On Tampons And Tax, Tony Abbott Is Not The Suppository Of All Wisdom

Tony Tony Tony.

I fear for you.

I wonder if you quite realise the hornets nest, the honey pot the spunk bucket the fish mitten the spam folder the grot slot the spasm chasm the spunk dungeon the passion purse the otter’s pocket the wiener warmer the skin mitten the meat purse the wellie top the mutton tube the tuna taco the panty hampster the money box the gutted quoka the collapsed mineshaft the pandora’s box you have stirred.

Ruling out removing the luxury tax on tampons is really a winkle of a move, a blart a cooze a vuvvle a minky a twinkle a lulu a snizz a mimsy a fuffkin a punani a clunge a growler a minge a flange a miffkin a tumpsy a slit a pussy a foof a twat a quim a snatch a chuff a gash a muff a fanny a vag a cunt.

Dammit, it slipped out, I was holding it in but, nope. Know the feeling Tony?

You see this is not ok by us women. We do present something of a voters block and we’re already not happy with you.

It all started when you told us we shouldn’t give our virginity away lightly, like we’d strewn it about the fairground like fly away fairyfloss for too long. Like it’s a commodity to exchange. (Cue wink Tony)

Then after calling us housewives you actually had the hide to add, what we need to understand when we’re doing the ironing is that repealing the carbon tax was especially good for us. Because we don’t really want a safe, just, inhabitable climate for our kids and grandkids. No. We’d rather a neat pile of starched napkins than, I dunno, descendants. Crazy brave Tony. It’s still a wonder you survived that one.

You stood under a banner that accused our first elected woman PM, and from all accounts, a very ace woman, of being Bob Brown’s Bitch. See now what can we say about that Tony? Judgement. Diplomacy. Statesmanship. Dignity. That new thing called Mindfulness. That old think called Intelligence. Lacking. All. Complete void in fact. An abyss as deep and dark as … yep she of the uninostril who shall not be named.

You accused Aboriginal women, many struggling to keep their families together in communities lacking the most basic facilities and supports, of living on their custodial land as a lifestyle choice. Oh, and then you declared the sum total of the oldest continuing lineage of ancestors, their matrilineal heritage, as ‘scarcely settled’. About here I for one wanted to smack you one and I can tell you I was not alone.

You recommended of one of your candidates, Fiona Scott, on the basis of her sex appeal. Just to clarify, here’s a woman depending on your endorsement to the public to be elected, not to be looked over and sized up against some soft-porn ideal but to have the qualities that fit her for public office – know what they might be? – explained to her constituency. So wrong Tony, we’ve since wondered what game you’re playing cause it sure as hell ain’t politics.

And on it has gone. Lurching due to exchanging feet in your mouth and god only knows what happened to that suppository. We suspect you now wear it as your crown.

About now I should rehearse the facts on the 10 per cent Goods and Services Tax that Australian tampons attract but condoms and sunscreen don’t because they are, it seems, more ‘essential items’. $25 million a year in the government coffers exclusively from us women on this ‘luxury item’, blather lather etc.

You want us to believe that the products associated with keeping our periods under wraps – which we largely do to protect the sensibilities of hung-up men like you – are luxuries.

Luxuries. For women it’s a luxury to bleed. What I would like to say here does not bear printing. Splutter.

Would you prefer us to actually use them as non-essential items Tony?

Come to think of it can you explain why there are virtually no bleeding vaginas in the ever expanding constellation of vag shots out there in clicksville? Could there be a double standard here? For all our liberation-via-vag-publicity by Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt et al (thanks guys!) there remain all sorts of conventions of exposure for women. There are things about our bodies still deemed too 'offensive' for porn.

Menstruation is simply inadmissible to public life.

It was guess who women, WW1 army nurses who first adapted absorbent bandaging, made from wood fibers and cellulose padding, to disposable napkins. Funny this wasn’t a big part in the telling of the Gallipoli centenary. My guess is the wounded young ANZACS weren’t charged a luxury tax on their bandaging.

So, sigh, women invented them, and typically the big men of the Kimberly-Clark company packaged them as ‘Kotex’. But they then had to manage the complete repression of the fact of menstruation while marketing a product whose function could not be publically admitted – other than in the odd sex-education pamphlet as the ‘monthly sickness’.

Tricky. How to market the invisible. How to publically expose the eternally repressed.

Actually it hasn’t changed much from the plain packaged boxes already wrapped in brown paper that women purchased by silently handing over the counter a coupon snipped out of a newspaper, to the blue water of more recent advertising.

And the wildly farflung and inexplicable adventures of young women pictured alongside? It is a menstruating woman? No, it’s a horseriding beachgirl, a sportsdriving partygirl, a skateboarding sportygirl. SuperNotBleedingInSightGirl!

Feminine hygiene ads then, as now, had to guarantee the out-and-about Modern Woman ‘protection absolute’ by ‘modern science’ and its new techniques in ‘deodorised, sterilised, aridised solubility and hygiene’. And from what must women be protected? Not from Kimberly-Clark or governments profiting from a natural bodily function, but from exposure. From the dreadful revelation of our bodys’ workings to the public.

Here’s the thing about that public. Half of it are already perfectly aware, in fact they inhabit those workings. A quarter again are doing it in any public gathering of fertile adults.

Yes Tony we’re bleeding, all over the place. Probably right next to you.

Leaving the luxury tax on tampons is about repression Tony. It’s archaic and shaming of women. And it makes you look like a fur burger a velvet trench a wet lettuce an oyster ditch a guarded slot a winking prawn a bearded clam a vertical smile a wizard’s sleeve a fish mitten a ham wallet a poon park a badly packed kebab a Queef Richards a ripped-out fireplace a hairy lasso a yawning hippo an itching jenny a city of lost children a downtown diner a wookey hole a foo foo a ninky nonk a front bottom an inverted penis.

Last time I heard, on April 25, it’s heroic to bleed. Why don’t you try it sometime Tony. My feeling is the women of Australia will thank you for it. They might even buy tickets, and gladly pay the GST on luxury seating.