Decentering the technology explaining the drip irrigation paradox

When I was a teenager, there was a riddle that my friends and I liked telling each other. It went more or less as follows: what allows you to swim, skate, ride horseback, bike, run and dance? The answer was a particular brand of tampons (I forgot which), and it referred to the television commercial that was used to promote it: it showed a happy, care-free, young and pretty woman who was swimming, skating, riding horseback and so on. While the commercial, of course, aimed to suggest that the tampons would make the menstrual period pass almost unnoticed, its message could also be read as saying that it was the tampon itself that produced the capacity to swim, ride horseback, etc., in the young woman.