base in the future. Instead of focusing on the cost-focused hygiene products, something our generation was fond of, the market is transitioning towards convenient products, which can tack on higher prices for things like scents, extra absorbency and funky colors. Remember when Kotex dropped the U-brand? Those suckers on average cost more than the standard brand and all you really got was pads and tampons in hip colors. But of course, we were not buying them for the super absorbency or memory flex core, we were buying a lifestyle. And so goes capitalism.
One of the great things about the Affordable Healthcare Act, aka Obamacare, is that requires new insurance plans to fully cover women’s preventive care, which now will include free birth control, yearly wellness visits, breastfeeding counseling and equipment and sexually transmitted infections including HIV. What that means is that a woman’s reproductive health is almost on par with the menfolk, who’ve long benefited from not having their Viagra rejected by insurance companies. However, the world still fails women. And if we are expected to go to school, to hold jobs or exist anywhere outside of a Dogon menstruation hut, than why should we be expected to pay for the necessities of feminine hygiene products?
If we were smart, we would do as my Facebook friend suggested, and take this on as the next wave of feminist agenda. Think about it; it would be just like the bra burning protest of the ’60’s but instead women would refuse to wear any type of feminine product including tampons and napkins. We can go around, bleeding through white pants and sitting on every seat we can find. Then as we unite as womankind, so will our cycles. And for one week out of every month, there will be literally be blood in the streets…
…Or perhaps we can always go the natural route. You know, using the cloth napkins, which are reusable, made with no harmful chemicals or dyes and lack the applicators, which are said to create their own havoc on the environment. There are a few sites, which offer an array of natural feminine products from the designer cloth pads to the menstruation cups to even crochet tampons. Of course, the upfront cost of those products range between $40 to an upwards of $120. And since I don’t have a washing machine or a dryer – or the extra time to spend hand-washing blood out of my reusable rags, I say we fight. If not, then we will be forever beholden to a system, which likes to see our vaginas as mere vessels of profits.
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