What a lot of un-learning women have had to do. Against the odds of social conditioning, we are, thank God, now clear that becoming a ballerina or a princess are not our only career options, that the 'perfect' women in magazines are actually just a clever re-adjustment of pixels, and that if anyone rapes us, it’s not our fault, nor is it the fault of our blouse or red wine.
We’ve been doing alright at resisting what we’re told about how we should look and behave in recent years. But, before we get ahead of ourselves and start thinking that things might be improving, let me introduce you to biotech startup dudes Austen Heinz and Gilad Gome, who last week announced that they were creating a probiotic supplement that will make our vaginas smell like peaches. As well as being a nugget of jaw-on-the-floor misogyny, it showed a startling lack of gratitude by two men who appear to have forgotten that they did, in fact, come out of a vagina once.
They said they were offering 'personal empowerment' to women, which was nice. Being biotech chaps, they continued: “All your smells are not human. They’re produced by the creatures that live on you. We think it’s a fundamental human right to not only know your code and the code of the things that live on you but also to rewrite that code and personalize it.”
If this sounds like plain old sexism dressed up in techno jargon gobbledygook, then that’s probably because it is. CEO of the company Audrey Hutchinson, who says she's an 'ultra-feminist', has now understandably backtracked a bit, stating that they never intended to focus on the odour of your bits: the peach smell is apparently just a sign that the supplement is doing its job of protecting you from thrush and UTIs. Imagine that in a clinch: "Ooh, I like your perfume, very peachy." "Oh, no, it’s just that I’ve got thrush and my probiotic supplement is successfully fighting the infection."
Regardless of the true purpose of the supplement, the fact is that when the company originally claimed that their main intention was to alter the smell of our ladybits under the guise of biotechnology, no one doubted their veracity. The fact that Heinz and Gome garnered such attention goes to show that even the most private parts of a woman's body are still held to be public property.
A probiotic peach-smelling vagina might sound harmless enough – albeit fairly ridiculous – but this isn’t just about making your genitals smell like a fruit bowl. It’s another disturbing iteration of the idea that men should have a say in what women do with their bodies. The idea that a woman’s vagina needs to smell like a piece of fruit tells her that she will not be sufficiently desirable until she is dehumanised, cleansed of her perfectly natural biological functions. It suggests that female sexuality is something to ashamed of, and even unhygienic.
Newsflash, tech bros: we’ve lived without this invention for thousands of years, and, touch wood, the human race hasn’t died out as yet. Men have thus far been able to get to the crucial point of conception - despite having to contend with the rotten smell of our fetid vaginas, and I don’t think that’s because they’ve all been wearing pegs on their noses.
Jeez, even satirist Jonathan Swift knew that the idea that women are fragrant, heavenly angels was a disaster for all concerned. In his poem The Lady’s Dressing Room, he mocked his character Strephon for being horrified by his discovery that women do, in fact, go for a poo every now and again. And that was in 1732.
It’s a tiring job, remaining constantly alert to the pervasive, constant undertow of judgments about how women should look, behave, sound and smell – but they keep coming. Subtle as they may seem, if they work their way into a woman’s consciousness, they do the job that was intended for them: they revise her idea of what is normal, and tell her something is wrong with her when it’s not. They deplete her energy by distracting her into fretting about whether everyone around her thinks she’s disgusting. We’re getting wise to these games, but that doesn’t make them any less tiresome.
We never asked for these men’s opinions on the pH levels of our naughty bits. Just like we weren’t interested when they insisted that cat-calling is a compliment, or that Page 3 is harmless, or that rape jokes are banter.
Men don’t get to tell us how we should feel about our own bodies. Please leave our vaginas alone – period. On which note, if you’ve got a problem with periods too, get back to me when I’m peri-menopausal. Hopefully in the intervening years I’ll have written a probiotic code which means that, whenever any man says anything misogynist, all that comes out of his mouth is Beyoncé lyrics.