Consider yourself warned: the next few paragraphs are not going to be pretty. They contain blood clots, cervical mucus, and vaginal secretions. And they're not the sexy sort of secretions either, they're those gross menstrual ones. The type that's not much discussed unless it happens to be one of those weeks where feminine hygiene goes viral. Well, this is one of those weeks.
Last Monday, a guy called Richard Neill posted a comment on Bodyform's Facebook page accusing the sanitary pad brand of misleading him about the pleasures of the period. The comment, which has had more than 86,000 likes, went something along the lines of "Why does your advertising make 'time of the month' look like so much fun when it's not?" This being an age of social media and all, Bodyform's multimedia units whirred into action. Yesterday, the brand uploaded a video featuring fictional CEO Caroline Williams explaining to Neill that the feminine hygiene industry has indeed been peddling menstruation misinformation for years. But it has done so in order to protect men: to shield their sensitive souls from the reality of girls' grizzly bits.
The Neill v Bodyform snark-slinging is very amusing, however the real joke in this period drama comes from the risible conventions of sanitary product advertising: the blue water, white spandex, and smiley, sporty femininity that have become universal code for a woman's unmentionables. A code that, by dint of its sheer repetition, helps reinforce the notion that the female body and its natural functions are somehow things to be ashamed of, to be disgusted by.
The absurdity of marketing's persistent pussyfooting around periods has not gone entirely unremarked by adland. In 2010, Kotex made headlines by cleverly positioning itself as the one feminine hygiene brand challenging the blue-washing of menstrual messaging with an advertising campaign poking fun at the cliches of the genre. What was most clever about these ads, however, is that Kotex mocked marketing conventions without actually straying from them. The brand may have been making fun of advertising's bloodless approach to feminine hygiene, but the parody also allowed it to stay within a safely patrolled area of "palatable" imagery.
All this is not to say that what maxi pad ads need is more blood and gore. Menstruation is not disgusting but it's not exactly visually pleasing either; nobody's asking the ad agencies to dial up the discharge in their product demos. What would be nice, however, is if they shed all the foo-foos and woo-woos and attempted a more grown-up conversation about female genitalia. To give Kotex its due, it tried to do exactly this but had its attempts forcibly sanitised by the powers-in-TV. Three broadcast networks told Kotex it couldn't use the word "vagina" and two wouldn't even sanction the euphemism "down there". And, really, I'm not sure how one can talk more realistically about periods if you leave the whole vagina thing out. It's kind of integral to the process.
While Bodyform's response to Richard Neill is hilarious, it is simply a 2012 iteration of the same self-knowing-but-safe marketing mechanics of Kotex's earlier efforts. There's a lot of nodding and winking, but it's all just as airbrushed as ever. The straight-talking CEO, for example, is actually straight out of adland. According to Bodyform, it "doesn't have a CEO. But if it did she'd be called Caroline Williams. And she'd say this." The thing is, Bodyform doesn't have a CEO because it's not a company. It's a trademark of personal care conglomerate SCA, which does have a CEO. He's called Jan Johansson and he's neither as buxom nor as blonde as Williams. While the fictional Bodyform may be all girl power and female leadership, SCA only has one woman in its top tier of management. And she looks after incontinence. Which pretty much sums up the status quo in sanitary advertising: not many real women and quite a lot of crap.
