It seems that someone has decided that leaking menstrual blood is an embarrassing and totally disgusting consequence of not knowing when you should change your tampon, so a new start-up called my.Flow has come up with a nifty solution, according to Gizmodo.
Called my.Flow, it is basically a tampon with Bluetooth connectivity. Yep, all you older women have read this correctly. Your tampon will let you know when it is saturated and needs to be changed. It all works with a six to 12-inch string that hangs down outside your bodily orifice that you thread into a wearable device that you wear on your waist that you then pair with your phone.
You can even get an app that allows you to program how full the tampon has to be before you are notified. This will show up on your smartphone. Now maybe for a greenhorn, just starting out on her periods, this might seem like a great idea, but for the countless millions of us that grew up in the pre-Internet era, what we didn’t have, we didn’t miss.
But the big question on many people’s minds, according to The Daily Dot, is whether my.Flow is revolutionizing the way we humans think of the menstrual cycle, which, by the way, is a perfectly normal bodily function in females of the species, or is this apparatus adding to the misplaced idea that “having a period” is something forbidden to talk about.
The Guardian quotes Professor Christina Bobel, president of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, who points out the product “accommodates the culture of silence and taboo around menstruation by allowing the menstruator to pass as non-menstruating.” She says that “while it’s nice not to leak, we seem to be moving in the direction of ‘my body is a problem to be solved’.”
Elissa Stein, the co-author of Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation, added that “The whole language of menstruation was written by advertisers to sell their products.” She believes that marketing has created an aura of shame around a normal human process. She calls it “Menstrual mortification.” Strong words, this writer thinks.
Referring to the my.Flow website, Stein says “if that’s not a slap in your face … It’s the same message women have been sold for decades. That menstruation is something to be ashamed and afraid of. We’re going to sell you something to keep your secret.”
There is a lot of truth in what she says. I remember many, many years ago when I reached puberty and began my menstrual cycle, my mother refused to talk about it with me. My father had to explain what was happening, and he took me to the store for my first box of sanitary napkins. Hey, get real, folks. Menstruation is not a mechanical function that needs to be regulated via the Internet.
The my.Flow saturation monitor is expected to cost about $49, and a month’s supply of tampons will set you back $13.
