Vintage sanpro: anyone remember giant towels with loops and belts?

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The first ones mum gave me were huge affairs with an elastic waist belt. There were these loops at each end that you threaded through to wear - felt like you were straddling a hammock and made you walk like a jockey. The horror.

Then there was the Bunnies incinerator at school - a terrifying steampunk monstrosity that you fed the used towel in and it would make an appalling noise as it mashed it up. Oh, I wonder if that was why mum called towels 'bunnies'?

I quickly discovered Vespre towels - someone had the rather bright idea that regular press on towels always bunched into a particular curved shape in use, so why not make them in that shape? I liked those.

I was a late tampon adopter - started at 18. Tho I liked the ones with the pull-out compact applicator (Compak??), I always wondered - who the hell thought those sharp plastic teeth was a good idea??

I went meno before mooncups happened, sadly so I can't comment.

Ah, memories ...

Just remembered a prank that some of the boys at a local co-ed secondary school played on a boy in their year who was notoriously naive but also massively self-confident. They would all have been about 14 years old.

There was a "sanpro" dispenser in the Girls' toilets/changing room, at the end of an internal corridor and smack bang opposite the door to the main corridor. Too far away to work out what it was if you didn't already know but sometimes girls could be seen moving away from it holding some sort of white package in hand.

The smart but naive kid had apparently asked one of his mates what the machine was in the Girls' changing room. And the mate kindly explained that it was a Cream Bun Dispensing Machine.

Not only that - they were FREE cream buns!

The girls had got the Free Cream Buns Machine by doing a letter-writing campaign to the Head Teacher but they had only asked for Free Cream Buns for Girls, so the school had put the machine where boys could not use it!

Yes, the lad started a Petition for Free Cream Buns for Boys!

Luckily, his parents found out before he made too much of a fool of himself and set him straight on what the "Cream Buns" really were!

This reminds me of one time when the nurse came to talk to Y6 (boys and girls separate talks) and the girls were given samples of sanitary wear, one of the boys complained to me that it wasn't fair...the girls had been given goody bags.

Free cream buns and goody bags!

I’m 55 had had the belt sanitary towels they were huge. I use to wear two pairs of knickers on top so they didn’t show.

I never used tampons until I went to university, my mum told me that she didn’t use tampons until she was married (she didn’t have sex until she married). Definitely to do with virginity at the time.

Adhesive pads were normal here by the time I started, but many were very thick. My mom was quite matter of fact, being a nurse, but she probably could have given me more practical advice. I think she assumed I would just ask if I wanted to know things since she had never treated it as taboo, but I was far more private about stuff than she was, and also just less practical.

She didn't offer me tampons but at a certain point early on I bought some myself, and she asked me if I'd managed with them ok, that some girls had trouble if the hymen was not perforated much.
My problem was more the opposite, I couldn't get them to work well because I would bleed through quite quickly. It wasn't until I was older that I realised that I hadn't been using them wrong, I was just very heavy on some days. By that time in the late 80s the assumption seemed to be that girls would use them, so there was no real understanding around active sports or dance classes or swimming or anything like that.

I had a moon cup after having a baby - I couldn't get them to fit when tried as a student and there weren't many options then. I kept it up until about two years ago when my dog chewed it into a billion tiny bits.

I know I shouldn't laugh but . . .

"I kept it up until about two years ago when my dog chewed it into a billion tiny bits."

A belt used to come in each package of Kotex brand pads.

Yes though I don't remember them being exactly giant.

Period Troll heaven🙄

"Period Troll heaven"

Yep! But perverts are everywhere.

Talk about shoes and the shoe and foot fetishists will be wanking furiously, hoping that someone will mention the ultimate illicit thrill - being strapped into a Women's Brannock Device!

brannock.com

Maybe, they have thousands of moon cup reviews on amazon to salivate over if they wish, doesn't stop this still being interesting though. How despite having moved on from rags and aprons, the common theme of pretending it's not happening and inducing a level of shame onto a process that helped bring every single human onto this earth, still continues to this day. Be it , the clothes we or kids had/have to wear to school, or the set up for getting changed at work or at school, to the multi million pound industry that is designing products that can be disguised so no one knows what they are, or so thin and "discreet" you can fit one into the smallest pocket on your tightest trousers complete with perfumes to disguise a smell that the products themselves cause. We've gone one better now though. It's not the word period that's the embarrassment. It's the word woman that must never be uttered in the discussion/advert for period products. It's all kinda gone full circle. We solve one problem only to create another

I'm 46. I was never given looped pads at home and only occasionally saw them in shops but if you "came on" at school and were caught short, the school secretary had a stock of giant looped towels which attached to your knickers with safety pins in the absence of a belt. I don't know where they got them from.

I remember giant packs of Bodyform, Simplicity and some called Libra, as well as Poise with the ballerina on the wrapper. There would always be super-huge night-time versions on the bottom shelf, in even bigger packaging.

Oh my ... I just googled Bunnie incinerator images and this - THIS - is the result. I remember it so well. And the cutesy leaping bunny logo. It's all branded on my memory. Apparently it had an asbestos concrete flue.

I'm finding this sooo interesting! I'm in my twenties and my DM is in her fifties and finds it so hard to talk about this kind of thing, I got the minimum info possible when I started menstruating at 11 in the summer holidays before I started secondary school. She's never mentioned what she or my DGM used to use for sanpro when they were adolescents and I feel she would be very uncomfortable if I asked her. Finding this thread fascinating, thanks ladies! FWIW my DM used tampons (as I would see them in the bathroom cupboards) but only introduced me to pads and never mentioned them. I first tried a tampon at the age 20 the day before my wedding because I had a period that was coinciding with it. I was so nervous about it that DH was there for support and it was an applicator tampon and I was ofc already sexually active. Crazy. I had very very heavy periods as a teen with lots of accidents too and missed schooling every month due to it, but still my DM never thought to suggest that e.g. the most absorbent tampons + a pad might help. They also refused to take me to the GP to try medication to make them less heavy my GP surgery said they wouldn't see a patient under 16 without a parent. I started sixth form and was nearly 17 when I finally went myself and got put on the combined pill which totally changed my life, having 'normal' length periods with 'normal' amounts of bleeding.

I saw the looped sanitary towels in Boots a few months ago and wondered who would use them. I used stick on pads - I’m in my 50s, but the vending machine at school gave you a pad with loops and two safety pins.

Fascinating thread! I'm 43 and remember reading about the looped pads in a book my mum bought me ("Have you started yet?") Did anyone else have that book?

Also you have answered a question I've had for about 30 years, which is why did my dad's girlfriend call sanitary towels "bunnies"?

In my secondary school we use the term 'briefcasing' to indicate that we were having a period.

This was because we only ever took our school bags into the toilets when we needed our Huge brick-like pads.

None of us had briefcases though so not sure why we didn't say 'satchelling' or 'bagging'.

In my secondary school we use the term 'briefcasing' to indicate that we were having a period.

This was because we only ever took our school bags into the toilets when we needed our Huge brick-like pads.

None of us had briefcases though so not sure why we didn't say 'satchelling' or 'bagging'.

I remember those huge pads. I used to try to buy them on the way home from school but I "couldn't" if there was a man in the chemist or if I had too much schoolwork to jam the giant package into my schoolbag where it could not be seen. I bought tampax because they were smaller but I couldn't use them at first. I remember being in the bathroom after a bath and trying for ages to force one in, getting all stressed and sweaty and desperate because I had nothing else to use and I had this whole box of mysterious plentiful clean white things that would solve all my problems if only I could get my stupid body to cooperate. (I was doing it right, it just wouldn't go in) In the end I gave up and went back to putting loo paper in my pants. After about a year of this I confided in my mum, which I found incredibly difficult and embarrassing but I thought that this meant that she would provide me with pads, but it didn't - I was supposed to ask for them or something - I found this impossible. So back to square 1. I sorted out using tampons in the end but it took me a while.

I use a lovely mooncup now but I still feel almost tearfully sentimental about well stocked shelves or drawers of varied sanpro. to me it looks lovely and calm and soothing and bounteous, like a well organised, full larder. I could look at it for ages.

MeadowHay
I'm finding this sooo interesting! I'm in my twenties and my DM is in her fifties and finds it so hard to talk about this kind of thing

Are you in the UK ? I find it extraordinary that a woman of your mother's generation would be like this. She's younger than me- I don't know anyone who would behave like that.

@FreeKitties

Sorry to be ‘that’ person, but i think that using the term ‘sanpro’ is actually adding to the casual misogyny/shame of periods.

If you are avoiding using ‘Sanitary’ because of the connotations of periods needing to be clean/sterile then why not use menstrual protection?

Why make assumptions about people's language?

Do you always say

Telephone call
Automatic transaction machine
Railway Station
???

Sanpro is shorter - that's all. Quit making everything having more than it is.

As a teenager I went on holiday with 2 friends and ran out of pads while there and had to get local ones. We were in a restaurant and I opened my bag to show one friend the massive hammock monstrosity with strings, and she pulled it out, held it up and burst out laughing right in the middle of the restaurant, she just couldn't help it. The other friend was so angry and embarrassed she got up and left