"First, let’s keep in mind that commercially produced femcare-pads, belts, tampons-has been around for only a hundred years or so. Since their launch, there have been noticeable improvements that we, for the most part, applaud madly. Who doesn’t prefer that today’s superabsorbent pads are wafer-thin, meaning that one no longer had to waddle around with the Manhattan Yellow Pages stuffed between her legs? Or that there’s such a variety of tampon styles sizes, and applicators, even a first-timer twelve-year old can generally find something she can insert without the need for heavy sedatives? And yet, even the most sanguine of businessmen realized long ago that there’s ultimately a limit to what kinds of products can actually be made and sold to women when it comes to sopping up a few spoonfuls of blood every month. How many improvements can one make to a pad, anyway? If there’s anything you can figure out about making a pad, say, even more absorbent, with even better wings, or perhaps an even prettier tampon with a glideier applicator, you can rest assured there are many teams of scientists feverishly working on it this very second. Yet dealing with the actual effluent of menstruation is just the tip of the revenue iceberg. Sure, there’s money to be made from pads and tampons; but there’s potentially huge money, monster dollars, to be harvested from tinkering with the actual process itself-something the medical community and pharmaceutical giants figured out years ago."