Tampons for Boys Just Feels Right

Many reasonably well-intentioned people have trouble distinguishing between movement and progress. Watch the boy in fourth grade with outrageous A.D.D. for an exemplary reminder. People who have chosen the soft career of academia love enacting shit that has all the superficial markings of social advancement. It’s largely masturbatory arm-flapping. 

The Brown University Undergraduate Council of Students has decided to fund free tampons in all the campus restrooms. Men’s, women’s, and gender inclusive. The big three, or two, with the third clearly an arbitrary null set of the first two. According to UCS President, Viet Nguyen, tampons are a human right. By illogical extension, free tampons are a super duper human right. And they’re not just for women anymore:

We wanted people to recognize that this issue affects trans students as well and that menstruation is experienced by more than just those who identify as women and that not all people who identify as women menstruate.

Just twenty years ago that statement would’ve made absolutely no sense. Twenty years later it still really fucking makes no sense.

Nguyen deftly notes that menstrual products can cost a person nearly $18,000 over a lifetime. Somebody did their tampon research. To put that high cost into perspective, it’s almost one semester of Body Shamed Lesbian Artists Through the Ages at Brown. The UCS is now picking up the cost of such products campus wide. Everybody is giving the project rave reviews. Especially the non-gender specified persons with bloody underpants every four weeks. Less so the guys who just lost their Frisbee golf team funding to pay for maxi-pads.

Nguyen admits the the point of the program is more than just giving away free shit. The UCS hopes the tampons opens up a larger discussion about the stigmatization of menstruation. That sounds serious but really it just means only female comedians will be allowed to make period jokes moving forward. Also, some mandatory seminars that will remind you why you should’ve saved your parents six figures and gone to State where they’re giving away free condoms.

_{Photo credit: Brown University}