So there’s this Disney series of shorts about Baymax (the healthbot from Big Hero 6), and this clip is going around, where Baymax goes through the “clueless non-period-having adult is dispatched to get emergency products for a teen/tween girl who’s trapped in a bathroom, oh no” gag.

Good: child-friendly media is acknowledging that periods exist!

Also good: one of the people who advises Baymax on period products is a guy in a giant unambiguous trans-flag shirt!

Still good: the stock joke in this scene is no longer “women treat the hapless shopper as some kind of suspicious pervert, because the idea that he might have a tween girl to shop for is totally unimaginable”!

All that is positive and I’m here for it.

But.

I’m still annoyed that the stock joke in this kind of scene is now “hapless shopper can’t figure out all these mysterious products, ends up buying one pack of each just to be safe.”

Why would you do that. Why??

If you were making an emergency run on somebody else’s behalf for tissues, you wouldn’t stand in the tissue aisle and go “oh my god, should I get 2-ply or 3-ply? Do they want the ones with lotion or aloe? Fragrance-free, chlorine-free? How much recycled content is acceptable?? I better bring back 20 boxes of tissues, that’s the only way to make sure my friend gets the correct nose-blowing experience.”

No, you would get one (1) box of tissues — probably the one that was cheapest! — and be done.

Just get one box of pads. That’s all.

If you want more details, I recommend looking for the words “basic”/”regular” and “unscented”/”plain”, but honestly? In the “helping a tween girl stuck in a bathroom” situation, you don’t need to track any of that. Just remember “pads” and you’re covered.

Your job here is not to get her the Perfect Menstrual Product Experience. All she needs is to get from the bathroom to a place where she can restock — maybe she has more supplies at home, maybe she’s going shopping too — without bleeding through her clothes along the way.

Literally any pads in the Feminine Hygiene aisle will handle that.

And, look, maybe the writers are trying to counteract humanity’s chronic “cis men making all kinds of stupid and dangerous laws based on wild misconceptions about how uteruses work, while being convinced that they know everything and are totally qualified” problem.

But I feel like “periods are an exotic and overwhelming mystery, anything period-related is automatically super-complicated and can’t possibly have a simple solution” is…just another strand of that same problem.

Some things have simple answers! It would not be impossible or overwhelming for a well-meaning cis man, and/or balloon robot who goes by “he” but has no biological organs of any kind, to learn a few basic pointers.

Granted, it’s harder than it should be, because a lot of the resources are made by people who think “this is impossible or overwhelming to learn, so we won’t even try to teach it.”

Resources like, ooh, let’s say…an educational cartoon where each episode is about a friendly robot nurse helping one of his neighbors with a health problem?

Crazy idea, I know, but it just might work.

Bonus: while writing this post, my browser spellcheck flagged “uteruses” as a word it doesn’t recognize. For comparison, it doesn’t flag “follicles” or “aortas” or “penises” or “kidneys” or “ventricles” or “testicles.” The mystique of “this topic is sooooo exotic and complicated that you shouldn’t even bother trying” is so widespread, it even affects which plural nouns someone thought were worth putting in a dictionary.