TU bathrooms are currently ill-equipped to deal with the needs of its students.
Not to be a 77th-wave feminist or whatever number we’re on, but can we please have easy to access feminine hygiene products around here? Pads and tampons are a fact of life for many of the women in your life. We need them at the special time each month where we bless the miracles of modern day birth control while simultaneously cursing our own existence.
If you have never had the pleasure of menstruating, let’s play a game. Imagine getting intense lower stomach pains right in the middle of class and then standing up to feel a trickle of blood run slowly and unexpectedly down your leg as you rush to the restroom. As you run out the room and down the hall, you try to subtly bend your head over your shoulder to make sure you don’t have a massive red stain on your ass. And also, with your legs moving together and apart in quick succession, the odor is starting to spread out into the world, causing further embarrassment. After all, you’ve basically peed your pants, but instead of urine, it’s blood.
Now you’ve arrived at the bathroom, heart racing and cheeks flushed, to find that you haven’t replaced the pads or tampons or whatever disposable device you use in the secret pocket of your purse or bookbag. If you were in a regular public restroom, there is fair bet that somewhere in that room with you is a little metal box attached to the wall with a coin slot and contents that will assist in your return to cleanliness. However, you are not in a regular public restroom. You are in a restroom inside of TU’s academic buildings. The first floor women’s restrooms of Oliphant Hall, the Student Union, Kendall Hall and Tyrrell Hall do not have tampon dispensers. There are no dispensers in Keplinger Hall, and the dispenser in Chapman Hall is long empty.
So what do you do, young, menstruation-free individual? What do you do when you are all covered in dark, stinky, sticky blood down there and have no way keep it from sullying and perhaps permanently dyeing your pretty purple undies?
While you’re solving that problem … let’s talk about getting feminine hygiene product dispensers in all the female and gender-neutral bathrooms. By talk about it, I mean just fucking do it.
Sincerely, the Menstruating People of TU.
