This post stems from a conversation I had with my 13 year old daughter last week. As you may glean from the title, it has to do with menstruation, slightly. Hang with me here, gentlemen, because I have a question for you at the end. I promise you won’t cringe…too much.
We were sitting by the pool enjoying one of her final days of summer. Finally, a topic that was unsettled in my head made its way to the surface.
Me: You know, you are going to have to keep some “supplies” in your locker or purse this year.
13: I know.
Me: Since it just happened, you can’t count on being on a regular cycle for a while. You’ll feel better if you know you’re prepared.
13: I know, Mom.
Me: You’re lucky. I didn’t have a locker until high school so I had to keep everything in my purse.
13: That stinks.
Me: Yeah, because of the boys. As soon as they noticed that a girl was taking her purse with her to the bathroom, they would try their best to steal it and find her tampons.
13: They do that here, too. That’s way I’ll never take the risk.
She went on to explain that in her school boys may tease you if they see a pad in your locker or purse but if they spot a tampon, they will take it. When I asked her what they would do with it, she said she didn’t know but she thought it was bad. Really bad.
Now, I feel like I remember being 13 as if it was yesterday. (Sometimes…alright., often times, I even behave as such.) But to me, that’s just plain crazy. I don’t understand why one product would garner more harassment than the other. Do you?
And what do they do with these tampons and pads once they steal them? Is there a Tampax/Always shrine somewhere in boy’s locker rooms across the country?
Ladies: Did boys steal your “products” in middle school?
Guys: Care to shed some light on this for me? Or give me back my tampons?
Thanks.
*shudder*
We all should have received medals for getting through our teenage years.
I seem to recall something about a ceiling w/soaked tampons stuck permanent on it at some point in my teenage years. Maybe it was the girls locker room, would surprise me.
More likely they put sticking out of the backpack of some poor geek guy they want to torment.
I’ve never heard of this.
But at my junior high and high school the drama departments were bigger than the athletics departments.
If I had to hazard a Freudian guess about why one rather than the other, I’d have to go with: Pads look boring, and passive; tampons look interesting (i.e. phallic) and active. Stealing tampons amounts to stealing the substitute penis; and if a girl has a substitute penis with her, well hell, that must mean she’s interested in regular ol’ penis, right? So, if we steal her phallic substitute maybe she’ll refocus on the genuine bait and tackle.
Guys are predictable: “Pay attention to me and my penis!!!”
Ahhh, pre-teen boys…they’re rather pathetic.
I’m so glad we don’t have to return to junior high… but watching our children go through it is almost as painful I’m sure.
Ah the joys of having been to an all-girls school. Boys steal tampons?? That’s just weird.
Somehow, all of this is new to me…
Never happened at my schools - but I flew under the radar so to speak, so maybe that’s why.
I’ll have to do some research on that topic here at The Crossing.
I’ll let you know if I get any new info.
xo
LBC
You could have tampon wars. You hit the ends to see how far you can shoot them out of the applicator. Just sayin.
Okay - so here’s what you do.
Buy a big box of the cheap ones … tie a ribbon around each tampon.
Have a spunky grandma type stand in the hallway and give them away with a “I know you boys must be curious about the girls bodies, and that’s why you steal their tampons so here is one of your very own” speech.
Mortal embarrassment will go a long way to change a teenagers behavior.
*particularly if the next time a boy steals a tampon, the girls all say “poor dear, you must be curious …” In their best old lady voice.
I was a Royal Pain as a teenager.
Tee hee - maybe I should have read the tweet about the therapist reading before I commented
I have worked so hard to help my girls not be shame faced when purchasing or having one seen in their purse. I know it is a sort of a right of passage, that all this happens to most of us girls, and that boys have no clue what they doing but still - It pisses me off to no end!
Okay, I have no idea what they do with tampons but I know what they did with the pads where my daughter attended school.
Do not read further if you are easily grossed out…..
A favorite thing in our small country town was for the boys to procure pads, with the sticky strips of course, and then “decorate” them with a smear of catsup/ketchup. (Are you puking yet?)
There was a large concrete round curb barrier at the most popular four way stop in town, just as you turned into the Sonic Drive-In. It was their favorite place to adhere them….right at eye level of the car driver.
Lovely and it reallllly made you want to order some chili fries!
They were not selective however. Any street sign or window was fair game.
Our kids did not have enough free time obviously.
This is probably NOT what the 13-year old boys are doing, but have you seen this? (I can’t embed the link for some reason: http://www.tamponcrafts.com/ )
And I SO remember sneaking my purse into the bathroom. I was the first one in my class. Just mortifying.
I don’t recall them stealing, but I do remember the teasing. Me and my friends would just say something like, “Now that I’m a woman, I’m not interested in you immature little boys. I’ll be looking at high school boys now.”
Oh, um…sorry, Kimberly, don’t tell your daughter that and give her any ideas!
I don’t remember any of this stuff in middle school, but I may have blocked out the memory.
Also, I never had to worry about carrying a purse to the bathroom because at our middleschool we had to carry our backpacks all day (we were not allowed to use the lockers - i think it had something to do with kids dealing drugs out of them). I was also the girl no one really noticed because i was painfully shy and hardly talked to anyone…
And, I think as mothers we can teach our sons to be more respectful. I really can’t stand it when people excuse boys behavior by saying, “boys will be boys”. I grew up with three brothers and they were taught to be respectful and understanding to me, and i also did my best to keep those ‘girly things’ personal.
I don’t think we carried purses in school - middle or high school - so we had to cram them into our pockets.
yeah…we didn’t carry purses either. we used the hide it up your sleeve maneuver.
that’s why i really and truly believe that the compaks are the best invention ever. you can totally hide those in jeans.
I remember being provided with a hard plastic carrying case, with the signature Tampax flowers and logo embossed on it. I guess it was to be used to discreetly carry one’s tampons, but it pretty much screamed, I AM A TAMPON HOLDER! so there would have been no getting away with it.
This post makes me thankful I have a house full of boys… hey, want me to ask my son what they boys do with the stolen tampons in middle school? I’ll check in after school. Hee!
YES!! Meg, please do and tell me what he says!
I have never stolen a tampon. The men certainly don’t need them for themselves! Perhaps they see the as trophies, and can boast that they have got a certain girl’s tampon?
Mine were never stolen because I always tried to cram them in my pocket to avoid the whole purse carrying thing. Granted it took half of the class to discreetly get the thing in my pocket and by that time I was wondering what the back of my pants may look like.
I had totally forgotten about those days. Man school sucked! I’ll take an unshowered day with a toddler that still thinks I’m the prettiest thing in the world any day!
My teenage years makes me shudder and I don’t think anyone could pay me enough to go back ;-)
There is an award for you over at my blog.
I don’t remember any boy stealing tampons or pads from me. But I do remember one of my male friends told me when they find tampons on a girl they open up the tampon and hang it like an ornament on tree. They hang it where ever? I thought this was ridiculous??!! Plus a wasted of money…….does he know how much those darn things cost.
Tampon bombs…soak ‘em and throw them at each other.
Tampon corks…get two or three and flush them…then watch as the water spills over and covers the floors.
Tampon paste…wet one and throw it up at the ceiling (when one is not available, toilet paper works, too…
It sticks and dries there. For some reason this is funny when you’re a 13 year old boy.
I only know these things because mine was once 13, and I lost *a lot* of tampons when he was in junior high…
Poor kid, harassment or not, you couldn’t pay me to use a pad.
I think Backpack Dad’s probably right about his theory and I’m glad he said it cuz I didn’t want to.
Speaking of pubescent boys being jackasses, remember being ANYWHERE and having some retard come up and run his finger down your back just so that they could all whoop and holler because you were wearing *gasp* a bra?
But I suppose that isn’t as bad as having to deal with a wayward erection, so I’ll try to have a little pity on the poor guys of my past - and the three in my future (12, 9 and 2).
I don’t think anything of the sort ever happened. But I can’t remember anything about junior high school…
The thought of going through those years again makes me cringe. I have no idea why boys thought it was funny but I certainly got teased a lot for carrying a purse. I eventually just carried one everyday to avoid the obvious.
Can’t say I’ve ever stolen tampons. Maybe that was why I wasn’t popular. How could I have been so dumb?
Hey Gang,
Checking back in with a first-hand report from a real live 7th grader. He was all, I have no idea why anyone would want to do that. (Steal some girl’s tampon, I mean.) He said he’s never done it, never seen it done, and was so incredulous that I had to make sure he knew about girls and their periods and what a tampon is first. He assured me that he did.
So….. too small a sample size to draw conclusions, but there you have it.
[...] promised in the title, some random fluff, or maybe it should be called lint. Very juvenile lint. Kimberly of Petroville wrote yesterday about how her teenage daughter was living in fear of keeping sanitary supplies in [...]
I remember going to Chesapeake Seafood House on Allentown Road and there was a tampon in the ketchup bottle. I am sure a boy put it in there.
I also remember my brother taking them from his girlfriend and putting them in a glass of water. He and his friends thought it was wierd how much they expanded.
Oh, I don’t know…maybe they smoke them in the boys room??? (kidding)
I recall a very hated band director’s shrubs being bombarded with plastic forks from the cafeteria one week, and then showered with tampons the next. Kind of expensive–is all I can think now as an adult.
But, I have a 9 yr old son and I suspect that the fart humor just evolves and this is the next phase I’ll have to look forward to. woo…woo…
I was one of those unfortunate girls who got a visit from mother nature when I was 9. And, further more unlucky, I had a horrible vicious cycle that would cause me to flood terribly. I would almost always mess up my clothes. Basically I would carry that extra set of clothes with me to school.
After this happened repeatedly over a couple of years time, kids knew, they would see my pants, they (and mostly boys) would make fun of me horribly. If I ever find out that one of my boys has behaved the way any of those boys did toward a girl because of this, we shall have a smack down. I know boys are going to be boys and do some of that kind of stuff, be these boys were down right bullying me. I have a post coming up on Mom is Teaching later in the week about the bullying. That post only covers the girl bully and her pack, I didn’t even get to the bullying I took from the boys.
By the time I was in the seventh grade, I had a cycle that started and lasted for about 14 days, I would have about 6 days without a visit from the evil demon and I’d start again. My mom acted as if it were normal. I was still using a pack of super absorbent pads in about 2 days time and about 4 pads at night. Finally my mother agreed to let me stay home the first 2 days of my cycle every once in a while if my grades were good (and they were always good - I didn’t make a B til the 9th grade) and she wasn’t mad at me about something stupid. But, she never even approached the subject with me about how boys would act, how other girls would act and how this might not be normal.
I moved to my dads in the spring of my 8th grade year and I managed to conceal the horrible stuff from him the last months of eighth grade. That summer though, he watched as I would wriggle on the sofa in pain and saw how bad the issue really was. When I started 9th grade, I would ask to stay home the first 2 or 3 days although I had learned to cope much better by that time than I had ever managed in the fifth grade. About half way through the ninth grade he said, “this is ridiculous” and courted me off to see an ob/gyn. I don’t know if I would ever graduated high school if I had been forced to stay out 2 says out of every 3 weeks.
So, I wrote a novel, sorry! I just want you to be aware of just how cruel boys can be (as if you didn’t know) when someone has a hard time dealing with that evil creature.
I have no idea what they’re doing with tampons. Boys.
But I did the sleeve trick. It stayed in my locker until just the moment when I could put it up my sleeve and run to the bathroom. Pads were impossible to hide.
In my high school then and in the high school I teach at now, we weren’t allowed to bring purses or bags into classrooms (I think it has something to do with portable electronics and bombs), so I don’t have any of those embarrassing stories about leaving for the bathroom with my purse!
They fashion a flotation device out of all of them? To sail home?