Until this evening, I was loathe to enter the fray surrounding the 'ridiculousness' of ads for 'female hygeine' products. You know, all that brou-ha-ha and 'aware' talk about menstrual blood being "like, not blue" and about the sanitary pad not generally being put to use as a fix-all for leaks etc. You know what I mean. I vowed never to go there because it has been commented upon to the point of lameness [though of course, not to the point of achieving any substantial change]. Every time someone smugly trotted out such hackneyed material, I was like, yawn. Move along. But this evening I saw one of the most piss funny things relating to this subject. Forgive me, but I just had to share.

It was a tampon ad for some new tampon whose major selling point was an 'ease shield' or something. Whatever it's called, it's meant to be, like, silky or something, which makes for a smoother insertion. Simple, right? Wrong. Just consider what you would do if you were in advertising and this was the angle you needed to emphasise to explain the superiority of the product you had to hawk, okay? Come on big stuff, how would you illustrate that this particular tampon is designed to create less, er, 'friction' than other brands, without alluding in any way to the fact that it is also designed to get stuck up women's fanny holes to absorb, you know, "stuff"? No ideas? Punk? You disappoint me. It's just soooo obvious! You make the tampons race each other of course, dummy!

The ad's demonstrative mechanism was so beautiful. There was a glass sloped surface with two vertical canals indented on it and water running down them. The indentations were like two water slides, side by side, but of a size that made them suitable only for use by tampons [you must be "this" wide to ride]. So, two tampons [one being our boy, the other a less evolved challenger] were sliding down the canals, propelled by gravity and with only their own friction to impede them. Wheeeeee! It was intense, man. And would you believe it, but the new 'ease' tampon with its smoother less frictional surface won! Yay!

I think we all learned an important lesson here today, people. Perhaps even a variety of lessons. Any physics teachers out there, take note. Prepare your experiments and just watch the learning happen. So cheap, yet so effective a demonstration about the forces acting on moving objects and stuff, don't you think? And ladies, now that we've got the lowdown on which tampon would win a race down a slightly sloped and pristine water slide [wink wink] we can all be better informed about our options [wink wink]. Do the math, girls. Make the translation. You know what that means.

Hee hee hee! Ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa! I think this ad is hilarious. And bizarre. It's like, totally weird packaged as 'polite' but it knows it's totally weird. Brilliant.