Last week Tiger Woods thought it would be funny to hand fellow golfer Justin Thomas a tampon in some very immature, ill-thought-out idea of a joke during the Genesis Invitational in Pacific Palisades, California. This makes it clear to me that Woods has never had to bleed regularly from an orifice of his body. If he did, he would never, ever equate the idea of a tampon with weakness. Now Woods has to apologize because that’s what you have to do when you’re publicly caught out being a misogynistic twerp.
“It was supposed to be fun and games, but obviously, it hasn’t turned out that way,” Woods said at a press conference, according to Buzzfeed. “If I offended anybody, it was not the case. It was just friends having fun and as I said, if I offended anybody in any way, shape, or form, I’m sorry. It was not intended to be that way. We play pranks on one another all the time and virally, I do not think this came across that way, but between us, it was different.”
OK, just so we’re clear, that apology is essentially an apology for getting caught and not for engaging in the tired BS “oh, periods are funny and vaginas are weak” trope that anyone who menstruates hears basically from the time we first menstruate. It’s boring, stale, and obnoxious. You can tell that by the repeated: “If I offended anybody.”
For the record, Tiger. I’m not offended, I’m bored of this whole trope, and I think you’re an idiot. You’re not important or relevant enough to my day-to-day life to be offended by. A man insulting menstruation? I’m just going to call this Monday.
Now, I will not go so far as to say I like my period. I do not. It means I have a migraine and side note: I would love to see Tiger Woods go about his day with a menstrual migraine because they are a fucking drag. I guarantee you that if he had to have them two weeks out of the month like I do, he would never use a tampon as a joke for being weak again. However, let’s be very clear here, we’re all walking this green earth because of a vagina, so maybe, just maybe, making jokes about how weak they are is not the way to go?
If you menstruate, you know tampons are a gift! It means you can go swimming if you so desire, or even risk it and wear white if you’re feeling particularly daring. Hell, they’re even used by soldiers to plug bullet holes in the field, in a pinch. Tampons are a multi-faceted, multi-purpose, functional product! They should never be the butt of a joke, yet here we are in 2023, having this conversation. This is boring. I’m bored. Aren’t you? There are people walking around who believe tampons are a sign of weakness. At this point, it’s an active choice to be this willfully ignorant and tiresome.
It’s not that Woods got caught; I’m glad he did. It’s that certain a type of man still finds this kind of crap funny to begin with and that they’re in positions of power. As a reminder, The Masters, which is one of the big four professional championships in golf, only started letting women join the professional club that hosts the championship in 2012. It’s estimated that only 6 out of approximately 300 members of the club are women. Clearly, professional golf has a women-problem, and incidents like this don’t do much to help that notion. As a result, I now have a Tiger Woods problem.
