TORONTO — Today, local marketing associate Ellen Smith stood up for women’s empowerment everywhere by embarking on a bold, 4-hour, totally unintentional free bleed.
Smith’s courageous stand began at 7:34 AM, when she removed her tampon and, in a rush to get ready for work, neglected to replace it. “I was so worried about this new project I’m heading up that I just forgot what I was doing. God, so fucking embarrassing,” the feminist hero told reporters.
Smith’s inadvertent statement to the world started to garner attention at around 8:30 AM during her commute. “I was on the subway and I noticed this woman trying to catch my eye and sort of gesturing to her front, but I thought she just wanted me to move out of the way of a pregnant lady. What the hell was I thinking?” said Smith, her face red and swollen with pride.
The metaphorical power of Smith’s bold stand ramped up as she confidently strode into her office while totally unaware that about 3-4 tablespoons of menstrual blood had seeped through the back of her form-fitting teal pants.
Smith elatedly explained how she then “just walked in there like a moron,” greeting her colleagues as she made her way to her desk, then made sure everyone took a moment out of their day to reexamine the disproportional stigma placed on periods when she bent over to refill the Keurig machine.
Smith’s female colleagues were touched, describing her willingness to reclaim the narrative around a natural and inevitable part of women’s lives as “awe-inspiring” and “literally my single greatest fear.”
Smith’s activism reached a crescendo completely without her knowledge when she was called into her boss’s office to offer an opinion on an upcoming presentation.
“I was sitting in a chair in Gary’s office and I got up to go to his computer and I looked down at the chair and saw blood on it and I thought ‘I am dead, I have died and this is hell.”
Smith then made a subtle and clever comment on the contortions women undergo to hide their periods by improvising a lie about how she just remembered she had to make a phone call and needed this chair to do it. Smith’s subsequently created a powerful symbolic rejection of the shame women live with around menstruation by double-bagging and throwing out her pants.
At press time, it’s still not clear if Gary saw anything when she was at the white board. Fuck.
