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Comment by teamhappy | Hacker News Reader

I googled for stats on tampons vs. pads and according to a paper some 3/4 of all women prefer tampons anyway, so I'm not sure they actually need a replacement for pads? I'm amazed that almost everybody using the word "gross" in this thread seems to be a women. I thought if anything men would be the problem. While searching for the paper I actually found a lot of women calling pads disgusting which I though is a little harsh. I hope they're talking about the feeling rather than the blood? About the product itself I'm not sure what to think. It's patented tech so it's not all that helpful to women in poor countries and I'm not too happy about the language they're using either. They're kind of implying that all women have tried so far isn't sexy and now they fixed it. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm convinced the tech isn't the problem here (seems fairly obvious).

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Tampons vs. pads is like Ruby vs. Javascript. Not mutually exclusive; used in different circumstances.

>While searching for the paper I actually found a lot of women calling pads disgusting which I though is a little harsh. I hope they're talking about the feeling rather than the blood?

I think what these women are saying is, "I personally find wearing a pad disgusting" and not "Women who wear pads are disgusting." I definitely would call pads gross or disgusting, and when I say that, I mean that is my experience with wearing them in comparison to tampons.

With tampons, the blood doesn't make it to the vulva, in general. So the vulva stays a lot cleaner. If you wear pads, the blood flows out, so it dies and cakes on your pubic hair, labia, and anus. In addition, you can feel the blood once it exits, so there's a continual "gooey" feel, squelching when you sit down, etc. I honestly don't know why women who wear pads prefer it.

To be clear, I don't have any hygienic concerns with pads, nor with women who wear them. It's just that both the mess and the felling caused from wearing pads vs tampons I personally find gross.

Interesting to me was that culturally even in the US, with native born women, there are clear lines sometimes. Example: I once, being the generally swell guy I am, volunteered to go on an errand to get tampons for my live in partner at the time, who was in a bit of a crisis. We lived in a laregly hispanic neighborhood, and despite the owners of the local store being family friends (they also rented our apartment to us), they were mortified that I was looking for them. I asked my (other white dude) friend who brought me into this circle of friends why everyone flipped out about it, and the general consensus was that in Latino-American culture, you just didn't use them. It was pads or nothing else, and that was disgusting to think of using tampons.

I've had little further discussion or interactions surrounding it, but that one anecdote basically reinforced my gender role of being weird about going to the store to buy them for my partner.

Where did you read tampons are more common?

I found this which sounds like pads are used more: http://lipglossandabackpack.com/feminine-hygiene-around-the-...

Here's the paper: http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8852185/Kohen.pdf...

The first sentence is: "Tampons are used by up to 70 percent of menstruating women in the United States today, and the average woman may use as many as 16,800 tampons in her lifetime."

Using tampons doesn't rule out using pads, too. If I use a tampon one day, I'm one of that 70% of menstruating women that uses tampons. If I use a pad when I swap out that tampon, I'm now also one of the x% of menstruating women that uses pads.

Realised that the second I pasted the text. It's midnight in Germany ... That's the original link I found: http://askville.amazon.com/AMERICAN-WOMEN-TAMPONS-PADS-PERIO...

And here is another statistic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22980411

They're both not clear though I do think it's fair to say tampons are preferred. Just google for "tampons vs. pads".

how do you use 16800 tampons over a lifetime? that's one a day for 46 years.

Well, if you change your tampon ever 2-3 hours, then you end up using 4-5 a day, which can run up to 30-35 tampons a month, which averages out to a little more than one a day.

That's US only.

FYI: Menstrual blood is not like, say, blood from a cut on your arm. It is clotty, nasty, disgusting stuff. Menstrual blood has been collecting in the uterus for some weeks, creating a lining on the walls intended to become a placenta should one get pregnant. And when a woman fails to get pregnant, the body decides to shed that lining.

It's really not pleasant stuff to deal with. Plus, it is contaminated by mucus of varying amounts and thicknesses.

"Not pleasant to deal with" is a lot better than "gross" :)

My first thought was "turns my stomach." I went with "gross" instead out of deference to the largely male audience whom I did not expect would understand my strong negative reaction. :-)

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