How To Sell a Douche

How do you sell something most people consider not only private, but embarrassing and off-putting? Advertisers have struggled with that problem for more than a century in their effort to sell tampons, sanitary pads, and other forms of femcare. Femcare ads have never depicted bathrooms. They rarely use the words “period” or “flow.” And they don’t show the color red, much less actual blood. Instead, advertisers have long relied on a tacit code built of images and euphemisms. These tend to reinforce notions of the dirtiness and shamefulness of menstruation, profoundly influencing how we think about not just about our periods, but our bodies. Does it go too far to say that our whole menstrual mindset is the result of effective advertising?

Click here for a slideshow history of marketing feminine care [2]. And read more in the new book Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation [3], which I co-wrote with Elissa Stein.