Yes. This one's been brewing for a looong time. And it's the one you're never gonna hear Jerry Seinfeld do.
What's the deal with sanitary napkins?
Yes, that's what they're called. They're called sanitary napkins. What Einstein came up with that, I'd like to know? My kids call them pads. Know why? Because they're pads, that's why. If what they are was ever something called a napkin, well, that's not what a napkin's been for a good long time now. Sanitary, I can understand. Because before the invention of these ... things ... people women used cloths, or rags even, that had to be laundered after each use, and heaven knows, that couldn't be sanitary. No, someone had to come up with something disposable ... okay, wait, that's a good thing. I don't want to launder them, or re-use them. Okay, the sanitary thing is alright with me.
When I was a kid, like a lot of girls who are pre-teens or young teens and therefore idiots, I couldn't wait until I would be able to use these amazing sanitary napkins. Oh, how wonderful it would be! I would be just like one of the cartoon teenagers in the filmstrip the nurse showed us! I would put on my belt and wear it discretely under my underwear. The tabs of the sanitary napkins would fit through the opening in the metal tabs (one in the front, one in the back) and be held there securely. I would be walking around in my every day life with a wonderful secret! Oh, the joy of sanitary napkin use would be mine!
In my house, the package of these magical objects was kept in the linen closet, right outside the bathroom door. Alongside the box, my mother kept a stash of small paper bags, saved from whatever original use they'd had, carrying home a prescription bottle or the like. Small paper bags. The rule was, a used napkin went in a bag and then into the trash outside, never in the bathroom trash. What -- horrors! -- if Daddy took out the trash (never mind that this was my job and I was the only one who did it) and discovered it there? The humiliation!
When my sister was 16, she was hospitalized for mono, of all things, and like almost every other female over 12, she was in the hospital, so naturally, she got her period. They brought her pads napkins, but no belt, because the napkins were the size of adult diapers. Hospitals had one-size-fits-all and the size was huge. We called them elephant pads. For obvious reasons.
Cut to the teenage years. I discovered tampons and only learned after I gave birth years later that there had been a revolution in the evolution of sanitary napkins, to whit:
- No one left alive except my mother called them sanitary napkins anymore, and,
- There were no more belts. Where were the belts? What happened to the belts?
Yes, I got it, they were sticky on the bottom. Hey, that's clever. Okay, I gave birth, I took the sticky-bottomed elephant pads they gave me in the hospital, and I was on my way.
Then they started packing little paper bags in the boxes with the pads. Damn clever. My mother loved that. No need to hoard bags anymore. Of course, she was over 50 by this time, so it was pretty much moot for her.
Then they started individually wrapping the little suckers, in plastic wrap that you could re-use to dispose of the formerly sanitary ... thing. Okay, that one deserves a Nobel prize or something. That was just brilliant.
I stopped having babies, and so I stopped following Current Trends in Sanitary Protection. I had, however, had girl babies, so it was a pendulum due to swing back and hit me in the ass one day. Which it did, and I discovered, to my horror, that pads were now being promoted for their thin-ness.
Hey, I've never gotten used to their being advertised on TV, let alone to the fact that they're thinner than dimes and have sprouted, of all bizarre things, wings. Yes. When I meet my grandmother again at the end of time, I'm going to tell her that sanitary napkins now stick to your underwear and have wings, and she's going to drop dead all over again.
I went to the gynecologist yesterday, and when the exam was over, she suggested I might want to ... er, wear a pad for a while, and indicated the stack on the counter. You know what they were, don't you? They were elephant pads! With sticky bottoms and no wings, thank you very much, but elephant pads just the same.
The two most important things I have learned about this over the the last forty years are:
- I'd like to done be now, thank you. I'd like all the remaining developments in sanitary protection to pass me right by, please.
- This turned out to be not so much the fun I thought it would be when I was twelve.
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I'm watching Roseanne
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