A poorly translated but real conversation I had with an overly personal gym rep:
Rep: “If you come to the gym 3 times a week, which is what we recommend, that’s 3 x 4 = 12 times per month, and then let’s subtract two days for menses — “
Me: “What?”
Rep: “Uh…menses?”
Me: “Yes, I know what that is. What did you say about it?”
Rep: “Like, we don’t really recommend women to exercise while menstruating? At least not very active exercise, because it’s bad for you? Like it might have detrimental effects on your health? Like — ”
Me: “It won’t. But continue.”
Rep: “Right so if we subtract 2 days for your menses — “
Me: “Oh, no need. I don’t menstruate regularly.”
Rep: “…”
Needless to say, I did not join that gym.
At first, his sales strategy completely bewildered me, but it occurred to me several weeks later that he was probably just trying to be considerate. In the US, we may complain about our periods every so often to our girlfriends and skip them every so often, but in professional settings, we have a pretty callous shut-up-and-suck-it-up attitude toward periods. Outside of my closest friends, the (straight, cis) men I interact with usually act as if periods don’t exist; I would certainly never expect a man to bring up my period when trying to sell me a product.
In China, there seems to be a collective awareness that periods comprise a vulnerable time for women. One of my coworkers told me that it stems from “watching my mom look really uncomfortable while menstruating.” But this phenomenon extends far beyond the home: some provinces in China have passed legislation for paid menstrual leave, which also exists in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia. It sounds like a great thing, but unfortunately, paid menstrual leave is in no way correlated with women’s workplace welfare: Japan and South Korea have some of the highest gender wage gaps in the world.
Of course, mere days after I had that exchange with overly personal gym rep, my own period decided that five months of dormancy was long enough. So I went to the supermarket to look for tampons, where I encountered my next great ordeal:
Not only are they scarce, but they’re also horribly expensive. For comparison, a box of 8 tampons costs 36 RMB (about $5.50), whereas 8 pads cost around 4 RMB ($0.60). All of the tampon brands I saw were imported: in 2015, China, world’s largest manufacturer, made 86 billion pads and not a single tampon. And in 2013, despite the enormous difference in pricing, China’s tampon market was only 2.5% the size of its sanitary pad market.
In a marketing survey from 2015, only 2% of Chinese women reported using tampons. Here are the top four reasons why survey respondents didn’t use them:
(1) don’t know how to use them: 38%
(2) never heard of them: 31%
(3) bad for health: 23%
(4) strange: 20%
I find (1) and (2) incredible and symptomatic of a much larger problem at hand: sexual education is abysmal, even in large cities. One fascinating study of female college students across three of China’s largest cities reported abysmal rates of safe-sex education prior to college, with most students getting their information from the television and other state-censured media. Another survey of urban high school students showed rates of condom use at first intercourse hovering around 25–40%. I won’t get into STI risk, but let’s just say that’s why I have a job.
At the end of the day, this entire issue is inseparable from culture: the country is skittish about inserting objects inside vaginas. Plenty of women (including my own mom, until I convinced her otherwise) think that tampons can’t be used before sex, or that they break the hymen. Yeah, some serious virgin-idolization is happening here. Even though the rate of premarital sex has increased by 30% from 1994 to 2012, sex is still appallingly stigmatized. Despite increasing liberal perspectives among young people, the societal obsession with virgins is alive and well. An unexpected outcome of this is the rise of services like hymen reconstruction surgery. Too poor for surgery? Guess you’ll have to settle for an artificial hymen. And just to be safe, stay away from those pesky tampons.
China isn’t the only country where tampons are being disruptive. Some of you may remember the controversy over the tampon tax in the US last year. This month in the EU, supermarkets have been slashing tampon prices to signal solidarity with citizens impatient for the EU to roll back its own tampon tax.
Currently, paralleling China’s (slow and controversial) promotion of early sexual education, the Chinese tampon market is also growing. If you’re looking for a side hustle, importing tampons is a pretty high-margin industry right now. But you’ll need to get in fast: just last year, Chinese companies started producing their own tampons. I got super excited after seeing a campaign in GZ for tampon newcomer Femme, boasting an elegant, minimalist design that wasn’t “overly westernized”:
But when I went to look, I couldn’t find their tampons anywhere.
