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You may have noticed there’s a little bit of a war on in Gaza at the moment, and in order to stop the very worst of the bloodshed, the people of the region need YOUR help—in the shape of your spare tampons. What Gaza’s under-siege women need now most of all is not food, water, fuel, or medicine, but free Bodyform by the bucketload, because otherwise…THEY WILL ALL SURELY DIE.

This is the alarmist message currently being gushed out substantially more than once per calendar month by feminist charities like MotherBeing, which sounds like some weird trans activist-approved word for a pregnant woman but is actually an Egypt-based “reproductive and women’s health clinic.” Besides doing an absolutely terrible job of discouraging Arabs from having far too many children, such bodies also have a nice anti-Zionist line in “rais[ing] awareness about the ethnic cleansing occurring in Occupied Palestine” at the hands of the Jews, who have deliberately engineered a killer local famine: of clean period pads.

Tampax Romanum
Another hysterical female-centered NGO, ActionAid, warns that, as access to tampons is currently limited due to Israel’s blockade, local women “have been using period products longer than intended,” which could lead to “life-threatening illnesses such as toxic shock syndrome”—a real thing, but very rare. Meanwhile, I’d imagine many females in the area can also fall victim to “life-threatening illnesses such as being shot in the head” by Israeli and Hamas bullets during frenzied cross fire, but this is seemingly nowhere near as serious as the severe regional lack of Lil-Lets.

In an interview, one 20-year-old Gazan girl, Noor, dribbled out the following self-absorbed words about her lack of something self-absorbent: “I want to highlight this topic because it’s extremely difficult, and unfortunately no-one is talking about [the tampon shortage] because of all the death and non-stop bombing.”

Yes, it’s much like how nobody ever much talked about the severe lack of pessaries during Guernica. Tampons in their modern form were only invented in 1931, just in time for WWII, a bit like radar but better. Prior to that, women caught up in the Sieges of Sevastopol, Byzantium, or Vienna had to manage by Sellotaping a sponge or a small hairy mammal between their legs and hoping for the best. They didn’t all just suddenly die for no reason.

Rags for Rag-Heads…
Another do-gooding outlet, ReliefWeb, gravely reported on an epidemic of “menstrual disturbance” in the troubled region, speaking of how vulnerable on-the-blob Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs—not to be confused with IDFs) were suffering because “hospitals in the Gaza Strip are taking emergency cases only.” Yes. Isn’t that what hospitals are generally for? Particularly those located within war zones, you might have thought.

In Scotland, politician Monica Lennon submitted a parliamentary question asking if the government would consider sending a ship full of free Kotex to Gaza, with so many such items going spare down Caledonia way. The official response, parsed for diplomatic euphemism, went along the lines of “We asked the Gazans if they’d like some free tampons, but they said, ‘No, send us lots of money so we can buy food and medical supplies instead, please, you woke morons,’ so we just did that.”

…Towels for Towel-Heads
I don’t mean to imply tampons are not a highly useful product—in many ways, they are the best thing since sliced bread (see below). It’s just that, when push comes to shove, ending up with red underwear is not the worst thing a woman is likely to suffer in the middle of a civilian battlefield.

There is clearly a wider political agenda at work here, the issue of tampons for refugees being neither new nor unique to the current Israel-Gaza conflict. Another activist NGO, Anera, has been “committed to addressing period poverty in Lebanon” for many years now, menstruation obviously being the major daily concern for female inhabitants of that particular perpetually strife-torn land, too.

Since 2021, Anera has been working in a local camp for Syrian refugees called “Arsal” (surely Lebanon itself is one giant Arsal?), citing disturbing figures to the effect that “some 45% of girls in refugee camps worldwide” have “inadequate access to menstrual products,” whilst “a whopping 63% didn’t have enough underwear.” Some women never do. Why don’t they just rip the tea towels off their husbands’ heads and try bleeding onto those?

We’ll Keep the Red Rag Flying Here
When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, other women of the West also stood ready to help in the only way they knew how: by knitting homemade tampons. British student Ella Lambert started her own “Pachamama Project,” recruiting 1,500 volunteers to sit around sewing amateur tampons dubbed Pacha Pads, to distribute Kiev-wards.

Once Putin’s troops crossed the border, the first horror that flashed through Ella’s mind was seemingly not one of death, fire, and destruction, but of some poor woman having a period straight into her lovely fresh white knickers. “It’s made people think how it could be them,” she told the BBC, who lapped it all up (so to speak). It couldn’t be me, Ella, due to obvious reasons.

If your immediate reaction to news of a massive military invasion is to scream, “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE TAMPONS?!” then I would suggest your priorities are as twisted as a pair of soiled Crimean panties. It comes across more as shoehorning a major foreign tragedy into becoming yet another vehicle for such people’s own pet identity-politics obsessions rather than any genuine compassion. As Ella has said, thanks to her own long-term efforts of raising awareness about periods (I already knew about them, thanks): “It’s almost like a period revolution is going on!” Not the first Red revolution to have bled out Westwards from Russia.

From Rags to Riches
Ella was not alone (these people never are). Manchester-based “period product social enterprise” Hey Girls, “a group that supports all people who menstruate,” says it was set up to “dispel the many myths that surround periods,” but not the specific fashionable left-wing one that there are any other “people who menstruate” besides actual women. Established by lifelong womb owner Celia Hodson and her two daughters after they experienced an imaginary economic condition named “period poverty,” Hey Girls is described as “a kitchen-table start-up”: Was it a Periodic Table?

According to Hey Girls: “As soon as the situation with Ukraine unfolded, we knew we had to take action.” Unfortunately, the action in question was thoroughly pointless: shipping out “environmentally friendly period pants, menstrual cups and sterilizing pots, tampons, disposable and reusable pads and pantyliners” to the front line. “In a crisis, periods are often the last thing people are thinking about,” Hey Girls admitted, but they still winged their products all eastwards anyway.

Here’s President Zelensky’s next desperate address to Congress if this kind of logic catches on:

ZELENSKY: People of America, send us tanks, send us missiles, send us jets…

BIDEN: Sorry, no money left. But we do have something else much more deadly. Kamala—open your legs and squirt him out your last used Playtex. Just a single one of these placed in the Moscow water supply is enough to kill the entire Russian population twice over.

ZELENSKY: This is worse than Zyklon-B.

Putin’s own favorite brand of female hygiene product, by the way, is Always Ultra (Nationalist).

Casting Tampax Pearls Before Swine
Tampons can help staunch one common genuine military problem: They make very useful (and cheap) makeshift bandages, according to the Russian military. Yet real problems are no longer enough for today’s posturing Female Justice Warriors, hence their sudden invention of the truly laughable concept of Israeli tampon genocide in Palestine: Talk about a Jewish blood libel.

My favorite wholly invented menses-related tragedy appears on the U.N.’s official web page about periods (defund the U.N. now!), where it explains piously that historical “misconceptions about menstruation have led to women’s and girls’ exclusion from all kinds of roles and settings.” The U.N.’s chief example? “Space travel.” If the crotches of astronaut suits hadn’t have been so hideously white and bloodstain-revealing, like the England women’s soccer team’s old shorts, that could have been Nell Armstrong up there on the lunar surface, not Neil, taking one giant skip for womankind, possibly whilst walking several puppies and wearing roller skates.

The greatest made-up menstrual malady, however, is surely “the atrocity of period poverty,” as it was called by Amika George, an 18-year-old London schoolgirl who launched her #FreePeriods campaign back in 2017, demanding global governments start handing out free tampons to all. She even suggested they be distributed at Food Banks: Swallowing several followed by a jug of water would indeed make your belly feel quite full. Airlift them out to Ethiopia, too!

Supposedly, the incredible cumulative annual cost of tampons was pushing women into actual destitution, so Amika organized a protest march at which people waved red banners “demanding change,” making London “slowly turn red.” “We are angry,” Amika declared on behalf of her flag-waving blood sisters. It must have been their time of the month.

Use Your Loaf
But the annual average cost of tampons per British woman is £128; far less than a smartphone or a foreign holiday, both of which I’m sure Amika has happily paid for in the past. It’s also much less than the annual cost of food, clothing, toiletries, and any number of other essential items not yet doled out gratis by the State. The annual cost of toilet paper for an average anus-owner is directly comparable to that of tampons, for example—I use toilet paper myself, so do I suffer from arsehole poverty? Sorry, no, wrong hole to play the victim with, bums aren’t gender-specific enough.

In 2022, ultra-woke SNP Scotland became the first country to give away free tampons to “anyone who needs them” (unspoken implication: even mentally ill men), with their amazing Period Products (Free Provision) Bill supposedly being “a beacon of hope” that “shows what can be achieved when politicians come together for the good of the people we serve”—i.e., absolutely nothing. According to the Scottish government, claimants “should not have to justify why they need period products or the amount that is needed.” Okay, I’ll have 10,000 to drain my local reservoir.

The “period dignity campaigners” of Hey Girls promptly popped up once again to explain that “There’s a very simple way to describe period poverty…. [You] have to actually choose whether you can buy a bag of pasta or a box of tampons.” That’s a classic false choice. Pasta is highly moisture-absorbent: Just use it for your monthly bleed first, then boil it sterile again during cooking. Worse, claimed a Hey Girls spokesfool, it was common for females on the literal breadline to shove slices of loaf inside themselves to soak up their ketchup. Mmm—jam sandwiches for packed lunch tomorrow, kids!

That’s nothing. Growing up in a deprived area of postindustrial northern England, I knew some women so poor they had to perform their own DIY abortions with stale baguettes.

These people really do need to stop moaning about their made-up “plight,” and please just put a sock in it.

Steven Tucker’s new book Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets is out now in hardback (Pen & Sword/Frontline Books). Buy it here (U.S.), here (U.K.), or here (direct from publisher).