Dramatic images of blood on our TV screens are commonplace, but it is still rare to be shown images of period blood.
It's a taboo that has been slowly challenged.
Communication design lecturer Jane Connory collected 100 period product ads from Australian women's magazines, dating from the 1920s to the present day.
You'd be hard pressed to know what some of the early advertising was even about, Dr Connory tells ABC RN's Life Matters.
She says the advertising industry offers a decade-by-decade snapshot of what images related to menstruation we've become more comfortable with, and which remain taboo.
Nature's handicap
In the 1920s, the message conveyed in ads for relatively new menstrual products was that periods were a medical issue that had to be treated or solved.
Source: Newspapers Collection, State Library Victoria.
)Ads like this one for Kotex's "surgical product" created a tone of secrecy and a sense that there was something wrong with having a period – euphemistically referred to as "liquids" or "nature's handicap," Dr Connory says.
According to her research, it took until 1974 for an Australian ad to even include the word "period".
This quiet approach continued into the 1940s where Dr Connory found ads that cryptically apologised to women for pad shortages, as the raw materials for bandages and medical necessities had to be prioritised for the war effort.
When products finally returned to the shelves, she says they were in minimal, plain packaging – reinforcing the notion that a period was shameful or something to be secretive about.
State Library of Western Australia
)When colour printing emerged, advertisers made a deliberate colour choice in the packaging of period products.
In Western culture, blue is considered "fresh [and] clean" and is far removed "from red and the reality of blood", says Dr Connory.
Ad agencies continue to use the colour blue today. Pure white has also featured over the decades.
Supplied
)In the 1980s, in magazines such as Dolly, Gen Xers were offered images extolling the advantages of tampons, and the freedom of not being held back by a period.
"Not only were these young women glamorous, they were glamorous in white clothes. They are in white bikinis, they were riding their white bikes. They're in white pants strutting around in corporate white suits," Dr Connory says.
She argues the images were far from realistic.
"What you would see and get as an education from these ads, and the realities of experiences as you fumbled your way through, was so opposite," she says.
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As Australian advertisers caught the zeitgeist of the women's movement, they felt capable of showing pads and tampons in magazine ads and on screen, but when they wanted to demonstrate the products' absorption, the menstrual blood was demonstrated with that same, safe colour: blue.
Not until 2019 was menstrual blood shown in an Australian TV commercial. It prompted hundreds of complaints to Ad Standards, all of which were dismissed.
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She notes that positive changes are continuing, offering the example of the depiction of men, who were until recently shown as oblivious to or ignorant about menstruation and menstrual products.
Source: Clemenger BBDO Melbourne
)But she says it will take time, and more dedicated effort, to dismantle menstrual taboos completely, and see an end to blue blood and white swimwear in period advertisements.
"Trying to change those tropes and metaphors is a tough gig," Dr Connory says.
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2021-05-17 21:00:00Z
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