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Historically significant tampons
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Sept. 10, 1999 |
Even more interesting than Finley's basement is the Web site he's created. Sometime last year, Finley stopped taking in visitors and installed the museum on the Internet. Finley is an illustrator and designer, and is very good at making Web sites. So good, in fact, that the Department of Defense recently hired him to design some. Do the generals know about Finley's hobby? They do know, and they're OK with it. "They just don't want any implications that there's some kind of connection." So I agreed not to imply that any high-ranking generals at the Pentagon have Pursettes fetishes or like to wear Maxi Thins under their uniforms. A prurient interest in things menstrual is not, Finley said, unheard of among males. He's received letters from six or seven such men, including an officer in the French Coast Guard. The men apparently mistook Finley for one of their own, and just wanted to talk. "It's like puncturing a boil for these men," recalls Finley, adding that he is not, in fact, one of them. "I would see menstruation as an impediment to sex." Would see? Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday.
"I don't have a girlfriend," confessed Finley. "My significant other right now is seven cats." I wasn't sure where to take things from here. I said, "Do cats menstruate?" This probably wasn't the place to take it, and I apologize. Finley, of course, had an answer, an answer that, I am sure, does not apply to any other question in the universe: "No, but there are apes that do, and a shrew." Many of Finley's answers were like that. My other favorite was: "It stands for Ohne Binde, which is German for 'without pads.'" Much of Finley's material is historical -- boxes of "historically significant tampons," sanitary pads dating back to the 1920s and hundreds of old magazine ads. The earliest reference to menstruation and what to do about it comes from the Old Testament: "The Lord said to Moses and Aaron: 'When a woman has a discharge of blood which is her regular discharge, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening, and everything upon which she lies during her impurity shall be unclean; everything also upon which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water and ...'" Whereupon Aaron made the blah- Growing sick of this seven-day impurity business, women picked up on a trick the ancient Egyptians came up with. According to Finley, Egyptian hieroglyphics tell of women inserting wads of lint for contraception. The O.B. tampon company has conjectured that the lint probably served double-duty as a tampon, and has printed this as fact in its promotional materials.
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