The Red Dragon is on the rag

It's early days yet, but in my capacity as a budding investigative journalist and as a creature who, in the immortal words of Mr. Garrison, bleeds for five days and doesn't die, I think I may have discovered the biggest scam since a bunch of technocrats in the late Roman Empire turned Jesus from a revolutionary to a patsy. And I'm not talking about come cunt called Madoff and thousands of pansies who thought they could get something for nothing. Small change, frankly. Men, look away if period talk makes you queasy, because there's about to be rather a lot of it.

I'm talking about how awesome this is relative to disposables. Not the brand itself, which obviously I'm too cheap to buy, but the idea, which I executed at home with a minumum of ingenuity, a sewing machine, a square metre of super-soft cotton flannelette, and the enforced domesticity that comes with a hangover. Now, I was pretty sure it was going to be more comfortable. Well, duh. Barring some weirdo masochistic perversion, what's going to feel nicer on the most sensitive part of your body: super soft cotton flannelette or a sticky bandage made of wood pulp and plastic? And otherwise, I decided to do it because I'm too cheap to pay for disposables every month, and because I don't like all the non-biodegradable waste associated with them. So three benefits I was expecting. Great.

A benefit I was not expecting was that the set-up would work so much better than disposables. That came as a complete fucking surprise. The first day I was checking on them every ten minutes in mortal fear of making a complete mess of myself, and each time I couldn't believe it. I'll spare you the gory details and let the numbers speak: on the peak day, I usually run through nine disposables. On the peak day this time, I ran through three inserts, and the second two were for freshness.

Hence the scam. It turns out that women don't actually bleed that much - within a range of 10 to 80 millilitres - something like half a cup. I've been amazed at that figure before, because whilst bleeding onto the finest disposables money can buy sometimes it feels like a fucking deluge, an unstoppable flood of gore, like when the fucking Tsarevich got a nosebleed. But like an idiot, I didn't figure out the implications of that until peak day this red dragon ride, when I actually bled into something besides a sticky bandage made of wood pulp and plastic. And realized - 'hey. This doesn't need changing every three hours.' Synapses fired . . . slowly (I've been drinking a lot lately). 'Hey. Hey. Erm . . . hey.'

Finally it came home to me: disposables are designed to be shitty. They're designed to be about as absorbent as soggy crackers, they're designed to be changed frequently, they're designed to cost five euros a month for a packet, they're designed, in short, to help a bunch of cunts at Procter & Gamble, et cetera, stick their fucking hands into my wallet. Motherfuckers. Sisterfuckers. Cuntwipes. The industry has always pissed me off, with its retarded commercials and exploitation of feminine insecurities and non-biodegradability and the way the products get taxed as cosmetics, like you're wearing them to look good instead of to not stain your furniture. But I'll admit, it had never crossed my mind that they were doing a half-ass design job on purpose to move more product. What fucking bullshit. I'm thirty years old now. That means I've given those fucks, those opportunistic, parasitic, exploitative shitheels, about $1200 they really, really don't fucking deserve, and helped them fill the planet with non-biodegradable biowaste to boot. Holy fuck.