Actress and comedian Amy Schumer doesn’t want women to feel shame about having a period any longer. And in order to change the stigma surrounding menstruation, she is teaming up with Tampax to create a campaign to normalize periods.
In a new interview with People, Schumer told the magazine that she was “so excited” about the partnership with Tampax. She added that it felt “incredibly natural” and “almost felt too perfect to me, because we have the exact same goals in mind.”
And Schumer doesn’t want to just remove the stigma around periods but also address the myths that surround it. “We want to … just take the shame away from this thing that is really strange that it’s still so secretive and that we’re made to feel bad about it. And just to get rid of some of the myths.”
One of the first myths Schumer will tackle is the idea that a girl “using a tampon means [women will] lose their virginity.”
“[Women and girls] have all these misconceptions and fears, and there really isn’t that much education out there,” Schumer explained. And she believes the reason for all the misconceptions surrounding women’s menstruation cycles is because “only 24 states have any sort of required sex education and only 13 of those states require any sort of upkeep of actual medical studies,” the mom of one revealed.
“So if you don’t have an older sister, or if your mom isn’t super up to date, you really have no one to rely on. So I’m hopefully gonna be people’s older sister, explaining the things that I’ve learned to them.”
In fact, Schumer admits that when she first learned about tampons herself while in the fifth grade, the women who came into her classroom “with a model of a vagina … scared the sh*t out of” her and her fellow students, and because of that “she didn’t learn much.”
And that’s when Schumer turned to her mom for help. However, while her mom helped her feel informed, she never did teach Schumer how to properly use a tampon. “I didn’t find out how to put a Tampax in for probably a couple of years. People don’t understand — I didn’t understand that your flow changes and you need different sizes so I think I was probably just using whatever tampon my mom had.”
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Nonetheless, Schumer “I didn’t even know to be ashamed of it” and now she wants other women to feel that way too.
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