Mooncup make a menstrual cup that you put in your vagina when you’re on your period. They also do educational campaigns about menstruation, and generally have a theme around being open about talking about it, and removing the shame from periods. They also did a campaign about what names people call their vaginas, with this video, aptly called the Love Your Vagina Song:
What Mooncup did well: Mooncup don’t hide from the word vagina, and the lighthearted video is fun. Mooncup also run educational campaigns to de-stigmatise menstruation, vaginas, wombs etc. Mooncup also make a useful product that women need.
Today, feminine hygiene product Femfresh received a backlash on their Facebook Page for using similar non-science words for vulva in their communications.
One response with 22 likes said: ” I can’t go to any festivals! I’ll be too busy sitting at home crying about the embarrassing smell of my shame-shame.”
Read more: http://wallblog.co.uk/2012/06/21/femfresh-suffers-social-media-vagina-backlash/#ixzz1yXFt7uHb
Femfresh have finally issued quite a good explanation, a near-apology, which addresses the main concerns people raised:
Femfresh avoided using the word vagina (or vulva, which I think is what their product is for actually), then had to explain themselves. Using daft words for womens’ genitals is OK if you don’t stigmatise the real word. But by avoiding using it, it is stigmatising. Their explanation is also annoying because they say it is to avoid offending people. People will continue to be offended by vaginas and vulvas if nobody ever speaks about them. But the major difference here is that their product is unnecessary. They try to explain that the problem is women using soap on their genitals, when water is fine. For women who need more – maybe they need to get checked out at a doctor? Their marketing doesn’t exactly tell women that most of them would be better off using water than soap OR Femfresh products does it?!
Next up, today, the EU Commission for Research and Innovation, launched this video to promote science to women and girls:
This also received a massive backlash. I don’t think I even need to start explaining why, just check out the comments on the YouTube video. Twitter comments on the hashtag #itsagirlthing were of a similar ilk:
Pretty much a fail for feminism today then.