Handing over the baton: of course men should buy tampons for their girlfriends. It’s 2015!

The same week Instagram censors a picture of a woman having a period, is a teenage boy advocating on the same social media platform, the carrying of tampons for one’s girlfriend. A chap after my own heart, this kind of advocacy is another rung on the ladder to making the day to day realities of what it means to be female, much like wage transparency, or male feminism, or paternity rights, just that little bit more, well, normal, whether or not we want it to be. To be sure, mensturation ain’t nice for anyone – I can’t even write the word without forcing down a bit of sick in the back of my throat – let alone the person having a period, for all we make up little more than half the population. But like food allergies or racism, it’s easy to stick your head in the sand and pretend they don’t exist when you don’t have to deal with them, thus making little accommodation for those who do.

My periods are a roller-coaster that stretch from month to month. I won’t go into the visceralities of them here because I have already done so here. But suffice it to say they affect everything from my mood and my skin, to which jeans I can fit into, to how likely I am, or not to pounce on my husband – or whoever. They feed into my lack of belief in free will, and my sense that life, ultimately, isn’t fair. What makes it just a bit more bearable is that, if I forget to take a tampon with me when I’m out and about (both of which are fairly regular – luckily for me, I’m a woman with modern rights, which normally means I’m also pretty fucking busy) my husband normally has one knocking around somewhere, in the same way he used to carry condoms. Not so much need for that any more. But when I holler from the loo, having run down my pack, he’ll obediently go and get me one, or pop to the shops and buy me pads with pride. It’s not that he’s pussy-whipped (although I like to think he still is). He’s just man enough not to be embarrassed. And this is not just post-baby resignation either, having watched two small people exit my vagina. He would happily have bought me tampons back when I would rather have pretended to him I didn”t shit either. I guess when you live with someone, it’s hard to pretend you don’t have bodily functions. Perhaps we women are too good at pretending that the rest of the time.

But we do, like it or not, so it stands to reason that men should get, well, a bit more involved, at least once in a while. For those not having to suffer the indignities of bleeding from their nethers once a month, and all the pain, hysteria – yes, I am going to use that word, however provocatively – and the systematic prejudice simply having periods entails and has done throughout history, it’s time to show your solidarity, men.

Periods can be a massive hassle – or not depending on what it does to you that particular month, and I can corroborate, that too can change over time. The days of leaping into the air in white jeans like a maniacal Lilette’s ad are long gone. Since having children, they have got grimmer, and more painful. And there’s always, now I’ve come off the pill, the chance it won’t come at all. Add to that the years of weird contraceptive pill related symptoms, the joys getting the coil inserted, and the thrills and spills of the menopause to come, we could all do without it really, so I will add to the rallying cry: Men, buy your girlfriends a tampon! We’ve got enough on our plates, what with how many we women tend to be spinning these days.

Talking about periods has come a long way, as demonstrated by the vintage advert below, but in order to rewrite the story for the modern age, this is one aspect of femininity that we can’t hand over to our partners; so, in order to to share the load a bit more evenly, it’s high time men picked up the baton. It’s the bloody least you can do!