The marketer behind a stealth viral campaign featuring videos of a fictional 16-year-old boy who wakes up one morning to find his "guy parts" gone and replaced with "girl parts" is none other than Procter & Gamble's Tampax.
The campaign is anchored by a blog featuring professionally produced videos at Zack16.com. Its main link to Tampax to date has been when title character, Zack Johnson, has his first period during French class and sneaks into the girls' restroom to use a Tampax vending machine.
The campaign's backer hasn't been the only thing stealthy about it. As of this week, the most viewed of nine online videos produced had been seen fewer than 6,000 times on YouTube, though it's had a few thousand additional views on such sites as Funny or Die and StupidVideos.com. The fictional Mr. Johnson also has a Twitter account, @ZackJohnson16, with 949 followers.
It's not clear whether or how Mr. Johnson's Freudian nightmare will end. In a possible bit of foreshadowing, the fictional character's Twitter feed said today: "Watching gyro meat spin on a stick reminded me how things always come back around. Maybe it's a sign my guy parts will return?"
In the course of his change, the character has developed a new sympathy for and connection with his 14-year-old sister, an appreciation for the travails of menstruation and premenstrual syndrome, and an affinity for the Tampax brand.
What if men had periods?
by Gloria Steinem (written during the 1970s)
Since history was recorded, male human beings have built whole cultures around the idea that penis-envy is "natural" to women - though having such an unprotected organ might be said to make men more vulnerable, and the power to give birth makes womb-envy at least logical. In short, logic has nothing to do with it. What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? The answer is clear - menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event:
Men would brag about how long and how much.
Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed-for proof of manhood, with religious ritual and stag parties.
The US Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea to help stamp out monthly discomforts.
Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. (Of course, some men would still pay for the prestige of commercial brands such as John Wayne Tampons, Muhammed Ali's Rope-a-dope Pads, Joe Namath Jock Shields - "For Those Light Bachelor Days," and Robert "Baretta" Blake Maxi-Pads.)
Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation ("MENstruation") as proof that only men could serve in the army ("You have to give blood to take blood"), occupy political office ("Can women be aggressive without that steadfast cycle governed by the planet Mars?"), be priests and ministers ("how could a woman give her blood for our sins"), or rabbis ("Without the monthly loss of impurities, women remain unclean").
Male radicals, left-wing politicians, and mystics, however, would insist that women are equal, just different; and that any woman could enter their ranks if only she were willing to self-inflict a major wound every month ("You must give blood for the revolution"), recognize the preeminence of menstrual issues, or subordinate her selfness to all men in their Cycle of Enlightenment.
Street guys would brag ("I'm a three-pad man") or answer praise from a buddy (" Man, you are lookin' good") by giving fives and saying, "Yeah, man, I'm on the rag!"
TV shows would treat the subject at length. ("Happy Days": Richie and Potsie try to convince Fonzie that he is still "The Fonz," though he has missed two periods in a row.)
So would newspapers. (JUDGE CITES MONTHLY STRESS IN PARDONING RAPIST.)
And movies. (Newman and
Men would convince women that intercourse was more pleasurable at "that time of the month." Lesbians would be said to fear blood and therefore life itself - though probably only because they needed a good menstruating man.
Of course, male intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical arguments. How could a woman master any discipline that demanded a sense of time, space, mathematics, or measurement, for instance, without that in-built gift for measuring the cycles of the moon and planets - and thus for measuring anything at all? In the rarefied fields of philosophy and religion, could women compensate for missing the rhythm of the universe? Or for their lack of symbolic death-and-resurrection every month?
