Body Horror

by Anne Elizabeth Moore

  In contrast, the visual that sticks with me from the earliest days of 2014 is a swarm of giggling young women, dressed electrically. Cambodians joke that the way to tell a Khmer women from a Vietnamese woman is that the Vietnamese woman only likes to wear one pattern at a time, paired with a solid color. Cambodian women like to wear many patterns, a mish-mash of symbols and cute animals, clever if misspelled slogans, nearly incandescent colors. All together! As many as possible! She might wear a hot pink top and bright green hoodie with an American flag printed on the back with jeans, flowered socks, colorful shoes. They have plenty of time to concoct good outfits: they spend eight-hour days working in the factories where clothes are made, plus two hours of often mandatory overtime, and if they aren’t able to afford or find a fell-off-the-truck version of something they like, a whole other batch of clothes eventually returns to them, cast-offs from the US and EU, cheaply sold by the bulk in one of the city’s many markets. More garments are discarded every year as production rates increase, last year by 20 percent—an ever-expanding volume of apparel that garment workers both create and look great in.

  Perhaps because my pictures from that time are so filled with vibrant color, I can only describe being on the streets of Cambodia at the start of 2014 as the experience of pure joy.

  Around 9:00 a.m. on January 3, workers gathered along Veng Sreng Street. Many were striking to demand the $160 wage, but some had other concerns: back pay at some of the nearby factories was still owed to workers. The mood was light, however. One striking worker told me that, more or less, the protest was a big dance party.

  Quietly, in the background, a military unit gathered. Later identified as Brigade 911, an Indonesian-trained force with an unruly history including participation in the 1998 election-related violence, they dressed in sparkling new riot gear. They arrived by truck. They took out their guns, AK-47s and Norinco Type 97A Assault Rifles. Then, as a livid young man named Kha Sei told me in front of a clinic on Veng Sreng, “they fight the dancers.”

  Warning shots were fired over the heads of protestors. The crowd threw rocks and sticks in response. Police answered with live rounds, killing at least five, injuring and arresting many more. Several of the injured or arrested later claimed they weren’t even protesting. One was a food vendor, working nearby, seeking to feed her family by selling food to protestors.

  “When the police shoot the people, one guy died over there,” Kha Sei pointed to a spot a few feet away. “He’s still alive? The police shoot more.”

  “Were all five factory workers?” I asked. There had been no confirmation of this at the time, but Kha Sei, in his blood-red t-shirt, seemed to know all the players.

  Sophy, a garment worker in her early twenties who was also there that day, crossed her arms and looked disgusted. A third friend, who didn’t give his name, said yes. “But many more than five,” this friend added. He pointed to a wall fifteen yards to our right, marking the property of the Sunwell Shoes Company. “They throw one body there. Many others, they take away in the car.” (Missing persons reports emerged later, although the official death toll was not raised.)

  A striker standing near Kha Sei was shot. He mimed how he and two friends carried the gunshot victim to the medical clinic where we now stood, not thirty feet from where MPs were shooting, a point across the street Kha Sei pointed out to me. The clinic director turned them away. “He was scared about the government,” Kha Sei said. The striker died. He stood over the spot, glaring angrily at the ground. I looked away out of respect.

  Kha Sei spread his arm behind him, gesturing to the ruined clinic at our backs. “So we do this,” he said. The building had been destroyed, gutted—everything smashable smashed, everything wrenchable hurled to the ground and stomped on. The sign bearing the name of the clinic was riddled with holes, clearly caused by one young man on another’s shoulders, one holding on while the other punched. The group chased out a woman who had just given birth, then tore through everything in sight.

  Two days later, the clinic was still a pile of rubble, testifying to an anger not released but delayed. The angry trio I interviewed stood at its entrance, glaring at everyone. The nameless friend’s parting words to me were a comment that the garment workers were no longer demanding $160 per month.

  “Now we just need machine guns,” he said.

  Victory Over Genocide Day was not the day of change the garment workers had signaled for my camera after all; it was instead the day Hun Sen held a special ceremony for a visiting Vietnamese delegation, to publicly thank them for their country’s assistance in bringing an end to Cambodian bloodshed thirty-five years beforehand, even though a civil war continued to rage thereafter, and the bloodshed had continued. The bloodshed of two days prior, too, went conspicuously unmentioned. It remains true to this day that the Vietnamese profit from tourism to genocide sites and Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument in the world, and Cambodia’s beloved symbol of unity, strength, and pre-Khmer Rouge history. It is also still true that illegal logging hauls frequently end up in the possession of Vietnamese companies, and few investigations result. People remain angry about the post-Khmer Rouge occupation, and the extranational profiteering it allowed. Today, hostilities toward Vietnamese immigrants often result in violence, or death.

  Many garment workers had already left the city to return to the countryside, but those still in Phnom Penh on January 7 went back to work that day or the next. People fell into silence. Even Nike and I spoke less frequently. The country mourned, privately, each individual silently allowing hopes to dissipate, one by one. From the outside it may have appeared as if none of it had ever happened: Not the exhilaration. Not the horror. I might have ignored the whole grisly ordeal myself, if the nightmares hadn’t started then.

  But there was no ignoring it. In the earliest days of 2014, most Cambodians had taken to the streets in joy and hope for change. The government had turned on them, and many had died. The experience will never be forgotten, but it may never be publicly acknowledged, either.

  A version of this essay was originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly.

  By the mid-1920s, the nascent feminine hygiene industry in the US was in peril. Women, all a-flutter about their recently acquired voting rights and whatnot, were persisting in the questionable activity of crafting their own sanitary products by hand. Following a tradition passed down by generations of matriarchs, panty liners were still being sewn from castaway fabrics—hence the phrase “on the rag.” This presented a massive barrier to the handful of companies eager to get into the menstrual pad business. Who can blame these diligent entrepreneurs? They were missing out on valuable consumer dollars! So forward-thinking lady-product manufacturer Johnson & Johnson hired a team of efficiency experts to research the matter: Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, a husband-and-wife duo who combined their interests in industrial engineering with a study of psychology (and in their spare time, raised twelve children).

  That the Gilbreths were offered the market research contract as a duo is significant, because the Nineteenth Amendment was still new, and because they had a dozen kids, and because Frank died before the undertaking began. So Lillian was in a unique position to both innovate the field of market research—the Gilbreth firm was among the first of its kind—and to do so as a single woman. (The kids kept up the housework; their travails are immortalized in several Cheaper By the Dozen films.)

  Hiring a woman for the job, even if “the job” was to look into the habits of other women, was unheard of, although some saw Gilbreth’s 1926 solo venture as a further expression of growing equality between the sexes. Johnson & Johnson, for its part, perhaps sensed that her status as a career woman and single mother might boost their own marketing efforts among that exact demographic. That Gilbreth was also in the process of inventing the field of industrial psychology—making her, at the time, the standalone expert in the world on how consumers might feel about products, not to mention her ability to speak better even th
an her husband about the unique values of feminine products—surely played a role in the company’s progressive decision to allow her to honor the contract on her own.1

  The company’s problem was simple: “catamenial bandages,” as menstrual devices were called at the time, were not selling. Gilbreth’s theory was that they did not adequately address women’s needs. After all, Johnson & Johnson’s main market competition was not other companies, it was the intended customer base, who had been fulfilling their own needs just fine, thankyouverymuch, for generations. Commercially-available sanitary napkins were uniformly bulky, heavy, and uncomfortable, which Gilbreth set about proving in interviews with around a thousand women of diverse ages regarding their monthly needs. The resulting market research outlined a matrix of availability, adequate clothing protection, comfort, disposability, and inconspicuousness, all of which, when combined, would create a sort of menstrual product magic that ladies would be unable to resist. That, at least, is what Gilbreth’s final report suggested, and Johnson & Johnson concurred. Perceiving immediate salability in her ideas, the company generated patent after patent after patent based on her findings, quickly outpacing the production capabilities of other feminine hygiene product makers, who strove to improve their own designs when Johnson & Johnson’s new lines emerged, just to stay in business.

  Ninety years on, nearly 6,500 patents for sanitary napkins have been granted. The devices have become uniformly practical in that time, ensuring comfort, leakage control, and disposability—and can even biodegrade, absorb foul odors, or remain entirely unnoticeable when worn and disposed of as advised. It is no hyperbole to claim that the bulk of these advancements are the result of one single woman’s labor, nor would it tax imagination to further credit the thousand or so other women she tapped for input. Yet these women’s efforts go entirely unacknowledged in the realm of intellectual property: the rights to profit from the feminine hygiene field—as assured by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)—remain about 95 percent male-owned.

  Equality between the sexes indeed.

  One frequently sees cited today that, nearly a century after achieving the right to vote in the US, women continue to make up 51 percent of the population but only 18 percent of the US Congress, and continue to earn, on average, a mere 77 percent of what men do. (Factoring for race allows us to see that only white women can expect this comparatively high percentage of a male colleague’s dollar.) Implicit gender bias crystalizes in the realm of patents, which are held by a pool of inventors only 7.5 percent female.2 Commercial patents have been granted to an even smaller percentage of women, just 5.5 percent.

  This has shifted slightly over time. A massive push prior to Y2K had women earning science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees twenty or thirty times more frequently than in years past, and a change in patent holdings was one clear result: In the 1990s, 1.4 percent of all patents issued in the United States named at least one female inventor. By 2002, this percentage had grown to 10.4.

  The wage gap has shifted a bit as well. It narrowed by approximately half a penny every year—at least until a decade ago, when it stagnated completely.3 Women’s participation across all patent-earning fields dropped during that same time period. Progress toward gender equality, in other words, came to a halt in the US just a few years into the new century.

  Such stagnation is usually attributed to a mythological “ambition gap” between men and women. Women, it is often said, simply don’t ask for what they want. However, this has been debunked by two different studies of the US labor force.4 It turns out, women do ask for as many salary increases as men, but their requests are usually denied.

  Patenting remains one of the most persistent sites of gender disparity. In 2010, the National Women’s Business Council discovered that the USPTO had record-high numbers of successful female applicants. Yet bias remains: “The ratio of successful women patent applicants to successful men patent applicants varies from a low 73.36 percent in 1986 to a high of 93.57 percent in 2002,” the report states. Which means that, even in the best of years, only 6.43 percent more women than men are denied patents.

  Gilbreth’s dedication to ensuring women access to menstrual products they might actually use allowed the feminine hygiene industry to survive and soon thrive. The field quickly grew to offer a stunning variety of contraptions and palliatives, all intended to further mask the menstrual cycle as women entered, and then gained standing in, a male-dominated workforce. Noting that no concurrent moves have been made to socially normalize the regular occurrence of menstruation (the notion that Hilary Clinton might use a restroom for any purpose whatsoever was enough to set off presidential contender Donald Trump after one 2016 debate, for example) may spark the realization that the entire sanitary product industry exists to allow women to pass through an arena dominated by men without raising alarm. (Continue on this thought trajectory for too long, however, and you’ll discover that far more effort has gone into the innovation of menstrual pads than into the establishment of women’s rights. I do not advise this for those who already suffer from depression.)

  Devices new to the market in the last near-century therefore vary in both considerateness and usefulness: tampons, for example, absorbent insertables intended to soak up menstrual blood, take some adjusting to, as does the menstrual cup. Each carry potential hazards that range from embarrassing to life-threatening, but both allow for unimpeded movement with little blood overflow. (Unless you’re on a heavy day, and you sneeze.) Douches, on the other hand, intended to eliminate lady smells, come with fairly serious health hazards. They temporarily wipe out odor-creating bacteria, but also eliminate odor-eating bacteria, subsequently killing off your body’s ability to regulate its own smell or, more dangerously, fight off infection. Other sprays, ointments, and geegaws abound, each purporting to serve the basic purpose of masking half the world’s natural bodily processes from the other half. Not to get too twelve-year-old-boy about it, but it’s difficult not to burst out laughing at the ridiculous products women are urged to make use of just to experience the pleasure of going outside.

  One stand-out product in the feminine hygiene field is the lowly sanitary napkin disposal bag. It is possible that you have never seen any, so let me describe them for you. First and foremost, they are bags, a fact central to their oft-mocked status. Usually paper, although occasionally plastic, they are intended to house soiled feminine products, shielding their contents from view of other restroom users. They have no other purpose. Because you are extremely unlikely to require them in the privacy of your own home, such bags are found most frequently inside the stalls of women’s restrooms, although never on the shelves of your local drug store.

  Basically fancified scraps of paper to wrap waste in, the devices come heavily decorated. Sanitary napkin disposal bags may be festooned with happy, ladylike figures engaging in playful activities, such as tennis or dancing, or covered with gay flowers. Some may feature a stick figure in a dress delightfully throwing an object into the garbage. Others recall a traditional—frequently, Victorian—notion of femininity, and thus convey decorum. (The ad copy for a stainless steel garbage receptacle, into which such a bag is meant to be placed, similarly claims it “adds a touch of class to any restroom.”) Class-striving discretion is important—these bags do hold a specific kind of very dirty garbage from which other garbage, presumably, must be protected—but on the whole, sanitary napkin disposal bags strive to express ease of use, tranquility of mind, or maybe even “fun.”

  The bags’ lighthearted design schemes contrast starkly with manufacturers’ overt marketing strategies. These can be found on product descriptions in office-supply catalogs, promotional copy intended for the purchaser, rather than the user. Sanitary napkin disposal bag producer Scensibles, in the section of its 2012 annual report labeled, “The Problem,” states: “It’s bigger than you think. Now let’s talk about it . . .”—the subtext of which is that women’s hygiene is a massive but unacknowledged di
saster that only you, from your noble perch as office supply manager, can address. The website Teens’n’Parents goes a step further: “Disposal of Sanitary napkin is the major problem polluting the environment [sic].” (Not mentioned, of course, is the pollutive output from sanitary napkin manufacturing plants.) The nicknames used when the products appear in books and films and on television are no less alarming: sani-bag, individual feminine hygiene receptacle, lady bag, and even, “vagina bag.”

  The ambivalence between the design and marketing approaches is fascinating. While ads intend to browbeat the purchaser into addressing “The Problem” of seeping lady juice with a hefty order of sanitary napkin disposal bags, the product itself goes out of its way to assure users that they are behaving correctly, without effort, and possibly even enjoying themselves. One suspects that the bifurcated messaging is no accident, merely gendered for perceived audiences. Case in point: a recent trade mag op-ed by Scensibles founder Ann Germanow5 pits the issue as plumbers (95 percent men, nationally) and company bill-payers (CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, as an example, are 98 percent male) versus tampon users, coded here as women. (That biology and gender do not faithfully align has apparently not yet occurred to the sanitary napkin disposal bag community.) “A recent janitorial services blog confirms that if no acceptable alternative for disposal is offered, women ignore the signage and flush anyway,” Germanow states authoritatively.

  Certainly, the message embedded in the product’s very existence is as gendered as the restrooms in which the bags can be found, a wordless reminder to all who identify as women that the monthly waste of menstruators must be pre-bagged, a clear indication that it is more disgusting than all other forms of waste, combined. “The number-one bacteria hot spot in a woman’s restroom is the ‘sanitary’ napkin disposal unit,” Germanow contends in her op-ed. Perhaps that lady-waste container can more properly be viewed as a breeding-ground for neoliberal subjectivity, a stealthy mixture of individually targeted fortitude and self-doubt that can only be assuaged by the relentless purchase of beauty products. If the impact of these bags on the psyche seems brutal, however, let’s pause to reflect on their impact on the planet. The paper waste, plastics, and manufacturing byproducts created will surely fail to decompose in our lifetimes.