Lunapads

The New Yorker has a piece on their site right now called “Greener Postures: Hacking through the biodegradable, zero-carbon, ecochic overhype” which has my panties in a bit of a twist. I respect what they’re trying to do with the piece, namely: to analyze whether or not many “green” items on the current consumer market are actually helping the larger environmental cause. Take for example something like the Body Squeege (details here), which is a product intended to be used to remove water from your body after your bath/shower so that you use less of your towel, thereby reducing the amount of laundry you need to do. I tend to agree with the authors of the piece whose verdict on the product is: “The proliferation of absurdly specialized and redundant tools is not our idea of green.” Fair enough.

In their review of 12 products they also included washable menstrual pads (review here). They start by claiming that the garbage and waste impact of disposables isn’t that bad in the greater scheme of garbage. Fair enough perhaps, but if we though that way about everything then how do we hope to ever make an impact. Really, it was their final verdict that got me “A personal matter. But the cup thing kind of makes sense if you can get over the gross-out factor.” Yes, your menstrual products are a matter of personal taste, so too I would argue is a body squegee or choosing to buy soy fabrics (another product reviewed), but those items don’t get the “personal matter” treatment. Then comes the mention of the “gross-out factor” which is in my opinion just plain stupid and a perilously individualistic approach to the matter. The message really is: it’s ok to get away with not examining your use of disposable products in this case because, well “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” we all know this one is kind of gross. And I think it’s time we put those ideas to rest. I don’t expect everyone to become comfortable with using alternative menstrual products by any means, but I do expect those who care about the environment or their bodies to spend a bit of time actually looking at the issue and deciding how they feel about it before just writing it off as “too gross.” I know the piece is meant to be funny, but I guess after many years of working in this field I’m so used to seeing this kind of “humour” about women’s cycles and our bodies accepted as the norm.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 2:00 pm by Guest and is filed under Women's Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.