A recent advertisement for a tampon delivery service is making waves across the Internet since the ad's release Sunday.

A pre-teen girl gets her period for the first time at camp and appoints herself the Camp Gyno, distributing tampons to her fellow campers as they need them. But when the other girls begin receiving care packages each month from Hello Flo — a tampon and pantiliner delivery service — the Camp Gyno is out of a job. Despite its sub-two minute run time, the ad already has a number of people questioning its intent, and why, for instance, the tampon deliveries need to come packed with candy.

Delicious Treats Over Dinner

"We came up with this idea over a bottle of wine and a bunch of Thai food one night," Naama Bloom, Hello Flo founder and CEO, told Adweek, noting that the idea came after telling a friend about a girl at camp who regularly gave womanly advice.

"When Pete said 'You mean like a Camp Gyno?' we basically knew what we had to do," Bloom said. "Only humor could tell this story in a way that would be relatable, endearing and shareable."

Hello Flo comes in three plans — Light, Medium, and Heavy Flo — to accommodate the varying duration of each woman's cycle. Packages come with tampons, pads, pantiliners, and, most surprisingly to two editors involved in the Atlantic's recent debate, "some delicious treats."

"The tampon shipment comes with candy," said senior associate editor Eleanor Barkhorn. "Why does candy have to be involved?"

"Yes, exactly. It almost feels like it sells getting your period as way more insufferable than it actually is," replied Ashley Fetters, associate editor. "As though women somehow just can't handle getting their period without a side of chocolate, when in reality this happens every month. Women generally learn how to deal."

The ad has received considerable praise, however, for its refusal to tip-toe around the language many companies seek to avoid. In the ad, the Camp Gyno holds a "menstruation demonstration" where she squirts ketchup from behind a Dora the Explorer doll. Later, she calls herself the campers' Joan of Arc, her being Joan and "their vag" as the ark.

Co-writer and co-director Pete Marquis said the choice not to dance around the words came from a desire to strip away any taboo from the biological process.

"A lot of girls don't go to their parents when they first get their period. They go to their friends. And a 12-year-old might not be the best source of information," he added. "We ran with the idea from there, and thought camp could be a funny setting. And a girl who embraced the idea of getting her period and seeing it as an opportunity to become popular, instead of being mortified, was pretty funny, too."

Less Cute, More Cliché

But Fetters and Barkhorn remain unamused, saying that the ad does a better job of reinforcing humiliating stereotypes than it does at delivering a useful service.

"As I was saying earlier, this is all part of a larger gripe I have with certain products marketed toward women: They're not marketed for their effectiveness, but for some broader message they supposedly send about womanhood," said Barkhorn. She goes on to reference Dove soap, which she says keeps her clean, but turns her off when its ads mention beauty.

"Just tell me about the product. Tell me how good it is, because it is good," she said.

The two go on to draw parallels between Hello Flo and Dollar Shave Club, which resembles Hello Flo in that it sends a monthly shipment of a product to one gender — in this case being razors to men. But where Hello Flo "infantilizes" the process of a woman getting her period, with "cutesy language" on its website, Dollar Shave Club drills straight to the service's core.

"And does the razor shipment come with some stereotypically manly side item, like a cigar or...I don't know, beef jerky?" Barkhorn asked. "No! Just the razors. Just the razors."

Hello Flo is not the first service to ship regular supplies of feminine care products to the consumer. The Period Store, Le Parcel, SentHerWay, and Juniper all offer similar services, albeit with a few variants. The Period Store, for example, sends chocolates, tea, and customized medicine to its consumers — which is all standard compared to Hello Flo, save for the website's graphics, Fetters said, which "make getting your period look like getting food poisoning, or the stomach flu or something."

In the end, Fetters and Barkhorn lamented the overdramatization of something that, really, happens all the time.

"I get that some women do get hit really hard when they get their period, and have to stay home from school or work. But that's both uncommon and, in many cases, treatable. Getting your period doesn't have to require quarantining or bathrobe-moping as a rule," Fetters argued. "Plenty of women just keep on keepin' on during their periods-shocking as that may be."