“Pub girls” (5/7). Periphrases, water lilies, blue blood … For fifty years, advertising used subterfuges to talk about the rules. A new marketing generation goes straight to the point.
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Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Tania Dutel was 12 years old when she had her first period. In a sketch, the 33 -year -old humorist testifies: “I look at my panties and I see brown spots. For me, blood was red. In advertisements, it is blue, and, in fact, c ‘ is brown … warn us! “Like this poor Carrie, in the novel by Stephen King (1974), which wades, horrified, in its own blood in the shower of the locker room of the Lycée, generations of teenage girls have long not understood, for lack of being warned, what happened to them when “the English landed”.
According to British anthropologist Mary Douglas (De La Souillure, 1966), menstrual blood is polluting, because it is where it should not be, and thus represents a threat to social order. An ancestral taboo that advertising did not frankly helped to break in its spots for so-called “hygienic” protections.
From the start, the dice were piped. At the end of the First World War, explains Jeanne Guien, a specialist in consumerism, the American company Kimberly-Clark ends up with a huge surplus of her cellotton stocks, which was used to make gas and bandages for the wounded. She then created Kotex, the first menstrual towel, and puts the package on sales techniques and advertising. To convince, the brand is based on a slightly hacked mythical story: the war nurses would have used the bandages with which they “save” the soldiers.
“Marketing of shame”
The first Kotex campaigns published in the American Women’s Press (the promotion of hygienic protections will be prohibited on television until the 1970s) will lay the foundations for “shame marketing”, which will be up for fifty years in countries Western: no blood, no information, the term “rules” is not pronounced. We turn around the pot. When you are a woman, no one should know that we are “indisposed”, nor understand why.
“These were very vague pubs, which were addressed to these ladies of the upper classes, because the material was expensive. The towel, which was not shown and which we did not know what it was for, was however presented as the central room of the wardrobe, with obscure developments on values of cleanliness, progress “, explains Jeanne Guien. These ladys were admired as a fur coat which indulged in ice skating, skiing, golf. The brand did not sell a product, but a lifestyle. And insisted on comfort and practical aspect, because the “bandages” were disposable. “When it has become more democratic, faced with the explosion of plumbing problems (since it ended in the toilet), specifies the researcher, we ended up advising women to cut them before throwing them …”
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