‘Eat my tampon’ yelled Donita Sparks at the baying crowd. It was one of grunge’s most memorable moments, a defiant prank that showed
Women would not be shouted down
It might seem a bit much that the festival moment I wish I’d witnessed was a bloodied tampon being flung into a baying crowd. But, as anyone who has watched the recent smash-hit series I May Destroy You can attest, the visceral visual of a sanitary product – as natural as it is, but underrepresented in pop culture – stays with you.
It’s likely that I first saw L7’s Reading festival set as a young teenager on one of the VHS mixtapes that my best friend would make me by recording MTV2. I didn’t have cable or the internet, so these videos were a lifeline to the alternative worlds of rock, punk and metal, and the scarce women in them. It’s probable that the footage I watched, sometime in the early 2000s, was in a roundup of “the most shocking festival moments, ever”. But it’s certain that I’d have wanted to be there, devil-horning and ducking the crimson
missile.