It may be 2023, but Tiger Woods’s sense of humor is stuck in 2005.
Look, I don’t know much about golf, but I know what misogyny looks like, and Woods hit a hole-in-one there during the Genesis Invitational at California’s Riviera Country Club. On February 16, Golfweek reported that Woods slipped a tampon into fellow player Justin Thomas’s hand after outdriving him on the ninth hole. No, no, this was not a deleted scene from the Amanda Bynes classic She’s the Man, this was a 47-year-old grown man who couldn’t even spring for the Tampax Pearl applicator. I get it, tampons are expensive.
Presumably, Woods was looking for a visual way to tell his opponent that he plays like a girl. While many people on social media—including plenty of women—declared how unoffended they were by the gag, others were quick to point out the joke’s inherent misogyny. As one Twitter user wrote, “If Tiger spent three months a year bleeding and coping with period pain, they’d make a whole-ass documentary about how champions overcome insurmountable obstacles.”
Others had questions. “Did Tiger Woods go to the store…and buy a box of Tampons?” reporter Alison Hall asked on Twitter. “Or did he swipe it off his teenage daughter? So many questions. So little laughter.”
Personally, I wonder if Tiger Woods knows we’re dealing with a national tampon shortage. Has he ever heard the term period poverty? According to a 2019 study by tampon maker Always, one in five girls in the US has missed school due to a lack of period products. Maybe Woods has some extra?
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Following social media backlash, Woods “apologized” for the gag during a press conference, saying, “It was supposed to be fun and games, but obviously it hasn’t turned out that way. If I offended anybody—it was just friends having fun. If I offended anybody in any way, shape, or form, I’m sorry. It was not intended to be that way. It was just, we play pranks on one another all the time and virally this did not come across that way but between us it was different.” Cool, cool, cool.
