ABSTRACT
I will also explore how contemporary menstrual product advertisements reproduce menstruation as a restrictive experience. In the early twenty-first century, women can purchase menstrual products with names such as Libra, Carefree, and Stayfree – conjuring up images of freedom and the potential for a vast number of experiences, presumably including vigorous physical exertion. This chapter demonstrates how contemporary advertisements, although different in style and content, and despite allusions to freedom and liberation, resituate menstruation as a problematic event. Menstruation is socially, rather than biologically, problematic in these contemporary advertisements, but with similarly restrictive consequences. Although these advertisements no longer focus on the pathological nature of menstruation, they promote discourses of restraint, control, and caution. This results in strictly coded rules of feminine behavior that highlight the female body and its social expectations at the expense of embodied physicality.
