The word 'sanitary' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe something that is kept clean or hygienic. For example, "The restaurant had excellent sanitary standards."
On day two – usually my heaviest bleeding day – I had to use four sanitary pads.
Yet nearly all advertising for sanitary products encourages us to hide this chunk of our lives – three thousand days for most women – by preventing leaks that might embarrass us and everyone else; by ensuring we don't, God forbid, smell of menstrual blood; by putting menstruation behind locked doors and safely enclosed in euphemism.
This unmentionability can have other serious consequences: if girls can't afford sanitary napkins or cloths, they use straw, or sand, or newspaper, often resulting in infections.
It's day four so I'm barely bleeding, but I'm still wearing a sanitary pad.
It started with the video, which has now inspired multiple crowdfunding and sanitary product collection projects to pop up across Europe, the US and Australia.
In 1986, Gloria Steinem wrote that if men got periods, they "would brag about how long and how much": that boys would talk about their menstruation as the beginning of their manhood, that there would be "gifts, religious ceremonies" and sanitary supplies would be "federally funded and free".
Women in prison often don't have access to sanitary products at all, and the high cost of a product that half the population needs multiple times a day, every month for approximately 30 years, is simply, well, bullshit.
I've written for a few years now about the dreadful state of things in the developing world, where girls leave school because they don't have a toilet or sanitary protection, and use sand or rags, or sell sex to buy pads.
The Robin Danielson Feminine Hygiene Product Safety Act is named after a woman who died of toxic shock syndrome (yes, that still exists), and wants independent testing of all sanitary products (or anything that goes near or in the vagina, though that's not in the text) done by the National Institutes of Health.
It is one thing, after all, to reinforce the basic infrastructures that undergird the quality of urban life everywhere; quite another to propose saddling India's cities with expensive, untested technology at a time when reliable access to electricity, clean drinking water or safe sanitary facilities remain beyond reach for too many.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out an old sanitary pad.
