Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth.

“Repunctuate your life.”

What do you think this ad is for? Yup. Birth control.

I’m sorry – what?

Birth control. It’s a play on “period” – which I think is enormously clever, but also very sad. What a terrifying state to live in when you have detailed control over even the most natural of cycles! I find it nearly as mind-blowing as controlling the phases of the moon (which are predictable and have unseen effects on all of earth).

I can only imagine what kind of effects controlling your period (so that you only have four a year!) has on your body, which is designed to have one a month. I’m not good with math, but that’s less than half of the natural number of periods a woman is supposed to have per year. Can you imagine what your body must feel like, being forced to skip something that your DNA is driving it to do? My squirrelly mind immediately imagines your body taking revenge by storing it all up so when you have one of four periods a year, it lasts for three weeks and puts you completely out of commission. “Take that!” she says to you.

And of course there’s Kotex’s “Have a happy period” slogan. I vote they fire every one of the men on the design team and start over again – all women this time. Insensitive. Especially when they’ve never personally had the urge to overdose on chocolate. *Grimace*

The last commercial I saw was for pads with ultra-flex wings or some such. The ad showed a Gumby-like mechanical bull (saddle only, with embroidered flowers of course). A pad unfolds (like a flower, but grotesque) across the saddle and sticks itself down. The saddle rolls around like a sweet little puppy while a concerned voice tells you this pad will cover you even on your heaviest days. Yes, but have they fixed the “feels like I’m wearing a diaper” feature? Because I stopped wearing diapers when I was two, and I refuse to regress that far.