The stupid, it burns.
Waitrose whispers sweet nothings in our ear.
The very headline is bad. Sanitary products? So you’re talking about stuff you put on floors to clean them, and stuff you pour down toilets and stuff you sprinkle in garbage cans and stuff you sprinkle on the sinks and bathtubs to scrub away the unsanitary slime and whatnot? But no; of course that’s not what they mean at all. “Sanitary products”=the wads of absorbent cotton women of childbearing age use to soak up the monthly shedding of the uterine lining. Isn’t it odd that those products are labeled “sanitary” as if to reassure us that the disgusting unholy taboo trayf nasty stuff that feeds new humans as they develop from fetus to baby will be soaked up and thrown away without disturbing the fastidious. We’re already on weirdly squicked-by-women territory, and it doesn’t get better from here.
Anyway. Let’s get to the really important stuff: supermarket chains that pwodwy suppowt the alphabet soup communidee. Who cares what faction of demanding men Waitrose supports? Is it men who do most of the Waitrose shopping?
They want their shops and workplaces to be places where people can be themselves without fear of judgement. They say. Do they? Does that mean they want their employees to be grumbling and swearing whenever they’re in a bad mood, telling customers to fuck off, helping themselves to an occasional luxury item? I doubt it. I strongly doubt they care at all about employees “being themselves without fear of judgement” – they care about employees doing their jobs and not demanding higher wages.
Oh well don’t be so literal, they might tell me if they were here. They didn’t mean all the time and about everything – they meant about trans people. What about them? Um…that it’s required to declare solidarity with them in one way or another at least once a month? Something like that.
So they do. “We celebrate Pride, we talk about inclusion, but ah ah ah watch out, inclusion isn’t just about rainbows once a year. No indeed. That’s why we have to stop calling sanitary products (the stuff meant to soak up filthy womany goo, you know) ‘Feminine Care’. It’s so disappointing that we do that, as if women were the only people who spill filthy goo once a month.”
Wouldn’t it be simpler to skip the women or women and men part and just call it Filthy Goo Care? Wouldn’t that just be so inclusive and inclusive?
There’s more.
Yet the language we use still suggests that these products are exclusively for women and femininity.
[sound of screeching brakes]
What?? That these products are for femininity? What does that even mean?
It doesn’t mean anything unless you interpret it through the lens of morbid envy and suspicion of women, and you thus have a resentful idea that women horde womanyism for themselves out of sheer spite and won’t share it with men because they’re that bitch back in 4th grade who had nicer sweaters than little Pauly did.
To some people, that might seem like a small detail. To me, it isn’t. Words matter because people matter.
Well, yes, without people there wouldn’t be any words to matter, and if there were any, they wouldn’t matter to anyone, because there wouldn’t be any anyone. We can swap tautologies all day long, but it doesn’t really get us anywhere.
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