The worst part about being a girl is definitely getting your period. Childbirth is supposedly “magical” because you literally create a tiny human inside of you, and boobs are pretty cool, but there’s no upside to your period. It’s gross, but it’s a fact of life. We want as little direct contact with products of menstruation as possible. Tampons make this possible. Handy applicators make the process much less gross, and as long as you change them regularly, it’s almost as if it never happened. Then, menstrual cups came along and completely fucked up the game. Watch the video below and try not to gag.
“The average woman menstruates for 2,470 days in her lifetime. That’s seven years straight.” Well, we’re off to a great start here. Bold strategy by leading with a statistic that makes me hate you. I had no idea that seven years of my life will be spent bleeding from my insides. Menopause kicks in around the time I’m 40, and I waste seven of the years leading up to that? Are those the seven years my future husband spends sleeping with other women thinking he’s too young to settle down? God, I hope so.
The foreign woman in the video claims that the Lily Cup Compact is as small as a thing of lip balm. Oh, the ways this could go wrong feel so right. Follow me on a journey here as I describe what will probably definitely happen to women who use the Lily Cup Compact:
Man: “Babe, do you have lip balm in your bag?”
Woman: “Yeah, it’s the pink round thing floating around at the bottom of my purse.”
Man: *pops open the Lily Cup Compact* “OH DEAR GOD, WHAT IS THIS MEDIEVAL CONTRAPTION?”
And then they break up and the woman spends seven years menstruating into a cup alone while the man sleeps with women who wear tampons.
“You literally forget you’re even on your period.” Except for the emotional scarring that occurs every time you change it. When you take it out, it’s probably a warm 98.6 degrees, like everything else inside your body, waiting to spill that warm, gooey liquid all over your hand. What if you get scared of the spillage and drop it in the toilet? And you’re just stuck there fishing out your cup in a bowl of freshly dumped period blood?
The great thing about tampons is that most women carry them in their purse, in their car, and even keep some at their desk. Should you ever break this commandment of being a woman by forgetting a tampon, you can just ask any other woman and she’ll have your back. No one will ever say, “Can I borrow your menstrual cup? I left mine at home.” Excuse me while I vomit.
There seems to be a new fad with making everything reusable and environmentally friendly, but some things are just not meant to be reusable: condoms, diapers, and yes, TAMPONS. How are we supposed to keep these things clean? Are they dishwasher safe? Do I even want to put this in my dishwasher? I don’t have time to boil my menstrual cup in a vat of hot water every time I need to change it. Sometimes I don’t even do my dishes. I just rinse them off and if they smell okay, I use them again. This goes to show that I have very little faith in my ability to keep a menstrual cup clean.
My point is, can people stop trying to make menstrual cups a thing? They will never be a thing. I’m sorry, but I will never be comfortable enough with my body to fish a cup of hot liquid out of it voluntarily, every day, for seven days. I will continue killing trees by using tampons, and I won’t feel bad about it, because I recycle enough Diet Coke cans to make Leonardo DiCaprio proud..