Victoria Smith on women the contaminants:

Should universities — hallowed places of learning, temples of the mind — allow themselves to be contaminated by the presence of females? What if their passive, bovine intellects were to slow the lively exchange of ideas? What if their inferior morals should poison the purity of free enquiry? What if, God forbid, they were to menstruate all over the books?

It sounds satirical but that is in fact how women have been seen since forever, and still are, more than is generally admitted. Menstrual huts may be Way Over There somewhere but the thinking behind them isn’t entirely distant. Terf=cunt=slut=filth.

In a report compiled by lawyers and academics at Garden Court Chambers and the University of Essex, it’s been found that certain groups have been making a nuisance of themselves by organising on the basis of — urgh! — being female. This is bad not just because a female-centric event might cause distress to attendees expecting something more pleasantly penis-focused. “The hosting of an unwanted event,” the report notes, “would contaminate student life for hundreds if not thousands of people.”

Hundreds, if not thousands! This is because “the distress would be felt in the contamination of a part of the University which holds a particular emotional value to certain staff and students”. Such people might have to face the trauma of going somewhere, knowing that female people once stood there centring femaleness, minus the purifying presence of someone male. 

In other words the writers of the report meant it figuratively – the “contamination”would be emotional as opposed to literal and physical – but they also blithely or maliciously ignored the long history, which is not over yet, of women being treated as literal contaminants. They deliberately invoked emotions of disgust, which are emotions that inspire people to do very bad things. Remember the yellow star? That was a kind of plague-warning, a portable quarantine system – an invoker of disgust and loathing. The writers of the report were playing with a similar kind of fire. It’s unbelievably sinister and shocking.

They may be reminded of Leviticus 15:20: “Everything [a woman] lies on during her impurity shall be unclean; also everything that she sits on shall be unclean.” Or perhaps Saint Clement of Alexandria: “For women, the very consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame.”

It does, yeah. It does, and it was meant to.

This trend towards contamination is not confined to higher education. On the contrary, a recent article by Jennifer Horgan in the Irish Examiner decries the flourishing of “dirty” feminism. By this, she means a feminism that prioritises the class of people once known as “the Devil’s gateway”. In its place, she advises, is needed “true feminism, the non-dirty kind”, which naturally includes the class of people who aren’t so impure and defective. 

In arguing this, I suspect Horgan genuinely believes she is just “being inclusive”. To her and others, it may seem coincidental that the language of dirt, contamination and stigma just so happens to be directed at women who seek out spaces in which to centre female bodies and lives. Shame at femaleness can be so deeply ingrained that fighting against those who embrace it can become its own moral crusade. It does not surprise me that for many women, an anti-female feminism feels purer and neater than the messy, leaky, corporeally-bound alternative. 

It’s a funny thing, because we’re all products of those messy leaky bodies, but we’re not grateful to them. We want to be the children of stars or diamonds or similar. Something clean, hard, pure, that simply peels off a bit of clean hard pure substance and presto, there’s your new human.

I have never known a time when people have been so open about how little they think of my half of the human race. When I was born, it was no longer possible — apart, perhaps, from in the most extremist religious circles — to express open revulsion for anyone born female. Now it is happening in plain sight.

That’s progress, yeah?