Still at a loss for what to get your currently menstruating lady friend for Valentine's Day? The choice is clear — the pad's sexier cousin, the tampon. As the sultry narrator in the video above puts it, your girlfriend doesn't just need them, but "She wants them. They're her special little treat." Across the board, women agree: There's nothing more luxe or alluring than a sterile stick of cotton sitting in your vagina. It's a rare and perfect thing.
Staged like a commercial for lingerie, fancy chocolates, a phone sex line, or all three, the video astutely skewers the idea that tampons are considered a luxury good. As ridiculous as that sounds, 40 states still tax tampons as they would a nonessential item. Beyond that, more states tax tampons and pads than they do candy. No wonder the more common V-Day gift is chocolate.
The video's creators, Mary Dauterman and Sarah Lloyd, came upon the idea pretty organically. "Lately, we’ve been flipping back and forth between rage reading about the 'pink tax' and 'tampon tax' and cracking up about a guy we overheard fretting about Valentine’s Day gifts," Dauterman tells Refinery29. She adds that men tend to view Valentine's gift-giving as a "burden," so why not encourage them to give tampons to the women in their lives? It shows they care and helps the women save some major coin (past research has shown that menstruation, as we deal with it now, is downright expensive, regardless of how much your feminine products are taxed).
We've seen other demonstrations against the tampon tax recently, from parody videos to public free bleeding. And, while Dauterman and Lloyd's video is clearly meant as protest, the pair still maintain a sense of humor about it.
"We hope people actually do get their GFs tampons," Dauterman jokes. "It seems so romantic and thoughtful to share the lifelong burden of menstruation."
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