What a woman carries inside

When I walk into a pharmacy in Brazil, move through the aisles past the beauty creams and pampers, I come upon the same thing time and time again: twenty to thirty different packages of sanitary pads and maybe, if I'm lucky, one very expensive kind of imported tampons. Why do women in Brazil not wear tampons?

I've asked a lot of women here already but no one has an answer for me. There are pads for all sizes and flows, brands I recognize from the United States and brands that are home spun or grown or synthesized. But usually only a few OBs or the occassional Tampax for catching the flow further upstream.

This really makes no sense to me. It is hot here. Very hot. And more women on average wear clothes that are either cut tight or cut short or barely there. Skimpy for sweat support. Living in Rio means living near an ocean. Swimming pools are in abundunce and on the weekends, you can barely find space for another body whether on the sand or poolside. And bikinis here, well, the majority are made from dental floss and cotton balls.

Where do they hide the pads?

When I was a tadpole, tampons were just moving from those things that liberated sexual women wore to those things that every woman who didn't want to feel like she was wearing diapers could now choose. This was before toxic shock when fear struck deep into the national vagina. No, television and magazines had pictures of thin thin white women with tight white clothes bending over to pick up golf balls from the green. Look! No bulky pad! No embarrassing red spots in the crotch line!!

I embraced my tampon self, except for the period in my 20s when I opted for natural sea sponges. I still prefer them, but I got tired of going into public toilets and walking through the doors with a bloody red mound in my hand, wringing and rinsing in the sink along with my unwilling sisters, and then going back into my stall to reinsert. For most of my life, I've been a tampon kind of girl.

Have I been misled? Is there something that women here know that I don't know? Has marketing gone so deeply to my brain that I don't realize that even with dioxin-free Nature's Choice tampons, I am still causing some profound bodily harm?

A month or so ago, I asked a woman who was sitting and sweating next to the pool - and wearing shorts which she never does - why she didn't get in the cool refreshing water. It's lovely, I told her, and the sun is so hot. She glanced left and right and then leaned in to explain that she was mensturating (I don't know the slang in Portuguese, I only know menstruating which might sound normal to a Brazilian ear but always sounds Victorian to mine). She couldn't go in to the pool - "get myself wet" was actually what she said - until she was finished.

There I sat, on the steps leading in to the pool, my vagina safely submerged with a tampon tucked carefully away inside, and I wondered if she could see those small microbes of blood that, along with my other womanly juices, must be slipping from the sodden white cotton and delicately polluting the pool.

I never drip, I never stain. And I stay swimming, even when my uterus is cramping up to beat the band. If anything, water pressure like orgasm can really help a girl get through her monthlies.

Why don't women in Brazil use tampons?

And no, don't blame it on Catholicism. You should see the bottle dance. They can aim their girl-bits over the lip of a bottle - from three year old children to happy grandmotherly types - and writhe along with the rest of the family. How come they can't soak up the love with a bit of white cotton?

PS: This is just a side question but when I click on the button at the top right of the page - next blog - about half of the blogs it takes me to are in Portuguese. Does the blogger man know that I am in Brazil and assume my billngualism? Are you all getting the same thing? This is very odd to me, as the internet is not physically located anywhere.