The rules are neither shocking nor pornographic, on TV as elsewhere

At a time when I speak to you, people - the age of women - are signaling a petition on change, the favorite virtual barricade of low cost revolutionaries, so that we have a nana pub broadcast on TV for a fewweeks already.

The scoop is therefore not very fresh, I grant you, but I doubt that the stir aroused by the functioning of the female reproductive system falls definitively, so let's say that I am getting ahead of the nextPeriodedsgate (tgifiona, stronger than BFM TV…)

So what's the problem ?

I summarize for this one who watches TV as often as I am never: entitled Viva la Vulva, the 30 -second spot visible here, which promotes a new range of periodic products without allergen and that the dispatch describes as "daring ”shows young women in their intimacy (one of them is obviously on the toilet, although we only see a panties on a pair of ankles, the other looks at the crotch with a mirror, aOther takes his baby in his arms).We also see a papaya, a shell, a fishing, wallets and a few other visual metaphors of the female sex, and cupcakes in the shape of vulva which sing.Oh, and we also see a hygienic towel very furtively with red liquid on it.So.

And so, what is the problem?

Well we see pussies on TV, not real but still, and what looks like blood !!!

Okay, but what is the problem?

Well it is degrading for “the image of the woman”, I quote the petition which mobilized more than 10,000 people and a wheelbarrow of comments picked up on social networks: it is disgusting, it is pornographic, it isShocking for everyone but especially for children ... A surfer argues even that it is "vulgar" and "useless" because "women know what they need ...", as if advertising had a purely educational vocation and that'It was not really useful to advertise only for products that people do not yet know they are viscerally need, like tartiflette chips, large displacement cars or anti-tamed laundry.Although ... Men know what they need to move around, and women to wash their shirts, right?Yet I doubt that there are boosts on change to denounce the vulgarity and uselessness of Mercedes or Ariel.In short.

The arguments against this advertisement which does not break three ovaries in a duck are interesting in that they are a concentrate of prejudices concerning the functioning and the role of the female sex. Why “the woman”, this pale pink entity with graceful gestures that never poops or shit and should serve as a model for 3.7 billion women on this planet, why “the woman” standardized, therefore, should feel degraded that His sex is used to sell hygienic towels while all over the world he is used to sell heaters or car batteries without lifting the slightest eyebrow? How is a hygienic towel more pornographic than a perfume bottle sold by ladies far more naked than in this Nana ad? Why would children be traumatized to see what most of them have already seen from every angle, especially on the Internet? In other words, and to continue to elegantly spin the automotive metaphor, why would children be traumatized to see the engine under a body that since advertising exists is used to sell products that have absolutely nothing to do with the body feminine ?

This is not the first time that an ad referring to women whose vulva has aroused such an uproar: two years ago, BodyForm, the UK version of Nana, had already caused a scandal for the same reasons. We were then in 2017 and it was the first time that a European television suggested that women did not bleed in pale but red - that puts the progress of science into perspective, huh? Two years earlier and without even using such barbaric methods, the brand of menstrual panties Thinx also put New York on fire and blood to have placarded posters on which we could read: “Subsequent Women who have their rules ” - A praise of terrorism, clearly. Yet at the same period, dozens of pubs for sports clubs, miracle diet methods and cosmetic surgery firms featuring much less dressed ladies wishing to be thinner, younger and larger were serenely swallowed by the 'Spirit of hundreds of thousands of women, almost all confronted at one time or another of their existence with this problem of rules.

In fact, that's it, the thing: everywhere in the world including in countries that invite women to tune their breasts without anyone finding it to complain about, the rules are not a physiological characteristic that distinguishes the Most women of most men (remember that trans women do not have their rules), but a problem, worse, a shame, a reason for embarrassment and even a common insult - we rarely ask a woman “t 'Do you have your rules or what?! ”To bring her a hot water bottle… The sociologist Aurélia Mardon observed that all over the world, all young girls lived the arrival of their rules in shame and disgust, including in Western countries like ours, where the stamps Frequently exchanged in the open space of Manche in Manche like heroin sachets, where most women hide their buffers in the shopping cart before hiding them in a closet because they could crack the retina of The innocent came to make a candid pee, in short, modern and progressive countries where for society tolerates that you have your period, you must pretend you have not had them.

In Australia, the 600 complaints filed by viewers., the local equivalent of the CSA, on the grounds that it "promotes equality and demystification of menstruation".To one who complains about his "degrading" character for women, AD Standards retorts that “advertising does not include nor negative image that would imply that [women] should be ashamed of menstruation or a woman whoTo his rules would be someone lower. ”

How to Treat Sexuelly Transmitted Diseases During Pregnancy Wikihow: How to Treat Sexuelly Transmitted Diseases ... http://t.co/lc1rv8p0

— Dan Ibbetson Wed Nov 09 17:40:00 +0000 2011

"Yes, but it's not hygienic!", I will oppose me.First, remember that the simple fact of being in visual contact with blood behind a screen has never contaminated anyone, otherwise people would not continue to go and eat pop corn in front of gore films.But even in “real life”, menstrual blood is no more disgusting than a finger cut, and unless the person has a contagious disease and infuses their stamp in your tea that they then force you to drink, which only happens in the films that masculinists are made in their heads, you risk absolutely nothing.

“Yes but in pubs for the PQ we do not show the poop either!”Certainly, but first, the poop is much more dramatized than the blood of rules, since it has its emoji, unlike the buffer, the cup or the hygienic towel, and the smiling poop emoji is one of theThe most popular emoji, to the point of being available in keychain, t-shirts, stuffed animals and even earrings sold in particular in brands intended for an (very) young audience.And above all, poop is not discriminatory, unlike menstruation.No one has ever prohibited access to a religious building to someone whose intestinal transit works normally.

“Yes, but we don’t show sperm or dicks on TV!” It's true. On the other hand, we are still interested in it much more than rules and cats. No major discovery is to report on the menstruation side since the invention of the stamp in the 1930s, and the CUP, invented at the same period, waited for the second half of the 2010s to find out the commercial success that we know. In the American podcast Freakomics dedicated to entrepreneurs, Miki Agrawal, the co-founder of Thinx, confides “I am in the taboo business”. It also tells the number of failed meetings with investors -rags -doubts, convinced that the menstrual panty market had no future, and some of which must at the moment explain how they anticipated its spectacular commercial success ... The American site Researchgate reveals that there are five times more studies devoted to erectile dysfunctions than to premenstrual syndrome, while the latter concerns 9 out of 10 women, against 1 in 5 for the first. In the world, the scientist Susan Brown says that "the taboo around menstruation is at the heart of the way research is conducted", while his consumer Tomi-Ann Roberts observes that "our behaviors towards the mostly negative menstruation (… ) (have) very real consequences on the progress of knowledge on the functioning of the rules and the care given to the health problems they can pose. ”

Now it is complicated to take seriously an area which at this point arouses shame and contempt. It is complicated for women to be proud of a sex at this problematic point, which we teach them from a very young agethat he is disgusting and that he is likely to attract problems with them.It is therefore not very surprising that in almost 2020, women know their sex so badly: at 13 years old, 84% of girls do not know how to draw their sex when one in two knows how to represent a male sex.The first 3D representation of a female gender dates from 2016. In 2019, only one out of 10 school manual correctly represents the female sex.

Finally, a study by Nana just before disseminating this famous advertising spot revealed that 62% of women do not know how to define a vulva correctly.It also reveals that 36% of women are complexed by its appearance.I translate for the two at the bottom that look at them: in 2019, almost 2 thirds of women do not know the permanent resident of their panties too much, and more than 3 out of 10 think that she has a problem, not only four daysper month, but 365 days a year.Crazy figures confirmed by the recent boom in cosmetic surgery: according to the international company of aesthetic surgeons, labioplasty is now the 16th most practiced operation in the world, increasing 45% between 2015 and 2016 (figures did not existBefore 2010, so demand was tiny), while science is formal: the norm in vulva does not exist.

To summarize, women who bathe - like men - in porn culture see more and more cats and are more and more complexed by theirs, whose natural functioning continues to revolve them.Some of them have so little confidence in them that they believe that they are less painful to obscure the functioning or to modify the aspect of their sex rather than to be confronted with the judgment of others.How do you want gender equality to progress when one continues to consider that one of the two is the quasimodo of genitality?

It is therefore urgent to show the rules simply, as often as possible and everywhere, especially in advertising, because as a mass cultural product, it participates in shaping social representations. It is time that women,All women maintain pacified relationships with their sex which no longer depend on the external opinion in which Marine ten thousand years of sexist prejudices.

This post is also published on the Tgifiona blog.

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Fiona Schmidt

Journalist and author of the blog #tgifiona