Nobody likes being on their period. Nobody. Another thing that nobody likes is having someone named Karen yelling in your face about an expired promotion while you’re got a million other things to do at work. Combine the two things, and you have a recipe for potential murderer, so one Japanese department store decided to come up with a solution: making employees on their period wear a special ‘menstrual badge’.
Yep, if you were on your period, the shop would give you a badge to hang off your name tag with Seiri Chan on it – a manga character that’s meant to be a walking, talking period. And your suspicions are absolutely correct by the way, a man came up with this idea.
The theory was that wearing a badge to let the entire world know that you’re currently a bleeding, cranky mess was meant to be a way to make co-workers closer by letting them have sympathy for each other, but that is absolutely not what people said would happen.
“Any employer that asked me to wear a badge when I’m on my period would be getting sued.” was a fairly common opinion on Twitter, and another person summed up everyone’s feelings pretty well here:
“It’s all kinds of wrong when a woman employee at one department store has to put on a ‘period badge’ when she has a period during work. You can just imagine people saying she must be in a bad mood because of PMS. Makes me sick to my stomach.”
An executive of the company was sent out pretty quickly to take it all back. “We received many complaints from the public. Some of them concerned harassment, and that was definitely not our intention,” he said.
Apparently they’re “reconsidering plans” now, and I can only hope that that means that they’ll scrap the idea forever and never ever bring it up again.