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"If, as girls, we were given an option of whether or not to regularly bleed out of our vaginas for the next 40 years of our life, like, 97 percent of us\u00A0would choose not to (margin of error to account\u00A0for the\u00A0masochists in the crowd). No\u00A0woman is excited about spotting, cramps, bloating, breaking out, or spewing thick, red liquid for seven\u00A0days every month as if she is Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings. Nor are women particularly excited about how our periods are wielded as weapons against us by society: We are considered dirty (in some countries literally untouchable); grown-ass men treat us like we have cooties and use \"that time of the month\" as a way to invalidate our opinions; images of blood from a vagina\u00A0are\u00A0considered more vulgar than bloodshed from violence.\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nBut our periods aren't optional. Like going to the bathroom, menstruation is an involuntary bodily function. This may seem like an obvious and unnecessarily graphic point to make, but if you look around, you'll see it's not obvious at all. In America, periods are treated like something we're just doing because we want to. Most women pay a government tax on the\u00A0feminine hygiene products they need to manage their menstrual blood. If even made available in public restrooms, individual tampons and pads cost money \u2014 but can you imagine paying for every time you wiped your butt and washed your hands? Low-income women who rely on food stamps can't use their federal assistance on tampons, nor are feminine hygiene products considered among tax-deductible medical expenses. Women in prison have it even worse, when tampons and sanitary napkins are rationed or even withheld from them as punishment. (And critics who argue that women should just opt for a reusable menstruation cup are missing the point; menstruation cups are not right for everyone and require access to private sinks and sterilization facilities, so women who can barely afford a box of tampons are not likely to spend $30 to experiment with a cup). When ladies speak up about these issues, as Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti did when she argued for the subsidizing of sanitary products, they are often verbally harassed by the kind of jerks who shame women for having periods in the first place.\n\nThe shaming and exclusion of women on account of their periods needs to change, and one place to start is with the elimination of the sales tax on feminine hygiene products. Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, vice president for development at the Brennan Center for Justice and an advocate for the elimination of the tampon tax, told Cosmopolitan.com that making tampons duty-free does\u00A0three major things: It lifts a small financial burden from all women, promotes gender equality, and \"opens the door to what broader policy reforms could look like and what the problem really does look like for low-income women.\" That's why women in Australia, the U.K., and America are fighting hard to drop taxes on tampons in each of their own countries. They've found renewed hope after Canadians successfully petitioned their federal government to abolish the tampon tax this summer. So if you refuse to be second-rate to Canada in anything, time to put your misguided patriotism to good use!But as American women, we may also have a harder battle ahead of us. Because sales tax is regulated at the state level here, Americans have to take the fight to every single state government that taxes tampons. Sadly, that's most of them. In June, Fusion's Taryn Hillin found that only five\u00A0of the 45 states that have a sales tax have explicitly exempted feminine hygiene products from taxation (Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Maryland,\u00A0and New Jersey, good on you!). But tampons remain taxed in 40 states, even when other nonessential items aren't taxed. For example, did you know that more states tax tampons than\u00A0candy? Or that even on \"tax holidays,\" when some states sell frequently used items tax-free for a day or two, tampons and sanitary napkins are still not considered exempt? California doesn't tax incontinence creams and washes; Colorado doesn't tax pregnancy tests; Vermont doesn't tax disposable heating pads; North Dakota and Connecticut don't tax incontinence pads \u2014\u00A0but they all tax tampons. True, ranging between Hawaii's 4.25 percent and Tennessee's 9.45 percent, the sales tax is pennies on the dollar. But for homeless, low-income women and single mothers (especially those with daughters), every penny matters. The tax is an even greater strain when we remember that it is more expensive to be a woman than it is to be a man. The Nation reported in 2012 that women pay more than men for \"92 percent of the best-selling health plans\"; fork over $10,000 in necessary lady-specific medical care over their lifetimes, even with insurance; and are charged more for everyday products like deodorant and shampoo. Yet working women only make, on average, 78 cents of every dollar a man makes; Hispanic or black women make only 54 cents or\u00A064 cents to a man's dollar, respectively. It's almost impressive how many different ways society makes women pay for having ovaries. To Weiss-Wolf's point, a relief of the tampon\u00A0tax would send\u00A0a clear, top-down message that society needs to reevaluate how we treat women. Now this is where I acknowledge that state tax codes are notoriously complicated. The sales tax originated in the Great Depression as a way to help the government generate extra cash by taxing people on non-necessary items (think taxation on restaurant food versus essential grocery items). But, as a recent Planet Money podcast explains, this opened the tax code up to all sorts of endless loopholes, exemptions, and semantic debates that would induce an existential crisis even for the most adept philosophy major (Think: What is food? How do you define a sandwich? What is necessary for life?). As a result, there are insane and inconsistent\u00A0taxes on all sorts of nutty things. And yes, in many states, there are even sales taxes on essential items like toilet paper and incontinence pads (some legislators are tackling that\u00A0too). So no, there isn't some explicit anti-tampon conspiracy. But that should not detract from the argument for\u00A0states to lift taxes from feminine hygiene products. Why? Because state governments can and do reverse decisions on taxes for lesser things, and the arguments usually come down to issues of fairness, equity, necessity, and having a powerful lobby on your side. In 1971, for example, the candy lobby in California argued that they \"were being discriminated against,\" Planet Money reports, because other desserts were exempt from the sales tax. The lobby made its point by passing around desserts to the committee and one by one, politicians ate candy with cake, indiscriminately. Lo and behold, now candy enjoys the same tax-exempt benefits as other grocery items. Or take this example: In 2006, Iowa attempted to impose its 5 percent sales tax on pumpkins sold as jack-o'-lanterns, arguing that the gourd's\u00A0\"predominant use was for decorations\" thanks to Halloween. After the press got wind of it in 2007, the public was outraged. With an impressive sense of urgency, a week\u00A0after the story broke, then-Iowa Gov. Chet Culver called on the Department of Revenue to \"do the common-sense thing and suspend collection of this tax and offer refunds to consumers or retailers who have been affected,\" the Des Moines Register reported. Inedible gourds are still subject to sales tax in Iowa, but pumpkins have been exempt from the sales tax ever since (and alas, tampons are not). If considering women on a scale between candy and pumpkins, I think we've got a strong case, ladies. While a woman's \"predominant use\" sure does seem to be decorative during Halloween, most of us are not stockpiling tampons and pads for a Sexy Human Tampon costume. I would also argue that women face as much discrimination as candy once did \u2014 if not more! And if the above argument hasn't convinced you, let me invoke the words of pumpkin patch owner Bob Kautz, who in 2007 sermonized, \"I don't mind paying taxes, but let's get real here, people.\" \n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nThere was a brief win for tax equality in 1989 when a group of women in Chicago won a class\u00A0action lawsuit\u00A0successfully challenging a city sales tax on feminine hygiene products. At the time, Illinois had a sales tax exemption for \"medical appliances,\" and considered tampons and sanitary napkins within that category. The city, which tended to follow the state's categorizations, continued to tax tampons because they \"were only used for hygienic purposes and should be considered nonmedical appliances,\" according to a 1990 summary of the case in the Loyola Consumer Law Review. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled otherwise, finding \"that similar to the invention of the telephone and electricity, the invention of sanitary napkins and tampons created a reliance on these products,\" and the separate city sales tax for tampons was struck down. So precedence shows that\u00A0the justice system can see that tampons are as vital\u00A0as electricity! But it didn't last. Years later, however, we're still having this fight because politicians \u2014\u00A0who are overwhelmingly male\u00A0\u2014\u00A0cannot appreciate the usefulness of feminine hygiene products. Illinois eventually\u00A0capitulated; when Cosmopolitan.com made a call to the Illinois Dept. of Revenue, we were told that tampons are no longer considered medically necessary items. They are listed under \"grooming and hygiene products\" \u2014\u00A0in the same category as lip balm and contact lens solution \u2014\u00A0under which they are taxed at a 6.25 percent\u00A0rate by the state. Alas.\n\nShouting at the government is exhausting, but we can't be ignored forever. Making up 50 percent\u00A0of the population, there's no reason women can't be the most powerful lobby in the country. I'm not advocating passing around a platter of tampons during a committee meeting per se, but if politicians need extra convincing, perhaps some lady lobbyists can organize a free-bleed protest in front of our state capitol buildings to help legislators realize how vital these items are. The government should stop fining us for being women. Eliminating this tampon tax is about equality. It's about fairness. It's about finding a small way to send a big message to our lawmakers: That women \u00A0\u2014 and our periods \u2014\u00A0are not an afterthought. It's time for our legislation to reflect that.Most states don't\u00A0tax essential items, like groceries and prescriptions, yet all but 10 states do tax sanitary products. We'd call those essentials! Visit Change.org to sign our No Tax On Tampons petition.Follow Prachi on Twitter."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/news/a47780/abolish-tampon-tax-america/>