Period 26: Journalists - stop saying that menstrual products are tested with saline and please do some reporting
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Last week for the weird period fact I shared a recent paper that looked at menstrual product absorbencies/containments. It was small, but important, showing that the reported absorbencies were often lower than what was actually reported by the manufacturers.
The study authors used expired blood for the testing liquid under the assumption it would be at least somewhat similar to menstrual blood. They then contended that the reason so many of the absorbencies were off were because menstrual product manufacturers use saline or water to test their products.
They did not ask manufacturers what they used. They made an assumption. Then everyone freaked out and started saying that menstrual products are tested with water or saline and isn’t that just sooooo fucked up???
I am not here to defend manufacturers – they are corporations trying to make money. What I want to address is that this is an embarrassingly ahistorical take. I don’t expect any regular person to know the history of feminist health activism or menstrual product testing. But I do expect journalists to not take a press release and one-line assumption at face value. (And, gently – paper authors, you may have wanted to double check this too. But frankly peer reviewers should have thought to ask you this.)
Ask the manufacturers what materials they use! Ask about their absorbency testing! It’s an interesting question actually, to get to the bottom of this. Because once upon a time Esther Rome, Nancy Reame, and many others fought for heparinized blood products to be used to test absorbencies for tampons. And they did! And the testing that came about because of these feminist health activists is why we now have particular standards for tampon absorbency!
Once upon a time, menstruating people had no way of knowing whether a Tampax super tampon was anything like a Kotex super tampon. And in fact, in the 1970s and 1980s we used to have the opposite problem: tampons were in fact more absorbent than was safe. These ultraabsorbent tampons had the potential to cause toxic shock syndrome because by drying out the vagina they created a habitable environment for bacteria. Maybe you’re not old like me so you don’t know this, but people got incredibly sick and even died from TSS.
So feminist health activists designed methods to test and create industry standards for tampon absorbency which saved the lives of countless menstruating people. We have them to thank for the fact that the products currently on the market are much safer than the products used by our parents and grandparents.
Once those initial methodologies were developed, and testing standards determined, did manufacturers stop using heparinized blood products? Who knows, but it sure would be a good story! Are they the victim of their own cost cutting and/or laziness and/or menstrual stigma? Or is this biiiiiig assumption incorrect, and the reason the absorbencies are off is the reason these sorts of things are so often off – because corporations gonna corporate. That is, it may or may not be the liquid they are using but some other way they are calculating standards that has led so many products to overestimate absorbencies. I mean, supplement manufacturers lie about how much active ingredient is in their product. Some over the counter drugs were known to be carcinogens and on the market anyway. Drugs have to be pulled for contamination because of unsafe manufacturing all the time. There are a million reasons these absorbencies could be wrong – each interesting in their own way.
So, journalists? How about you investigate and stop writing copy for university news bureaus! This is an interesting story – get on it!
Sources and further reading:
Dr. Sharra Vostral is literally the world expert on the feminist history of TSS and the study of menstrual absorbency. Interview her!
Go read, like, the Wikipedia page on Esther Rome.
Here’s Mayo Clinic information on TSS if you’re young and don’t remember what it was like to be afraid your tampon was going to literally kill you.
Here’s the paper everyone is overreacting to. (No shade to the authors, it’s not your fault it’s being covered this way.)
Here’s Sharra’s book on TSS, which you should read. Also here’s her other book on menstrual product technologies that is also awesome (I have no idea why this one is so expensive, so maybe request it from your library).