The Guardian: Tampon wars: the battle to overthrow the Tampax empire

The tampon, a late chapter in the story of menstruation, is a significant upgrade after centuries of women making do with homemade efforts – old rags, sheepskin, cheesecloth sacks stuffed with cotton, pieces of fabric pinned into pants. In parts of the world, including the UK, where many women can’t afford menstrual products, makeshift options are still used. Bespoke period products came into existence shortly after the first world war, when nurses realised that the cellulose-based bandages they were using to dress wounds were better than cotton at absorbing blood. Kotex introduced the first mass-market sanitary pad in 1921; it had to be held in place by a belt. Ten years later, Earle Haas, a Colorado-based doctor, invented and patented the first cardboard applicator tampon. (For those unfamiliar with the form, an applicator is the telescopic-tube mechanism that inserts the tampon into the vagina. Non-applicator tampons, or “digital tampons”, are pushed in by hand. Oddly, depending on which brand reached a territory first, most countries have an in-built preference for one or another – so the vast majority of US consumers use applicators, while most German users don’t.) [...]

Over the decades, Tampax’s promotion of the discretion of its products seemed to give corporate endorsement to the idea that a period was best kept secret. “You’ll love the Quiet Easy Reseal Wrapper,” goes the current marketing blurb for Tampax Radiant. As a narrative, it seems increasingly at odds with the times. Why should we hide tampons up our sleeves on the way to the bathroom, or worry that someone might hear us unwrap one once we’re there? (In a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, Phoebe Waller Bridge riffed on all the possible items – a copy of Mein Kampf, a neatly folded Confederate flag, a dog shit – within which you could more acceptably conceal a tampon and its associated deep shame.) For years, major period brands, including P&G’s sanitary towel Always, have advertised absorbency by using a bright blue liquid, as if to deflect us from what would actually be soaking a pad. Blood, it seemed, could openly seep from grazed knees and shaving cuts, but not from a woman’s bits. [...]

What the new tampon startups also have in common, but don’t talk about quite so openly, is the fact that beneath the reusable applicator or CBD coating, their fundamental products – the tampons themselves – are extremely similar. While Tampax has its own tampon factories and machinery, the vast majority of Europe’s new-brand tampons are made in one of a handful of factories. (The two leading ones, I was told in hushed tones, are in Slovenia and Spain.) The secrecy is not unusual – all companies protect manufacturing information. But many of the brands didn’t seem to realise that within these factories, their tampons were most likely being made on the same machines. A Swiss manufacturing firm called Ruggli has a near-monopoly on tampon-making machines, so almost every new-brand tampon, whatever its particular design or added feature, is a Ruggli tampon. “We all try and make it sound like there’s something proprietary,” Parvizi-Waynethe of Freda told me. “But ultimately, it’s like a white T-shirt. It’s the same product. We can’t fool ourselves that this is something different.” [...]

If you see the world as a set of addressed or yet-to-be-addressed markets, it changes things a little. I started to wonder what was left to address. Death? No, that’s been done: there are a host of nifty death startups, offering cheaper funeral services and probate advice. Your mind? Done, too – and I’m paying for it already (along with more than 1 million other subscribers, I have the Headspace app on my phone). Disconnection – our only hope – has long been monetised, and again, I’m shelling out for the privilege (the Freedom app, which disables the internet, is probably my most-used software). It makes sense that the only markets left are the ones we’ve been historically reluctant to talk about. “Let’s face it,” an investor once told Parvizi-Wayne at a meeting, “taboos have become sexy.” A taboo, seen another way, is just a market still invitingly unsaturated.

read the article or listen to the podcast

The Guardian: History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future

Turchin’s approach to history, which uses software to find patterns in massive amounts of historical data, has only become possible recently, thanks to the growth in cheap computing power and the development of large historical datasets. This “big data” approach is now becoming increasingly popular in historical disciplines. Tim Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University, believes we are living through “the glory days” of his field, because scholars can pool their research findings with unprecedented ease and extract real knowledge from them. In the future, Turchin believes, historical theories will be tested against large databases, and the ones that do not fit – many of them long-cherished – will be discarded. Our understanding of the past will converge on something approaching an objective truth. [...]

Complexity science had its origins in physics, in the study of the behaviour of elementary particles, but over the course of the past century it slowly spread to other disciplines. As late as the 1950s, few cell biologists would have conceded that cell division could be described mathematically; they assumed it was random. Now they take that fact for granted, and their mathematical models of cell division have led to better cancer treatments. In ecology, too, it is accepted that patterns exist in nature that can be described mathematically. Lemmings do not commit mass suicide, as Walt Disney would have had us believe, but they do go through predictable four-year boom-and-bust cycles driven by their interactions with predators, and possibly also with their own food supply. In 2008, the Nobel-prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann declared it was only a matter of time before laws of history would be found, too. It would not happen, however, until all those who study the past – historians, demographers, economists and others – realised that working in their specialist siloes, while necessary, was not sufficient. “We have neglected the crucial supplementary discipline of taking a crude look at the whole,” said Gell-Mann.[...]

“This argument gets it exactly wrong,” argues Turchin, who since the early 1990s has been a professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, and is now also affiliated with the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. “It is because social systems are so complex that we need mathematical models.” Importantly, the resulting laws are probabilistic, not deterministic, meaning that they accommodate the element of chance. But this does not mean they are hollow: if a weather forecast tells you there is an 80% chance of rain, you pack your umbrella. Peter J Richerson, a leading scholar of cultural evolution at the University of California in Davis, says that historical patterns such as secular cycles do exist, and that Turchin has “the only sensible causal account” of them. (It is also, Richeson points out, the only such account for now; the field is young, and different theories may follow.) [...]

Of course, our experience with the climate crisis suggests that even if we can predict the future the way we can forecast the weather, and come up with a set of preventative measures to stave off social collapse, that does not mean we will be able to muster the political will to act on such recommendations. But while it is true that human societies have in general been far better at reconstruction after disasters than preventing them in the first place, there are exceptions. Turchin points to the US New Deal of the 1930s, which he sees as a time when American elites consented to share their growing wealth more equitably, in return for the implicit agreement that “the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged”. This pact, Turchin argues, enabled American society to exit a potentially revolutionary situation.

read the article or listen to the podcast

The Conversation: What The Satanic Temple is and why it’s opening a debate about religion

Members of The Satanic Temple do not believe in God or the devil. Its beliefs are articulated in “the seven tenets.” These tenets emphasize reason and science as well as values such as compassion and justice. [...]

One of the group’s political goals is to advocate for the value of the separation of church and state. Their strategy is to remind the public that if Christians can use government resources to assert their cultural dominance, then Satanists are free to do the same.

After Oklahoma installed a monument of the Ten Commandments at its State Capitol in 2012, the group demanded that their statue of a satanic deity, Baphomet, a winged-goat-like creature, be installed next to it. The group received US$30,000 in donations from people around the country to build the statue. [...]

After Oklahoma installed a monument of the Ten Commandments at its State Capitol in 2012, the group demanded that their statue of a satanic deity, Baphomet, a winged-goat-like creature, be installed next to it. The group received US$30,000 in donations from people around the country to build the statue.

read the article