“Guys are so clueless,” Canadian teen Caroline Majcher says in a TikTok video. “They had no idea that girls eat their tampon after they’re done with it to reabsorb all the blood they just lost.” Her audience echoed her shock: “lmao they thought we just threw them away?? waste of blood đ” one comment reads. TikTokers started posting videos of themselves revealing their taste for tampons to boyfriends, brothers, whole groups of guys who go ashen faced and googly eyed at the idea; others expressed frustration with men’s ignorance and disbelief. The poor (clueless) teenage boys had no idea what to do with themselves. They wereâof courseâbeing conned.
Majcher’s stunt was just a light-hearted hoax, but it does underscore a certain truth. Cis men tend to know little about the experiences people have with their vaginas, particularly the bits that can be sticky, smelly, and socially coded as unsexy or even shameful. In mixed company, periods, urinary incontinence, vaginal dryness, even the female orgasm, are seldom discussed, usually shunted behind a wall of politeness and “decency.” (By contrast, shrinkage, erectile dysfunction, wet dreams, and ball sweat are all standard sitcom fodder.)
Ignorance isn’t automatically a pressing problem, particularly since many men will never need to use menstruation products. Trouble is, the vast majority of products for vaginas are designed, funded, and manufactured by people who don’t have oneâa bad practice in any situation. Worse, ignorance compounded (and justified by) the squeamish silences around vulvas have made many of them complacent.
Take the tampon. If you buy the cheap ones with the cardboard applicator, you’re having the same chafey experience women did during the Great Depression. (That’s only slightly better than the stats on the speculumâyou know, the scary metal thing gynecologists use to ratchet vaginas openâwhich, until very recently, hadn’t been updated since the Civil War.) Beyond being old-fashioned and uncomfortable, tampons can also be a health risk, causing more problems than just the dreaded, potentially lethal toxic shock syndrome. “I suffered from yeast infections for 15 years,” says Lauren Schulte Wang, founder and CEO of the Flex Company, which creates period products. It wasn’t until Wang moved from Georgia to San Francisco that anyone questioned her condition. “A nurse practitioner said, ‘You know, you’re getting these infections from tampons. Have you ever considered using something else?'”
She hadn’t. Most women haven’t. Many folks with vaginas don’t even know all the alternatives for how to take care of them. So Wang got herself a menstrual cup, stopped getting yeast infections, and started hosting monthly dinner parties just to talk about periods. She kept hearing the same things over and over: People thought tampons and pads seemed wasteful and unsuitable for a busy, working life; others felt gross and bloated and dirty. “They didn’t blame the products, they blamed their bodies,” Wang says. “I started thinking: We’re living in San Francisco, we have Uber for everything, we’re firing sports cars into space, but we don’t have good period products?” It seemed ludicrous because it is. Soon after, Wang started mocking up prototypes.
People who found vagina-related companiesâthe drivers of what some have started calling “the vagina economy”âdon’t all have the same story, but their experiences rhyme. Polly Rodriguez, cofounder and CEO of sexual wellness company Unbound, came into the space after going through menopause at age 21 as a result of chemotherapy for stage three colon cancer. “My doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to have children, but no one mentioned the lifelong consequences for my sexual health,” Rodriguez says. “I had to figure out what was happening to me by Googling it.” A nurse friend suggested lube, but Rodriguez felt deeply uncomfortable buying it, since her options swung from crustily clinical to lewd with little in between. “No one was tackling the shopping experience,” she says. She wanted to do just that, and not just for lube, but for vibrators and other sex toys, too.
Joanna Griffiths, founder and CEO of intimate apparel company Knix, was motivated by a similar retail hellscape: adult diapers. While talking to her mother, a doctor, Griffiths learned that one in three people experience urinary incontinence during or after pregnancy. “There were no suitable products on the market,” Griffiths says. “You’d get told to go to CVS or Walgreens to pick up Depends, but that didn’t feel very relevant to my demographic.” It’s hard to imagine a 29-year-old Instagram mommy blogger wanting to wear a diaper under her sundress. Griffiths started conducting online surveys and found that many, many folks were concerned about leaks. “It extends way beyond urinary incontinence,” she says. “It’s periods, it’s discharge, it’s sweat.” Again, the array of products on the market was making people having a perfectly normal experiences feel like icky outliers. “There was a great need for innovation in this category overall,” Griffiths says. So she started designing leak-proof underwear.
While they started out shocked by the obvious failings of products designed for individuals assigned female at birth, the founders quickly figured out what the major holdup was: monied men. “In the early days, around 2013, the main challenge was that there weren’t any female decisionmakers,” Griffiths says. “I would go into a funding meeting and get interrupted by a guy saying, ‘Let me go get Sally. Sally is my associate, the intern, the receptionist.'” What happened next is going to give you hives. “This woman would come into the room and sit down, and then her boss would ask her, ‘Do you leak?'” Griffths says. “It’s like saying, ‘Hey, do you have erectile dysfunction?’ and expecting them to answer in a room full of people.” Often, poor Sally would say no, and then her boss would tell Griffiths that there wasn’t a market for her products.
Wang had a similar experience: VCs would take home her prototype menstrual cups to their wives and ask, ‘Would you use this?’ which is a less than scientific way to determine if there’s demand. “One of the first things I did was change my pitch,” Wang says. “I’d say, ‘Have you ever been turned down for sex by someone because they were on their period? I have a new product for period sex!'” Suddenly, the venture capitalists were a lot more interested. (They still took a bunch of convincing, though. “Investors say they like really disruptive things, but the truth is that they like to see something validated in the market first,” Wang says. At first, they wanted her to sell a tampon subscription service rather than a menstrual disc, even though tampons had made her sick for over a decade.)
Stiil, as Rodriguez found out, having a sexier product didn’t necessarily get investors to line up either. “I knew reputational risk was going to be the biggest hurdle, but I didn’t really get it until I went to the bank, tried to open a credit account, and got denied,” she says. “Investors treat you like you’re trying to raise money for gambling or guns or some other vice category.” Most banks cluster all “sex stuff” into the same high-risk bucket, whether it’s pornography or menopausal lube. Look at ads. Rules for what can and can’t be advertised in places ranging from subway trains to Facebook dictate that there is no difference between what Rodriguez is trying to sell and an AR-15. “The rule doesn’t apply if it has to do with family planning,” she says. “Men have to orgasm to procreate, so Viagra, penis pumps, even some manscaping products are allowed to advertise, but the only thing you’re allowed to advertise to women is birth control pills and condoms. Lube and vibrators are banned.” Rodriguez’s response to this difficulty was to pass the savings on to her customers. “Not being able to advertise just means we can keep our costs down. Our vibrators start at $18,” she says. “We’re growing more slowly, but we can feel good about it.”
None of that growth, and none of the funding they’d eventually receive, would have been possible without the other, nongendered thing that makes Griffiths, Rodriguez, and Wang’s products stand out from many others: data, gathered by asking vagina ownersâlots of themâwhat they actually want. At first, it was hard. “For periods there’s been so much stigma that people haven’t felt comfortable talking about it,” Wang says. That’s changing rapidly. Wang and the Flex Company now rely on a research group they call “the Uterati” that numbers over 7,000 strong. The Uterati have (literally) shaped Flex and their products. “We were hearing that people wanted a fully reusable product but were getting stuck on the difficulty of removing the cup,” Wang says. (If you’ve never used one, let me explain. Menstrual cups have to be far enough inside your body that nothing leaks around the sides, so they have silicon pull tabs on the bottom for removal. Often, these stems are too short or slippery.) The result was, for some, a new, easy-to-grab stem and, for others, a tampon-esque pull string. Flex makes both because everyone experiences their period differently.
As time went on, embracing difference became a Uterati theme. “When I joined the Uterati, I was deep in dysphoria, where you feel disconnected from the body you were born in. Each period I was feeling more and more depressed,” says Alan Sherlock, who is transgender. “For some reason, people don’t realize that not every trans male or non-binary person gets the surgery or can take period-suppressing hormones.” Alan felt comfortable, and safe, talking about these issues with the Uterati. And, according to Wang, making sure Flex’s products are comfortable for everyone, including trans and gender-noncomforming communities, is a top priority. “Everyone supports each other,” Sherlock says. “I’m relieved to see companies reaching out to the genderqueer crowd. It’s refreshing to see phrases like ‘person who menstruates’ or ‘person who has a period’ included on major websites.”
Griffiths’ listening tours have sent her hunting through the innovations made in other kinds of apparel to see if she could tweak them for her customer’s underwear. “Leaks suck, we can all agree on that,” she says. “But people have different bodies, different needs.” For odor control techniques, she looked to active wear. Ditto, absorbency. “People would say, ‘I’m concerned about my period coming on really aggressively when I’m in a meeting and can’t get to the bathroom. It has to give me peace of mind for several hours,'” she says. “The challenge there was designing a product for periods and incontinence. Periods are a slow release. Incontinency is smaller amounts, but in bursts.” In both cases, the underwear needs to absorb liquid quickly, and the layer next to the skin needed to dry completely. “A big challenge was finding a manufacturer brave enough to make it,” she says.
For Rodriguez, the problem was less a lack of innovation in the sex tech category and more accessibility, with a side of cutting through a plethora of stupid innovation. Good vibrators tend to cost at least $100 and even at that price aren’t regulated by the FDA, so they often contain materials like phthalates that you should not be putting directly onto the most absorbent part of your body. Her research showed that her average customer makes $45,000 per year, and that’s why Unbound’s vibrators start at just $18. Then she started homing in on what customers really wanted from a vibrator. Hint: not an app. “Haptic tech is the thing that women really enjoy. The harder you squeeze it, the harder it vibrates,” she says. “I don’t have time for gimmicky shit. I’m tired of men’s immature approach to product design. Sex can be fun and funny, but I don’t want a vibrator that orders a pizza every time I orgasm.”
That pizza-orgasm thing? It’s a real product that got made (and, yes, by a man), and there are many, many others like it. “It’s not funny to me,” Rodriguez says. “Women treat our customer service inbox as a lifeline for sexual trauma and harassment and assault. There is a massive problem, and women are looking for help wherever they can find it.” At Unbound, connecting customers with therapists and specific organizations like domestic violence hotlines has become standard practice. The lesson: When you start one taboo conversation about sexual health, all the rest will come tumbling after it. “It’s humbling,” Rodriguez says.
When talking about products aimed at women, it’s important to consider if they’re truly necessary, not just another way to worm into people’s wallets or another item to color pink and then heavily tax. The vagina economy, much like a vagina, is only good if it’s healthy. “The bar I set for the products we make is that they must be life-changing. They cannot be incremental change. When investors wanted us to sell tampons, I refused,” Wang says. According to Rodriguez, she routinely “fights with VCs” to challenge their expectations about how products should be sold to women. They’d like to see her sell five products to each customer per year; She knows that’s not how vibrators work, and that it’s bad for the environment, besides.
In fact, these women would like to rethink business altogether. “If we’re really doing this to make life better for people with vaginas, I’d like to see more people partnering with each other rather than competing,” Wang says. “More options is better than fewer.” The Uterati would seem to agree.
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