Everyone who gets a period needs menstrual products for several days each month. Those products are often disposable paper goods used in bathrooms several times a day.
If that description — paper goods, one-time-use, used in bathrooms — sounds like toilet paper, good.
Pads and tampons should be treated as necessities available in any bathroom, just like toilet paper. Instead, as yet another example of how the architecture of our world defaults to the dominant group’s needs, they are treated as accessories — and expensive ones at that.
We support repealing the luxury tax on these items in stores, but in public bathrooms, pads and tampons should be available for free.
Access to tampons and pads is a sanitation issue, one that regularly results in infection and disease when those products are not available.
In the U.S. alone, women in homeless shelters and prisons do not have the products they need to handle their periods with dignity and safety. That’s one change you can make today — next time you gather up items to give to a shelter, consider donating some tampons or pads.
More broadly, these products need to be normalized because periods and bodies that menstruate are normal. Making pads and tampons the norm in public bathrooms won’t make “she’s acting like that cause she’s on her period” jokes go away, but treating these products as necessities is a start.
New York City public schools, shelters and jails have set an excellent precedent by supplying free menstrual products in their bathrooms.
We hope bathrooms everywhere will follow their lead, but for now, we ask UNC to set an example: bring free pads and tampons to campus bathrooms now.
