Gentlemen, if the functions of a woman’s body make you queasy, avert your eyes now. You have been warned! And ladies, if you would like to know how anti-gay and anti-women Proctor & Gamble (P&G) is milking you out of thousands of dollars in your lifetime, read on.

Always PadsWhile some of us may view our menstrual cycles as “curses,” “the monthlies,” or “a sacred part of being a Woman,” companies like P&G see our uteruses as bleeding money machines. By creating brand loyalty even before we reach menarche (our first period) through those dreaded “What’s Happening to Lilly?” videos, corporations that sell “feminine hygiene” products ensure they’ll have our business for the next 40 years of cramps, bloating, and PMS.

Allow me to illustrate.

Let’s pretend you got your period when you were 12, and that you’ll encounter menopause at 52. That means you will have 40 years’ worth of periods, which equals about 480 in a lifetime. (For the sake of mathematical simplicity”I failed intermediate algebra”let’s say you don’t have children and you’re always on schedule.)

Say you use only pads and you change them every 4 hours, meaning you use 6 in a day. The average period lasts 7 days, so you’re consuming 42 pads per cycle. This equals 20,160 pads in your lifetime.

Now, my brand of “choice” is Always (owned by P&G, along with almost every other feminine care product). For $7.69, you can get 36 ultra-thin, regular-absorbency-with-wings pads. You would go through 560 packs in your life if we took into account the statistics in the previous paragraph.

You would pay $4,306 over time to a company that uses advertising space and creative marketing to get women to think that their “down there” is a disgusting body part that needs all the sanitary attention it can get. And that’s if you were only using pads. P&G almost always plugs (uhh, pardon the pun) their tampons along with pads”you know, ‘cuz everyone is paranoid about leaking. Add to this the feminine wipes, sprays, Midol, Advil, and heating pads P&G will claim you need… you see where I’m headed.

I know there’s some renegade women out there who swear by the traditional, old-school cotton pads that affix by some sort of contraption”but why do we have to call them “renegades?” Is it so militant to be resourceful, more friendly to the environment, and someone who stands up to a company that tries to control every aspect of womanhood? I think not! If you wore commercial pads just half of the time (during the day) and an all-natural and super-absorbent cotton pad at night, you’d be contributing 50% less to a male-dominated company that produces women’s goods. And saving landfills. And not consuming dioxin (a controversy in itself).

Give LunaPads a try. Based in Canada, they’re kinda expensive, but way less expensive than a lifetime of synthetic-fibered pads.

Feel the power!