periods

when i was about 15 i was having a menstrual cycle and needed pads. having never bought them on my own I was very confused when I saw "tucks PRE MOISTENED pads" near the sanitary napkins. My friend laughed at me for years!!!

fawn

I used to believe that the sanitary napkin dispenser in womens' bathrooms were really candy dispensers that only adults could use. I tried time and time again to get my mom to buy me some candy from the machines, but she always refused, never really explaining what would be dispensed instead.

Bonnie

When I was a kid, although I was aware of the existence of menstrual pads, I thought that the term "sanitary napkins" referred to those little packaged moist towelettes.

Anon

When my Mum had periods she used tampons, they were Mummy's Egg Catchers that stopped the chicken-like eggs from crashing on the floor.

Clare

My first boyfriend couldnt understand how I could be able to pee if I had my period and was wearing a tampon. He thought it all came out of the same hole!!! He was 16 at the time...

Skate

My mom used to only occasionally go to the beauty parlor to have her hair done up into a bouffant hairdo. As a sensitive and somewhat impressionable child, I remember the somewhat chemical smell of the beauty parlor's caustic dyes and bleaches, and in my furtive imagination, I put those smells together with the preponderance of women in those establishments and came up with the idea that women, especially women on their period, smelled like that, at least "en mass". My father also had a very definite "man smell" that today I remember as distinctive. I knew that someday, as a male of the species, I too would sport that "funk". It was a shock when I formulated my theory about the females of the race. They stunk too, like the beauty parlor, even as my mom didn't. I'm glad to say that adulthood and sexual discovery dispelled that notion that ladies smelled like hair dye. I have to say that a few of the gals that I have been with have had, let us say, a "fragrance of their own" post coitus (as we all do), but none have had that distinctive smell of hydrogen peroxide, thank god...

Michael Escher

when my mother finally got around to giving my little brother the 'birds and the bees' talk, she just had to report to me that he had a strange belief... after she got done explaining about a girl's cycle, he asked, 'but why is it blue?' she was very confused for a moment and asked him where on earth he had gotten that idea. he told her on television it was blue, having seen those ads which show a feminine hygine product's amazing absorbancy when dealing with a large quantity of BLUE liquid. poor kid. must have scared him to death of women.

aks

I believed the right word was administration. Unfortunately, the correct term was menstruation.

hargoni

When my mother sat me down to explain about a woman's period, I couldn't fathom it. Of course I asked, "well, the bleeding stops when you go to sleep, right?"

I wish.

Gwen

i used to believe that women wore bras because their periods happened in their boobies.

Anon

I overheard some girls talking in a field. One (I thought) was saying that there were red pyramids and white pyramids.
I butted in and stated quite plainly that you didn't get red pyramids - they were all yellow.
Then they told me they were talking about 'periods'.
I assume by 'white' they meant discharge - so I'm not sure who this is more embarrasing to.

Susan