![female symbol for female female symbol for female](https://www.safetyfirstaid.co.uk/images/products/large/SS8029S.jpg)
In October, menstrual product brand Always changed the packaging of some of its sanitary pads. good? The symbolic value of removing a symbol When it’s enacted by a major company, can marketing inclusivity ever simply just be. Surely the countdown, until some kind of “but” was added to the announcement, had begun - as seemingly every viral post reveals itself to be sponcon or a milkshake duck, surely every “woke” marketing move comes with some kind of catch, or is merely an empty gesture. None of this is great! Compounding this stress by seeing that impossibly loud packaging material dotted with little female symbols, reminding you that no part of this process was designed with you in mind, can make an already unpleasant process borderline unbearable.Īnd yet, when a mass-market producer of sanitary pads scrapped its hyper-feminized packaging, something felt slightly off. This complicates the other objective of trying to move through this process as silently as possible, lest you alert anyone else in the bathroom that you’re committing Gender Deviance - but the crinkle of pad packaging being unwrapped in a public restroom booms at about 150 decibels, so you become certain everyone can hear you and knows there’s a trans person in the stall. Men’s room stalls never come equipped with the little metal trash cans they offer in women’s restrooms to toss out your used hygiene products, so from the get you’re probably executing half of the maneuver one-handed, with the other hand holding your trash. Skateboarding, mountain biking, and downhill street luge all pale in comparison to the extreme sport that is trying to change your pad in the stall of a public men’s restroom.