Jerk-ishness is its own punishment.

Warning this blog contains feminine hygiene content!

You may not have read this blog by Mummy McTavish. I commented then that one of the other comments reminded me of a funny tampon event back in 1975 and that it might be worth a blog entry one of these days. This is the day!

The youth group that I was involved in back in the 70's was fairly male dominated. Back then life was male dominated. Many blokes still had lovely old fashioned manners which was nice, but some were jerks -just like now I guess. Some jerks were openly jerk-ish and at least you knew where you stood with those types, but some jerks were less overt. They thought they could disguise their sexist bullying as humour or fun. We had a couple of this jerk species in the youth group. Unfortunately one of them was a leader. I'll call him Jeremy Jerk.

Jeremy had a keen sense of "fun". On camps, he thought it was fun to go through the girls' luggage and steal their undies and then use them as decorations around the camp site. He also thought it was fun to grab one of the girls and pick her up and put her in a garbage bin. His other fun pastime was to grab a girl's handbag or purse and start to go through it with the girl squealing and pleading with him to, "Stop and give it back!" He could always tell by the frantic screaming of the girl and her friends when he was getting close to some embarrassing stash of feminine hygiene products. Then he would hand the bag back so as to avoid embarrassing himself. He only did this to me once and I think I cured him of the habit for good.

I kept spare tampons in a little velvet jewelery case in my bag. It had once contained my watch. You know the sort - a hard little case with a spring loaded lid. I could fit about 3 tampons neatly inside it and it didn't look obvious. You can guess what happened.

Jeremy was having some fun with my handbag and at first I argued with him [I don't scream or squeal - it's undignified]. My girlfriends did the screaming and squealing on my belhalf and just as Jeremy found the little velvet jewelery box my girlfiriends became more frantic. One nudged me and said, "Can't we stop him. Look what he's got!" Jeremy looked confused - just as the other girls became more distressed, I became dead calm. He wasn't so sure of the signs anymore. I had one of those "light bulb" moments and I looked at my friends and shrugged my shoulders as if to say, "It's out of our hands. What will be, will be."

A couple of dozen teenagers were looking on as Jeremy opened the little case to reveal, horror of horrors, tampons! Absolute silence descended. Teenage boys froze in their tracks at first and then suddenly found they had things to do elsewhere. Jeremy was white, like a sheet. After a few seconds doing an excellent impersonation of a marble statue, he quietly closed the jewelery case, put it in my bag, handed the bag back to me and walked away without saying a word.

My girlfriends were impressed with how easily he was cured of his annoying habit and thought I was "brave" for the way I handled it.

It just goes to show how different attitudes were back then.