Anti-ScienceFeaturedFeminism

Tired of Your Period? Glue Your Vagina Shut!

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Sorta transcript:

Ladies, are you sick and tired of dealing with your periods? Does being a woman make you too stupid to fix the problem of your uterine lining sloughing out of your body once a month? Well, good news! A male chiropractor has invented the product that will finally free us from the tyranny of tampons: it’s glue, so you can literally glue your stupid vagina shut.

First of all I want to make it very clear that this is not a joke. Dan Dopps, a chiropractor from Witchita Kansas, has a patent and is actively promoting this product on Facebook. The product doesn’t appear to actually exist yet, but since when does that stop any quack from trying to make money?

Second of all, I want to point out that Dopps’ own brother, Brad Dopps, who is also a chiropractor, says that Dan is “insane.” Normally that would mean I wouldn’t talk about any of this, but screw it. I’m sick of talking about politics and Dan is a woman-hating asshole marketing possibly fraudulent and most assuredly dangerous pseudoscientific garbage. So let’s discuss it.

Dopps calls his company “Mensez.” It may be pronounced “Men-seez” but really, is there anything more fitting for an idiotic product marketed to women by a man who has no idea what he’s doing than calling it “Men-sez”?

The product in question is a glue stick. Dopps wants women to smear it on their labia in order to shut the blood and tissue inside. In his imagination, the glue would come un-stuck when exposed to urine, so simply peeing would open up the vagina and allow all the materials to come out. He compares it to waking up with your lips (on your face) stuck shut and needing to wet them with saliva from the inside to unstick them. That’s never happened to me, but okay. So you pee, all the blood and tissue comes out, and then you reapply the glue. Ta-da! Our menstrual woes are over.

You may have already thought of several problems with this. For a start, women don’t pee out of our vaginas. The urine would unglue the labia at the urethra, but then it would need to work its way over to the vagina in order to work. What if a few messy drops of urine on the outside aren’t enough to disengage the glue? Do you pry your vagina open with a butter knife?

There’s also the issue of putting a foreign substance anywhere near your vagina and then sealing it in. The vagina is a remarkable, self-cleaning instrument, but only if you don’t, you know, stick mysterious manmade chemicals into it and then seal it off. That’s a recipe for yeast infections or bacterial vaginosis, which can lead to even more serious problems like infertility.

You may have noticed I referred to Dobbs as a woman-hater, and that may be confusing. After all, he’s trying to solve a problem for women! Well, over on his company’s Facebook page, he has responded to early criticism with the following screed:

“I am a man and you as a woman, should have come up with a better solution then diapers and plugs, but you didn’t. Reason being women are focused on and distracted by your period 25% of the time, making them far less productive then they could be.”

By “diapers” he’s referring to pads, by “plugs” I assume he means tampons, and by “distracted by your period 25% of the time” he means he’s never actually met or talked to a woman.

If he had, he would know several things. First, that pads and panty liners are nothing like diapers, and that now we can get underwear that does that job perfectly anyway. Second, he’d know that menstrual cups exist for women who don’t like using tampons. They keep material inside until you go to the bathroom, without gluing your vagina shut.

Third, he’d know that blood coming out of our bodies is but one relatively minor inconvenience associated with menstruation. I’m loathe to bring this up, but has he heard of period shits? Thanks to a number of factors, pooping becomes a total hassle on your period: the uterus presses against the colon, and hormones can fluctuate in a way that leads to constipation and diarrhea.

Now that he knows about period shits, I assume he’ll start working on a way to glue the anus shut for a few days at least.

In the meanwhile, he’s taken down the company Facebook page, probably due to the flood of mockery that’s being visited upon him. The evil part of me hopes that he doesn’t give up and maybe goes on Shark Tank to get funding, just so I can see him mocked in front of a larger audience. But I know that even the most obviously ridiculous and dangerous quackery will attract a few eager customers, so it’s probably best to just hope that Dopps gives up on Mensez and goes back to his other patents for bottle caps and resealable snack bags.

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca is a writer, speaker, YouTube personality, and unrepentant science nerd. In addition to founding and continuing to run Skepchick, she hosts Quiz-o-Tron, a monthly science-themed quiz show and podcast that pits comedians against nerds. There is an asteroid named in her honor. Twitter @rebeccawatson Mastodon mstdn.social/@rebeccawatson Instagram @actuallyrebeccawatson TikTok @actuallyrebeccawatson YouTube @rebeccawatson BlueSky @rebeccawatson.bsky.social

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6 Comments

    1. 25121642,

      At this point it probably would depend on how fanatically anti abortion he is. Trump is desperate to appease the religious right after all.

      1. Which is baffling to me. It seems as though, even though he has nothing to offer that set, they’re his most locked-in supporters in the entire country regardless of what actions he takes.

        1. Ikanreed,

          Well Trump needs someone else to relay on besides twitter Nazis and white nationalists, who are in some ways even more outside of the mainstream than the religious right nowadays.

          1. No one in the two major parties gets what happened last November. The Midwest hated Trump, but they voted for him as a way of rejecting, let’s call it Reaganism-Clintonism. You know the type: Supply-side economics, free trade, deregulate everything, too big to fail, but they’re “leftist” because they’re somewhat better than the Spanish Inquisition on social issues. (If that sounds like the Libertarian Party, you will be happy to know, Bill Clinton’s group, the DLC, was a front group for the Libertarian Party. Specifically for Koch Industries.)

            The problem is, Reaganism-Clintonism defines both parties today. People inside Washington can’t imagine people outside Washington rejecting Reaganism-Clintonism.

            Right now I see Democrats making the same mistake as in 1972, predicting some imaginary future demographics. 1972 was the first clue that the Baby Boom would be Generation Dubya.

    2. If he developed a lip glue that cannot dissolve with saliva, he’d save half of Golden Boy Trump’s administration.

      There’d still remain the explosive Twitter diarrhea.

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