Yesterday, Kotex launched their new femcare product line, U by Kotex, and from all the media hoopla, you'd think they invented a working jet pack.
I recently co-wrote a book on the cultural story of menstruation and to my admittedly jaundiced eye, the U by Kotex products themselves -- tampons, pads, panty liners -- don't appear at first glance to be especially ground-breaking. True, the panty liner has a transparent adhesive film that makes it easier to custom-attach to thong underwear (ironically, just as that particular underwear fad seems to be dying down) and the tampon has an interesting lock-and-load action that makes it vaguely resemble a teeny-weeny assault weapon. What's more, the entire line features bold, edgy colors and black packaging, rather than the requisite whites and pale blues and greens. Still, it basically feels same old, same old, with a few bells and whistles thrown in. To be fair, what can you really do to pads and plugs, anyway? It's not as if anyone's going to figure out a way to make a tampon send text messages, if you catch my drift.
That being said, what's intriguing about U by Kotex is their advertising campaign.
Their first commercial, which launched this week, doesn't feature the typically vacuous beauties of femcare past, generically romping through daisy fields in slow-motion, riding horses through the surf, or dancing, presumably from the sheer joy of sloughing their monthly uterine lining into the right product. In fact, Kotex's newest commercial (created by JWT) dares to openly jeer at the visual clichés and strangled euphemisms of menstruation, using images from actual Kotex ads as an actress dryly intones things like, "The ads on TV are really helpful because they use that blue liquid, and I'm like, Oh, that's what's supposed to happen."
The website features some corporate femcare firsts: a woman shows how to insert a tampon using what looks like a plush bolster with a built-in vulva. There's also actual POV footage (how shocking!) from a female on a toilet, jeans bunched around her ankles, as she applies a pad to her boy shorts. When you consider the line is aimed at females 14-21, this kind of big-sister, instructional tone seems vastly more sensible than inflammatory, and the humorous, savvy tone of the entire campaign also seems right for the young women of today. And yet according to a piece in today's New York Times by Andrew Adam Newman, JWT was initially told it couldn't use the word vagina by three broadcast networks. It then tried substituting the old-lady euphemism down there, and even that was promptly rejected by two of the three networks. So what gives?
In fact, from the earliest days of commercial pads, one hundred-plus years ago, femcare advertising has been a virtual saga of prudishness, cluelessness, and excessive caution bordering on total hysteria -- and it wasn't just the advertisers who felt that way. In the dawn of TV, the National Association of Broadcasters placed a ban on all advertising of sanitary napkins, tampons, and douches that wasn't lifted until 1972. Pains were then taken to make sure those early commercials aired during the womanly ghetto of daytime TV. And yet even this proved too much for a squeamish public: a prompt tsunami of outrage from offended viewers caused advertisers to back-pedal away from anything that might be seen as graphic or upsetting (i.e. instructive or useful), thereby setting an already low bar even lower. Nobody dared even utter the word period in a TV ad until 1985 (it was Courtney Arquette Cox who said it), and that also sparked a huge and immediate outcry.
Tampon and pad advertising, like all advertising, is about the business of selling. That's fair. However, in selling us the femcare we rely on so aggressively, advertisers have consciously and unconsciously attacked the underlying body process itself -- instilling in many of us or contributing to a pervasive sense of shame, a squeamishness many of us don't question or even recognize. Thanks in good part to decades of artful euphemisms, visual symbolism and indirect language, menstruation has been vilified, demonized, over-simplified and reduced to a disgusting and embarrassing nuisance and hygienic crisis.
Will Kotex change this model? Visitors to the U by Kotex website are encouraged to sign a "Declaration of Real Talk" that addresses the code of secrecy that makes girls feel uncomfortable talking about their bodies. If Kotex succeeds in chipping away even a little at this deeply ingrained mortification, they're doing something a lot better than make a groovier tampon or hipper panty liner. They're helping undo a century of advertising-driven fear and embarrassment of a natural process... and that ain't hay.