Compare the American "Modess . . . . because" ads, and the German "Freedom" (Kimberly-Clark) for teens.
See a prototype of the first Kotex ad.
See more Kotex items: Ad 1928 (Sears and Roebuck catalog) - Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday (booklet for girls, 1928, Australian edition; there are many links here to Kotex items) - 1920s booklet in Spanish showing disposal method - box from about 1969 - Preparing for Womanhood (1920s, booklet for girls) - "Are you in the know?" ads (Kotex) (1949)(1953)(1964)(booklet, 1956) - See more ads on the Ads for Teenagers main page
Ads for the Kotex stick tampon (U.S.A., 1970s) - a Japanese stick tampon from the 1970s.
Early commercial tampons - Rely tampon - Meds tampon (Modess)
CONTRIBUTE to Humor, Words and expressions about menstruation and Would you stop menstruating if you could?
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homepage | MUM address & What does MUM mean? | e-mail the museum | privacy on this site | who runs this museum?? |
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Leer la versión en español de los siguientes temas: Anticoncepción y religión, Breve reseña - Olor - Religión y menstruación - Seguridad de productos para la menstruación.

Nana sanitary napkin ad, France, probably 1980s, magazine?

In 1997 the webmaster of one of the sites for the Nana pad (and tampon) company contacted me for a reason I've forgotten. At the time I wrote on this MUM site,

[T]he company that makes NANA pads and tampons conjured up this bon vivant from the 1980s who still puzzles me, even though I read French and a kindly Frenchman has interpreted it for me ("The more women are cute [or nice], the more I love them"). French guys refer to their girlfriends as being "nana," I am told by a male representative of the company, who said the ad is "very good." He had not seen it before.

Not that the French are so sophisticated that menstruation doesn't faze them; on the contrary, says my first informant. But somehow their approach is, well, so French!

By this interpretation I guess the pad name is "cute" or "nice." Internet translators call it "chick" or"girl." But see the end of this article for a different interpretation!

So, the text I guess translates as "The more women are nice [or cute; "chick" (not chic) doesn't seem to make it here] the more I love them." I guess there is no pun on Nana menstrual pad as such. It all seems so complicated. Those French.

But hold on! In the New York Review of Books for 17 December 2015, Bard College professor Ian Buruma writes (in a footnote to his review of Splendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution in France, 1850-1910, an exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay)

Nana, later the title of a Émile Zola's famous novel, published in 1880, was the slang expression for loose women.
And earlier in the article he writes
In 1877, the Salon rejected Manet's wonderful portrait of Nana, a high-class cocotte. There she is, in her silk underwear, powdering her face, her lacy behind facing an appreciative male sitting on a sofa ....
German women today can buy a menstrual pad named after the flower associated with a prostitute - Camelia.

Never in America! Torch-bearing mobs would boycott the company naming a menstrual product - or any other? - associated with prostitutes.

See a similar ad for Nana.
The ad, a one-pager, measures 9 x 11.62" (22.7 x 29.5 cm], is on one page and is black and white.
NEXT: Dutch ad featuring just a man and his, um, Kotex panty pad - Malaysian ad featuring, yes,
just a man, but smirking big time
Compare the American "Modess . . . . because" ads, and the German "Freedom" (Kimberly-Clark) for teens.

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