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In February 2017, news outlets reported on a new product called Mensez and its promise to solve menstrual inconveniences and serve as an alternative to tampons and pads by gluing women's labia together, along with the inventor's claims that it would revolutionize the menstruation-product industry. Although the reports about Mensez sounded to many readers like just more online satire, we found that a Wichita chiropractor named Dan Dopps was awarded indeed awarded a patent for the concept on 10 January 2017. The Wichita Eagle tracked down Dopps for a profile and quoted him as follows: Dopps' brothers answered questions about the Mensez controversy, distancing themselves and their businesses from their sibling's foray into inventing: Among myriad news reports about Mensez were some that pointed out the product had not been fully developed, nor did it appear to exist even in prototype form. Much of the information about Mensez came from Dopps' since-deleted Facebook page, where he purportedly made a number of inflammatory comments about women, vaginas, and menstruation: Although it is true that Dopps was issued a patent for Mensez-like concept in January 2017, inventions do not have to work, or even be feasible concepts, in order to be patented. It is possible that Mensez was the legitimate brainchild of a person not entirely familiar with female anatomy, but it is also within the realm of possibility the concept was nothing more than a media hoax. We reached out to Dopps for general comment, and he sent us the following reply: We note that both the questions and answers reproduced above came from Dobbs himself; he was not responding to a series of questions we posed to him ourselves.
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