For all the girls in the audience:

The discussion today was involving Toad and cunnilingus and the problems that the sticky bit on his tongue would cause. And we had the collective memory lane trip. Can you sympathise: That time when your underwear bands wore just a little too thin, and you discovered upon trying to remove them that those tiny elastic threads inside the fabric were covered with fabric for a reason? And the ubiquitous middle-school period story...Mine being the very first time I wore tampons, and didn't think about "backup", so to speak. I remember one of the popular girls spending gym class in the locker room with me trying to scrub the stain out of my shorts - "I'll tell him you're having 'female problems' if he asks" - and Amanda called her mother, who was a stay-at-home mom, and I got some replacement jeans after spending two periods in the office in abject misery. The jeans were elastic-waistband. I might almost have wanted the stained shorts instead. Shock and horror when they changed the colour of maxi-pad wrappers from a nice ignorable pink to bright purple, here-I-am-yellow, and oh-hello-green? The boxes that you got handed out in gym class with deodorant and acne wash and suckers in them? Girls got Tampax. Boys got Doritos. Never hand out Tampax to middle-schoolers during the school day. Wow. That was almost traumatic.