Harriett had spent her first years in advertising on one of those teams. That was back in the mid-nineties, a time she now recognized as a golden age in advertising, when television ads were often treated as short films and award-winning work could open the door to a career in screenwriting or directing. That was the dream—one Harriett could never have pursued directly. She’d gone to school with kids whose parents subsidized their careers in film or publishing. Harriett needed a job that would pay the bills.
That’s how she ended up writing tampon copy. Not for television ads, of course. Those were handled by a more senior team. Harriett’s first job was writing Q&A–style advertorials that would run in magazines aimed at teen girls. The ads encouraged readers to write in with their own questions, which would be answered in future issues. Will everyone know? the girls asked. Will I still be a virgin? What should I do if the worst happens?
Harriett had once wondered the same things herself, and for a while she was pleased to offer answers. No one ever needed to know it was that time of the month, she’d tell her readers. The brand’s new line of compact tampons could be easily concealed in a pocket or the palm of a hand. They would leave your virginity intact—and were designed to be so absorbent that the worst wouldn’t happen. She considered it a testament to her talent that she’d managed to write about tampons for months without ever using the words menstruation, period, vagina, or blood. At some point, she realized she’d been answering questions about periods for over a year. She’d invented new euphemisms. She’d devised new forms of camouflage. Still, the questions kept coming. Terrified, ashamed, miserable girls were scribbling their most mortifying questions on pieces of lined notebook paper and mailing them to a faceless corporation. That’s when Harriett realized she wasn’t providing solutions. She was part of the problem.
Then one day, she was handed a new question to answer. Why is this happening to me? asked Jennifer, age 13, Pittsburgh. The despair was so palpable that Harriett promptly burst into tears. You are NOT alone, she wrote back. It’s happening to me, too. It’s happening to every girl you know. It’s happening to the actress on television and the lady across the street. It is happening, has happened, or will happen to most women on earth, and it’s time we all stopped working so hard to hide it.
Harriett couldn’t stop writing to Jennifer, age 13, Pittsburgh. By the end of the week, she had a series of ads that she called the “Half the World” campaign. The executions spoke about menstruation as if dealing with your period was just as mundane as brushing your teeth. They used all the words Harriett had been trained to avoid. When fluid was shown, it was red, not blue. And most important, they encouraged girls to talk to each other and share what they knew.
Harriett took the campaign to her agency’s creative director. She’d set up a time to present to him alone, but when she reached his office, she found the new business director and a senior copywriter lounging on the couch.
The new business director, a closeted gay man named Nelson with a gentle soul and an old-fashioned fondness for three-martini lunches, winked at Harriett and nudged the copywriter. “Let’s leave,” he said. “Harriett’s here to knock his socks off.”
“No. Stay,” the creative director ordered flippantly, much to Harriett’s dismay. “She needs to get used to presenting to more than one person.”
So Harriett presented her “Half the World” campaign to three men, two of whom looked thoroughly disgusted by it.
“Did it ever occur to you that there might be a reason we use blue fluid instead of red?” the creative director asked when she was done. “No guy wants to think about what that shit really is or what hole it comes from,” he informed her.
“But these ads aren’t for guys,” Harriett had responded.
“We’re guys,” he responded. “So are most of the people who sell these tampons. Know your audience, Harriett.”
Her face was still burning an hour later when Nelson knocked on the side of her cube.