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An excursion
into Womanhood
On
the net, February 2, 2001 - One of the classes in my Communication
Design course, is the history of graphic design. It's a fun class
presented by a young Art Director, and thus we have to squeeze our
grey oranges for all the creative juice it has. The format of the
class is basically that small groups have to do presentations on
the work of the previous lesson.
Our last lesson was about the history of writing, and because this
was our first lesson and will therefor be our first presentation,
there was some confusion as to how to go about it. The idea is to
link a modern-day product to whichever piece of history we covered
in the particular lesson. For instance, and easy one on the history
of writing would be to explain how the modernday pencil came about
- ie. from the twigs they used in the first cave drawing, through
the stylus they used in the Cuneiform style of writing at about
2500bc, where they made impressions in wet clay with a triangular
tipped stylus, past the instruments the Egyptians used for their
hyroglyphics, through the discovery of graphite which was mixed
with lead and incased in wood - so you can then create an advert
using these facts to advertise Faber Castel for instance.
Not that this is very clever as it is possibly the easiest example
I could think off based on facts which I know. However, the teacher
said something in the line of that she wouldn't expect us to link
the history of writing with, and she paused here for a moment to
think of something completely irrelevant, with sanitary pads for
instance. My first reaction was, yeah, how would you ever link that
to the history of writing. Obviously this was just a silly example
to illustrate that she wouldn't expect us to link something that
has nothing to do with the history of writing, but because the class
is made up of at least 80% teenagers, everyone giggled. Sanitary
pads isn't exactly something you would hear outside the circles
of a few giggling girls, even more so here in mainly Muslim, conservative,
sex-and-sexuality-does-not-exist Malaysia.
Anyway, not being shy in general and also in things such as accompanying
my wife to buy sanitary accessories, or even buying it on her behalf,
I later thought about how this would shock the teacher if we could
actually link it. So it became a challenge. (Turns out, I wasn't
the only one. See side bar. Ed) If the teacher thought that
that example was an impossible link, why not do a bit of research
and do the impossible. Afterall, anything is possible.
So, without giving away what I am planning, as the presentation
is only next week and you never know when a cunning classmate will
surf on over to my website and 'borrow' these ideas, I came across
some very interesting background information on the evolution and
history of female menstrual sanitation, all in the name of research
of course. But you just never know what you're going to learn next,
do you?
The history is only clear cut as early as the 1930's, which is when
the first dispossable products hit the market accompanied by oh-so-sublte
advertisements. It was a hush-hush topic back then, and aparently
even more so before then, hence, the lack of history, which can
really only be decoded from cryptic references and fuzzy outlines.
Not only, in
this modern day and age, are women lead by their noses about the
true facts of menstrual santisation (according to the articles linked
above), the accesories they use and the effect it has on them, but
at the top of the chain, the people who call the shots, who do you
find? Men!. How did that happen? The exclusive Women Only Club,
is somehow chaired by men. And it has been women, who through the
ages have been humiliated, tortured and lambasted, all by men, about
something they never experience. The math on this one, sucks.
Anyway, to come back to the orginal topic, my research also showed
that the history of writing does in fact cross the history of sanitary
pads quite a few times, and if my group (which includes only 2 ladies,
so I forsee some shy males) agrees with this outrageous idea, we
may just knock the socks of our lecturer - ok, at least impress
her a little bit. I will let you know how it goes.
In the meantime, I will share with you the interesting links that
my research delivered which makes for insightful, interesting, sometimes
down right scary and even humorous reading. Highly recommended (in
the right hand column) for female and especially male readers (learn
something random today).
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A
Few Interesting Links:
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http://www.mum.org/
- http://www.critpath.org/~tracy/
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Sunway
Pyramid, Feb 12, 2001 -
Right, so on the eve of our Next presentation, a quick
update on how it went last week. Our presentation, in my
humble opinion, was very successful. If nothing else, we
got a nice reaction and we we did have the shortest, to
the point advert in the class.
As it turned out, my clever ideas were not unique as one
of the all-girl groups in our class also used the sanitary
product pitch. The presentation was sleek and professional
of course, but the research wasn't as thorough as it could
have been.
As their poor luck had it, I knew the background and I took
the opportunity to pose a few questions.
Without going in to much detail, I think the leader was
a bit pissed-off at me (could still be, who knows) for putting
her on the spot. I also think a male pretending to be a
wise-ass about women only things is a bit much in any case
:o)
So there you go, just becuase I'm male does'nt mean
I'm ignorant when it comes to the history of female goodies.
Sunway Pyramid, Feb 3, 2001 - Well, once you read the
article, read this section.
The idea I talk about is not going to be used. We had our
first brainstorming session today, and Tan Hoey, one of
the group members, came up with a brilliant concept which
we are going with. Due to the sensative nature of that information,
I won't go into detail.
However, I can tell you the link between sanitary pads and
the history of writing though. Like I mentioned before,
the two has crossed paths on a few occations during the
course of history, I will quickly outline it here, although
there are more details to be found above - obviously without
this link which none before has ever thought of researching.
The first is a bit of an indirect link to the actual history
of writing I think. According to MUM (see link above) -
there were mentions of a tampon like technique in Egyptian
hyroglyphics. This was exploited by the German company o.b.
in various of their earlier tampon advertisements.
However, there are no links to the source of the data and
nor any reference to it's validity. The 'tampon' (some cotton-like
fibres) was also mentioned as used for contreception and
not for menstrual use, which is only a deduction from theory.
So the link here is Egyptian Hyroglypics which was an important
stage in the history of writing.
Another mention is made to earlier 'pads' being made from
animal pelts, which around the same time were probably also
used as the first pages of books, which happened to be made
from calf and lamb skins. The commonly used scroll was to
cumbersome for longer documents, and the animal pelts were
used as sturdy pages for books. Hence the link.
The last link is quite modern, in that the Rayon fibres,
which are commonly used in certain tampons today, is a by-product
from wood-pulp, which incidentally is used in the manufacturing
of paper.
So there you have it, a few long shots, but valid nevertheless.
We are not following this line though, so if you are one
of my classmates and you want to explore this idea - feel
free, just give me credit in your biliography :o)
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