Moo Moo Buckaroo

There are several things that have made me give the side eye since I've become a mother to a girl. First, there's the concept of leggings as pants. Not even the "athleisure" type of leggings; no, I'm talking about straight on I can see your pantyline run-of-the-mill cotton leggings.

I know it's a thing. It still drives me nuts.

The second thing is really something that has bothered me for most of my life-- the concept of aiming a product towards a woman through marketing. Seems to me, recently, that aiming towards women isn't enough; now we must market a product to certain types of women and girls. 

We were at Walgreens the other day playing the never-ending game of Things We Need to Do Now That School Has Started. This round involved sports physicals.

I was walking down the aisle when something caught my eye: tampons. Not just any tampons, but tampons for "athletic" girls.

Would someone please tell me how a tampon could possibly be different for a girl who does sports versus a girl who does not? Do the sporty girls get some kind of cotton material that bends and stretches while the rest of us just get a kitchen sponge?

It makes no sense to me. 

Are the tampons covered with pictures of soccer balls? Are tampons for non-sporty girls covered with pictures of beer and hotdogs? How, exactly, can a tampon get marketed as sporty versus non-sporty? Might I just go ahead and ask...is  glitter somehow involved in all this?

I'm jumping the gun and will assume that pads will also get marketed this way. We'll have the mall-walker pad, which will go from the bellybutton all the way over to the mid-back area. It'll have pictures of white Keds on it, or perhaps a picture of a cat.

The Hipster pad, crocheted to look like a lovely white doily. There's the Instagram model pad, which will somehow have the word "bespoke"  used in marketing. 

Then, of course, we have to have the non-sporty pads for "the other women." Why even bother making it a pad? Let's just have a giant "Oops I crapped my pants" diaper where the woman can just sit on the couch all day long.

Maybe we can market it as a pad, but really we open the package to find a bunch of hay. We should pretty much go ahead and market the hay pad to anyone over the age of 33-- that lovely age where society thinks women should just get put out to pasture.

We'll call it the "You Old Heifer" brand. I'm pretty sure it'll take off, at least with the marketers.