Hey Dads: Go Buy Some Pads & Tampons With Your Son
“Find it uncomfortable to get your wife pads? That’s because your dad never normalized it with you.”
Hey fellow Millennials: do y’all remember sex ed? Specifically, the sex ed we got around fifth grade, where the boys went to one room, the girls went to another, and we all learned about puberty. Well. Some of us learned about puberty as a general concept. The girls. A lot of the boys didn’t learn one damn thing about menstruation, leaving a lot of us girls to think it was something we had to keep to ourselves and, generally, be ashamed of. It sucked. But society is fighting back and we love to see it.
TikTok user @OopsIDadItAgain0 — Sidebar: perfect name. 10/10. No Notes. — recently posted an outing with his tween son from the store.
“Find it uncomfortable to get your wife pads? That’s because your dad never normalized it with you,” he said. “We’re here getting pads for the wifey. Right buddy?”
“Yep!” his tween son answers brightly.
And that’s it. And that’s, apparently, all I needed to heal a part of me that I didn’t know needed healing.
Over the past decade or so, we’ve come a long way in normalizing periods. Do you know the first time a menstrual product used red liquid to demonstrate its products? 2017! (Well done, Bodyform!) Do you know the first time that was done in America? Not until 2020! (Well done, Kotex.)
That’s not to say we still don’t have a long way to go.
“My MIL was horrified I had a pack of pads on the bathroom shelf where my husband could see them,” one person wrote in the comments. “When I told her that he bought them for me she almost had a heart attack…”
“My boss refers to ladies’ personal things as ‘yucky stuff,’ ‘that gross stuff,’ ‘all that..stuff’,” replied another. “Like... where is your audacity?!”
“I dated someone who thought a period was gross,” groaned a third. “Such a turnoff.”
“I feel uncomfortable and I'm a woman,” wrote another.
But fortunately most of the (many) comments were cheering this on. One commenter summed it up best: “a green flag raising a green flag.”
And, honestly, while women’s voices need to be centered when it comes to periods (we’re generally the ones dealing with all things menstruation), having men give this message to other men and boys is invaluable. Because it’s one thing for a woman to say “You don’t have to be embarrassed to buy pads” but it’s another for a non-period-having guy to tell another guy “This is not a big deal.”
So keep up the good work out there, dads. Or start the good work. It’s never too late to normalize pads, tampons, and menstruation in general!
