Sanitary Napkins, not really one for men.

What the fuck is the point of sanitary pads? Can somebody please enlighten me?

Arguably, for known reasons, they do have a use, I guess.

I know when I have had an operation "down there" and have been probed by horrible steel pointy things, where I had absolutely no concept of the extent the horrific-ness was, until I saw the full length home made dvd version the doctors made, (the drugs were really good, so was the price tag)… Granted, the pads are useful then. Being that there would be no way in hell, after a gynecological invasion, with unfamiliar tools shoved inside your 'wimin's bits' you would want to stick a tampon up your twat.

(I should leave out the pro choice bit here - as I'm pretty sure you would want to use a pad for that)

But seriously. Apart from the handy after the, operation bit… is there any other use? you can't tell me that a tampon doesn't preserve the hymen, because we all know it does.

As a serial tampon offender/user for most of my menstruating life, I can not tell you how fucking angry and despairing one feels, after checking into an airport, and going through customs, which I always encounter issues with, feeling like Pre menstrual shit.

At first thinking it's a tummy ache, then realizing it's cramps, and having a flight at a time when there is absolutely no shops open, bar some overly expensive duty free shop selling perfume, cheapish fags and shitty repackaged chocolates. The only other option being some shitty snack shop posing as a semi 7/11, but had no tampons to be seen, no where to even buy a pad. The airport didn't even have a doodad machine in the women's toilets which dispensed the nappy pad (must be terrorism).

Ok so, you start to bleed like a stuck pig just after they have called the plane to board (you're about 20 rows away at this point, it's all sequential you know).You have precisely two precious tampons left, but you know it's not going to make the 24 hour long journey you have to get home… you hope to whoever and whatever that there will be an 'appropriate' shop open which sells female sanitary products at some inevitable mid point layover on the way home.

So, after the first long leg of the journey pained with want-to-make-you-die cramps, you finally get to the transfer airport. You walk around in a somnambulist daze because you've had intermittent sleep, punctuated with bad adam sandler movies, or at best shitty interrupted sleep beside some fat white person who smells, takes up half your seat on the plane and wants to pee a lot. A plane which is pretty much designed for small people (it's an Asian airline - their staple diet is rice). On your slightly anxious way (mainly because you feel it's poor form to seep blood all over your hired seat), your first and foremost endeavor is to find someone who sells FEMALE SANITARY PRODUCTS on the layover.

In the transit airport, you lackadaisically steer your hand luggage trolley around with your copious amounts of carry on luggage (the heavy stuff you can't check, disguised in smaller bags they don't care about). In a fucked up vague, sleep deprived state (with many bad asian/english conversations that go nowhere) you eventually find a chemist/pharmacy/drug store… the only shop where they sell the 'products' to stem the fucking mass hemorrhaging.

I is overjoyed because so far the tide of red has been stemmed with the available choices on hand to soak up the blood i.e the chippy two tampons I possessed. Most pointedly, I did not want to resort to wadding great stacks of paper towels into my underwear to do the last 12 hours of the journey, as from experience, we know that never works.

I get directed to the chintzy shitty little beauty shop… I look around. For the sweet love of Jebus… they have noting but pads… oh thats right, you're back in asia. They have no idea what a tampon is. Tampons are for white foreign women, possibly fat people it seems, and and worst, loose if your'e puritanical. No one uses tampons in ASIA?

You buy the pad out of sheer desperation and necessity. Waiting till the very last moment, eventually, after having no other option you stick it into your underwear…

not only do you feel angry, grumpy, menstrual, shitty, sleep deprived, but now you're wearing a pad which within the hour just turns into feeling like you are wearing a sopping nappy full of blood. There is nothing quite as disgusting as having the fucking blood trickle down between your legs into your panty protector, and not feel like it's secretly pissing out every where Carrie style.

I just want to go to the toilet and wash everything away every time i feel some warm red gush. I mean it's not contained, not really. Sure it's supposed to go between the wings and shit - in a perfectly blue seepage stain poured from a grade 9 science beaker (it doesn't)… but it feels gross, I don't care how natural a fucking bodily fluid is.

And don't try and sell me that shit in some spiffy ad where there's water sprinklers going off and the girl is running through it, pirouetting, jumping outlandishly high, or doing gymnastics, double flipping utterly carefree, like she is having a good time. They aren't… and you, advertiser, are lying.

Women are actually under their grandmas crocheted blanket with a hot water bottle feeling sorry for themselves, watching ads which make them cry. And if not on the 'pill', taking copious amounts of iboprofen, or codeine or something.

Not only that but, when wearing the pads, my sense of smell becomes very suspect. Can people smell me? Because I think I can smell me. It's like the faint smell of iron mixed in with some cheap off the rack perfume. Yeuk. Just pure yeuk.

I digress, kind of. What I meant to say is: in my personal opinion there is no point to pads, excluding gynecological operations or miscarriages/abortions, unless you are the type of person who likes walking around wearing a blood filled nappy, and don't mind spending half the day sitting in it.

Although thinking about it, I am sure there is a fetish for it. *goes googling*.