Have a Happy Period

Have you seen the Whisper commercial that says “Have a happy period”?

I mean, come on people, are you guys delusional??

I am yet to meet a menstruating woman who is having a “happy period”. Have you ever seen a woman jump up & down in excitement or sing joyously when she’s menstruating? Instead, what women do is fight with their boyfriends/husbands over something which is totally someone else’s fault, or pick fights if there’s no issue to fight over, blame the constant fighting in the Middle East for the pimples on their faces, cry for no reason at all or if they’re craving a brownie or a cheesecake and there's no one to get it for them, and bite the heads off anyone who tries to talk to them.

If someone asks them how they’re doing, they say, “Why don’t you just sod off?”

Seriously, you can’t be happy if you’re feeling bloated like a gas balloon that is about to explode, your breasts are swollen & sore, you’re having an acne attack, there’s a holy river flowing out of your body, you’re having such bad cramps that it seems someone is trying to pull your uterus out of your bloody body, you can’t lie down on your back and have to sleep on your side throughout the night, you feel depressed for no reason at all, and you can feel the hormonal forces surging through your body like a tornado, waiting to gush out & annihilate anything that comes in its wake. All you want to do is lie curled up in some corner of your house & pray fervently that no one asks you to get up from there. And there’s a foreign object in between your legs continuously for five-six days that doesn’t give you any pleasure at all and is therefore, not welcome.

Surely, the manufacturers of sanitary napkins have done a lot of consumer research. They know what their consumers have to go through during “that time of the month”. If they don't, let me tell them - you want to reach inside your body and yank out your uterus!! And during that time if you see a commercial that says “Have a happy period”, what does it make you feel like doing? It makes you want to yank out the testicles of the person who came up with that line (assuming he’s a man) & barbecue them. If it’s a woman you just want to bitch-slap her for betraying her kind.

A more appropriate tag line could have been: “Your boyfriend has done nothing wrong, please don’t yell at him”. Or “Mom loves you & has called to make sure you’re alright, not to chew your brains out”. Or “Manslaughter will get you life imprisonment”.

And don’t even get me started on the advertisements for sanitary napkins. They always show a PYT dressed in the tightest & whitest of pants, playing Frisbee, riding a bicycle, jumping up & down or skipping rope – suggesting that menstruation doesn’t put a stop to your life in any way at all. And there are flowers all over the screen implying that never mind the wet, sticky feeling down there, you always feel fresh as a flower. Both of these couldn’t be farther from the truth.

I mean, for heaven’s sake, there must be a more honest way to sell sanitary napkins?