The man has some bloody good points.
“If you’re offended by a vagina, then you just don’t know where you come from,” says self-proclaimed “dude” Jared Matthew Weiss at the end of his rant about periods.
The New York writer found himself seeing red after a series of ads for ‘period underwear’ were deemed too risqué for his city’s subway system.
The, apparently, controversial advertisements for Thinx undies (marketed as “underwear for women with periods”), got the Metropolitan Transportation Authority all cramped up, with the MTA’s chairman Thomas Prendergast declaring: “The ads offended me.”
It seems the not-so-subtle grapefruit euphemism was too suggestive and actually a little inappropriate for the transport authority, who also questioned how children might be affected by the images.
“It’s a f*cking grapefruit,” says Weiss in his flowing take down of the company and Prendergast.
In his three and a half minute video posted on Medium, he asks us to consider what exactly it is about that ‘certain time of the month’, which makes men so bafflingly uncomfortable.
“We all say that ‘certain time of the month’ because we’ve all been socially conditioned not to talk about periods. Why?” he asks, “because periods are a thing that make us feel uncomfortable to talk about.
“Maybe it’s because our social norms were created by wealthy, prejudiced, anglo-saxon, protestant men who just couldn’t feel comfortable with the relationship between bleeding and breeding.”
Watch the full rant here:
Weiss also analyses a number of other ‘suggestive’ ads that managed to slip under the MTAs suddenly high-brow advertising standards and even consulted with a four-year-old boy to see if he was missing something.
“We live in a patriarchal society,” the co-founder and CEO of Thinx Miki Agrawal said in a recent interview with Refinery29.
“The period conversation makes them uncomfortable,” she says, and that’s why “there’s such a double standard with what’s allowed to be up there.”
The brand say they are committed to breaking the taboo around menstruation and will work “proudly and tirelessly until every single girl has an equal opportunity for the brighter future she deserves.”
“Ultimately, who cares if it looks like a vagina? 50% of the population has a vagina. And the other half only exists because of them,” says Weiss of the ads.
“These are our mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, and girlfriends, and we should be supportive of them.”