“Tampon Tim” is the Republicans’ new epithet for Tim Walz of Democratic vice-presidential candidate fame. They intend it as a smear, one they’re hoping will stick, though at the moment it seems doubtful the catchy alliterative flow will be enough.
The nickname does have a touch of playground genius to it – playground in the sense that to explain its origin would confirm that everyone involved (except Walz) is a toddler, and genius in the sense that Donald Trump is a “very stable genius”.
It almost doesn’t matter where it came from. In the pro-Trump Republican mind, the visual image of a tampon works without a backstory. Ew, periods. Girls’ stuff, ha ha ha – Walz can’t be much of a man if they’re calling him “Tampon Tim”. That’s the logic. You have to wonder why they bother given a substantial chunk of the base seems to think it emasculating for a man to serve as a woman presidential candidate’s running mate anyway.
Still, erratic behaviour can be expected at this stage of the cycle – the election cycle, that is. It’s possible, polls suggest, that in less than three months’ time a woman will have won the White House, and that’s a red alert if ever there was one.
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Lest anybody fail to grasp how humiliating it is, apparently, for a man to be linked to a period product, anti-LGBTQ conspiracist Chaya Raichik helpfully grafted Walz’s kind, smiling face on to a box of 20 unscented Tampax.
It’s not your standard approach to menstrual product marketing, true. Walz is not, sadly, a folksy tampon engineer who invented a cool new applicator before pivoting to politics.
These days advertisers are also much less prone to insisting periods are delightful occasions full of Kamala Harris-worthy laughter. In one recent Always television ad, a woman reacts to a sudden gush of menstrual blood with a look of alarm and distaste coincidentally similar to my own whenever anyone mentions JD Vance.
The inspiration, if it can be called that, for Tampon Tim sprang from a law that Walz signed as governor of Minnesota requiring schools to provide free period products to “all menstruating students”.
Although this law didn’t specify that they had to be made available in boys’ toilets (for the potential benefit of any transmasculine students who use them), the gender-neutral language proved sufficient ammunition for Republicans to attack Walz, who they regard as too LGBTQ friendly.
Among the Trump-Vance campaign’s media allies on this, incidentally, is former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, the subject of Trump’s 2015 stream of consciousness in which he speculated that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever” – words I inevitably recall when the rims of my own eyes redden every three to four weeks.
Laws such as the one covering Minnesotan schools are, of course, designed to alleviate period poverty and make education less stressful. The worst thing that happens as a result of them is that every student who bleeds feels more confident, more secure and maybe even more willing to break menstruation omertà, setting them up for a life of actually being able to talk about this wild hand we’re dealt, instead of silently fearing the myriad ways in which squeamish and/or controlling men will use their cycles against them.
Even the other likely outcome – the odd unwitting kid wandering the corridors with a tampon stuck to their back – seems a reasonable temporary price for the lasting dignity of menstrual equity.
But menstrual equity is about more than everyone having affordable access to period products. It’s also about combating stigma, and on that score pretty much every country, every culture, needs to fight harder.
I’m not saying that Republicans are afraid of periods, but when the party’s Floridian wing moved last year to restrict reproductive health education before sixth grade (aged 11-12) – effectively preventing the teaching of the menstrual cycle until after some girls have started theirs – it was dubbed the “don’t say period” bill.
Now the phrase “menstrual surveillance” – often invoked by critics of period tracking apps – has popped up again, because Vance, Trump’s Veep pick, has the distinction of being one of a handful of Republican senators who objected to a new federal patient privacy regulation that limits law enforcement agencies’ ability to access medical records related to reproductive health.
The rule means that women in the US have a right to reproductive healthcare privacy when they go from one state to another for an abortion, which is important when Republicans start threatening travel bans. But Vance wasn’t a fan. He thought the police should be allowed to know everything. In a different age, he would be storming into huts to check the linens.
Meanwhile, republicans in Virginia voted last year to shelve a bill that would have protected menstrual tracking app data from search warrants. Now why would they do that?
This weaponisation of periods is, to borrow the terminology of the cycle, luteal phase levels of bleak. It’s just not what Tampon Tim would do, nor “Crazy” Kamala either.
The only hope is that swing-state voters will see the thought process underlying the jokey moniker for what it is: more hostility against the vast group of women who want to be open about their periods, but not in a way that is used to criminalise them.
For sure, efforts to stymie menstrual equity in the US will continue to be classed alongside the other “weird” behaviour of fundamentalist Republicans. They are indeed a special case. And yet their existence is at least partly the consequence of a power-upholding custom that is near universal: treating periods as taboo.