“Tampon Tim” and the Politics of Periods
Lara Freidenfelds“Tampon Tim,” Stephen Miller sneered, referring to the legislation Governor Tim Walz signed requiring schools to provide free menstrual products in school bathrooms. Name-calling triggered by Miller, a senior advisor from the Trump administration, is the latest attempt by MAGA and the Trump campaign to smear an opponent with “nasty” woman things, this time invoking period blood and vaginas.
What is so striking about this latest round of public discussion of menstruation is how readily many Democratic politicians and their young supporters speak about periods in public, and therefore how juvenile conservatives look when their message is essentially, “ew gross, periods!”
Between 1999 and 2002, I interviewed 75 men and women born from the earliest years of the twentieth century through the early 1980s about their experiences with menstruation for my book, The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America. The youngest of those interviewees are now in their early 40s, millennials now likely to have children of their own. When I interviewed them in their late teens and early 20s, they still had recent memories of their first periods, bleeding unexpectedly at school, and worrying about stains on their clothing. The eldest remembered the first mass-market Kotex in the 1920s.
Their stories, from across time and across the country, help explain what MAGA’s tampon culture wars really mean.
First, why “Tampon Tim?”
MAGA loves its alliterative nicknames, of course. But Miller and his MAGA chorus line are calling upon ancient taboos as well. In the Bible, the book of Leviticus defined menstruating women, and any who touched them, as unclean, and the book of Isaiah compared false idols to menstrual cloths which must be cast away. In the early modern period, it was commonly believed that sex during menstruation produced monstrous births. People assumed that menstrual blood was disgusting to men; as Mary Hanson,[1] born in the first years of the twentieth century, explained, “[D]idn’t they tell us it was our bad blood? Why would a man want to have anything to do with it?” MAGA critics want to stain Walz with this evergreen (ever-red?) stigma.
The nickname “Tampon Tim” not only suggests that Walz is perfectly okay with girls’ periods; it specifically connects him to internal protection, which carries its own sexualized taboo. When tampons were first introduced on the market by a female entrepreneur in the 1930s, doctors were aghast that women would use this medical technology—originally meant to deliver medication vaginally—without a physician’s supervision. It might lead to infections, and what’s more, it “brings about pelvic consciousness and undue handling, [and] may cause eroticism and masturbation.”[2] Mid-century sex researcher Robert Latou Dickinson conducted a study to prove that even with an intact hymen, a girl ought to have room for a tampon, but teen magazines still feel compelled to combat the myth that a tampon can take a girl’s virginity.[3] Many of those I interviewed felt that tampons were for “worldly” girls, and waited until they went to college, moved to a city, or otherwise encountered liberal, more sexualized spaces to try them. “Tampon Tim” associates Walz with girls’ precocious sexuality.
In addition to giving Walz a stigmatizing nickname, Republicans have claimed (incorrectly) that Walz required schools to put menstrual products in boys’ bathrooms. Why is this politically relevant? Because MAGA activists are trying to tie Walz to what they believe to be an unpopular transgender agenda. And indeed, the legislator who drafted the bill deliberately wrote it to obligate schools to supply pads and tampons to any menstruating student, not only to those who use girls’ bathrooms.
But MAGA activists are also picking up on a traditional belief that boys shouldn’t have to learn about menstruation because it’s yucky, and because it might then require their parents to explain about sex and reproduction. One of the women I interviewed, born in the 1910s, explained to me why she objected to TV commercials for pads and tampons that first started appearing in the 1970s. “I thought disgusting. Nasty. I say, all kids watching. ‘Oh, Mommy, what’s that?’ Little boy come, ‘what’s that for?’ I thought that was wrong. OK, you got in store you put in some magazine or something. On TV I don’t agree with. That’s somehow overboard. To me. Because I am old-fashioned.”[4] Her son did not remember seeing menstrual products in the family bathroom, so like a number of my older interviewees, she probably hid them in her bedroom. He guessed, “Maybe she was embarrassed to show it to us, or something. You know, start asking questions, it gets embarrassing. She wasn’t much one to talk about anything. That, and sex—anything like that.” [5] No one I interviewed expressed discomfort with the Kotex dispensers that appeared in women’s public bathrooms beginning in the 1920s, but it took some decades for American bathrooms to routinely contain storage cabinets, and for menstrual products to become an expected item in those cabinets, opening up the possibility of boys encountering them.[6] As MAGA activists campaign for “parental rights” that include the right to withhold health and sex education curricula they don’t like, keeping boys from encountering menstrual products is highlighted as a political issue.
Some schools in Minnesota have not put period products in boys’ bathrooms for trans students’ use for more prosaic reasons: boys will fool around and make a mess with them. My interviews suggest this concern may be warranted, especially if schools and parents decline to educate boys about menstruation. Adam Chiang, born in the early 1970s, shared memories of getting creative with his little brother while they were playing in the bathroom when Adam was 7 or 8. One time, they found a box of pads and stuck them to the walls. Another time they experimented with a box of tampons by “running them under the sink, and doing crazy stuff with them… We really didn’t know what they were.” This could be a recipe for a janitorial disaster in an elementary school bathroom. But in another way, it also has the potential (perhaps frightening to MAGA partisans) to destigmatize menstrual products. Because as Adam concluded, they were so free in their play because “We didn’t have any taboos about it.”[7]
In contrast to MAGA Republicans, who are casting an appeal to their followers by triggering disgust based in ancient taboos about women’s menstruating bodies, Democrats are hailing “Tampon Tim” as a caring public servant. As my book demonstrates, women, physicians, and menstrual products manufacturers have collaborated since the 1920s to build a matter-of-fact, modern way to manage menstruation, rooted in the Progressive values of the early twentieth century. Liberals have made longstanding efforts to put sex and menstrual education in schools, and in the last decade or so, the menstrual equity movement has picked up steam, demanding that people have universal access to the supplies they need to take care of their menstruating bodies. Talking about menstruation and public policy is par for the course.
With the “Tampon Tim” nickname, MAGA activists call up ancient taboos of uncleanness and shame. But the modern period has been with us for a century now, and traditional stigmas have faded dramatically. MAGAs may find that voters are no more eager to go back “on the rag” and into the menstrual closet than they are to lose their reproductive freedoms, and will likely regard MAGA name-calling as hardly worthy of the middle-school playground, never mind the vice-presidential contest.
Notes
Featured image caption: Governor Tim Walz speaking at a campaign rally for Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona. (Courtesy Gage Skidmore on Flickr)
Lara Freidenfelds is a historian of health, reproduction, and parenting in America. She is the author of The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: a History of Miscarriage in America and The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America. Sign up for her newsletter and find links to her op-eds and blog essays at www.larafreidenfelds.com.
