Posts Tagged ‘My Little Red Book’

Today’s Women’s History Month post deals with one of the most universal women’s issues: menstruation.
Nora Ephron got this sage advice in her novel Heartburn: invest in something people use once and throw away. So she invested in tampons and made a lot of money.

I thought of that when I met a young woman named Toyna Chin, whose company produces Petite Amie, an appealingly designed kit containing a custom designed mix of products a tween or teen needs when she has her monthly period. Not only was Toyna investing in products people use once and throw away, she was packaging them as a stylish health and beauty product rather than a tacky sterile necessity that smacks of embarrassment when plucked from the shelf.

Petite Amie is perfectly in synch with changes in how girls approach menstruation now compared to previous generations. In the same way that girls today learn to compete because Title IX increased their access to competitive sports (Think Sarah “Barracuda” Palin), they are much more likely to embrace and talk frely about the tangible evidence of puberty than the women who birthed them, and certainly more than their grandmothers, for whom “the curse” was just that.