In the midst of last week’s reports that an Uber executive suggested hiring researchers to invade the privacy of (and potentially blackmail) a female journalist, Silicon Valley was also fielding a secondary, seemingly sillier scandal: a startup called Sweet Peach Probiotics, which aimed, according to reports, to fix women’s gross vaginas by bioengineering them to smell like chemically simulated peaches. Naturally, both stories raised the hackles of feminists and other wild radicals who believe in such controversial women’s rights as “critiquing a popular car service” and “having a vagina-smelling vagina”. It was, I imagine, a discouraging few days for sexism-in-tech denialists. (Good.)
But chin up, tech bros! The PR gods threw you a lucky break this time. Not only did Sweet Peach’s founder clarify that the company has zilch to do with Febrezing anyone’s baby-cannon – it’s actually tailoring microbes to optimise the balance of vaginal flora and fauna, a service that could have a democratising effect on reproductive healthcare for low-income and uninsured women – she’s also a totally 100% legit actual female feminist! PHEW. “I don’t think women should have vaginas that smell like peaches, or anything like that,” she clarified emphatically to Inc.
As it turns out, the claim that Sweet Peach could add an artificial fragrance to one’s biome was made up by guys named Austen Heinz and Gilad Gome, who isn’t involved with the company at all, but has kind of a weird obsession with making women’s vaginas smell like other stuff. In September, according to Vice, Gome said that he hoped one day a woman would be able to “hack into her microbiome and make her vagina smell like roses and taste like diet cola”. (Dude, if you’re going to the trouble of hacking her microbes, could you at least spring for regular? Or maybe Coke Zero?)
Gome is currently working on a different venture with one of Sweet Peach’s investors to – and I wish I could write a joke this good – make cat and dog faeces come out smelling like bananas. And so he ended up on stage during the Sweet Peach presentation, and got a little carried away with his little making-genitals-smell-like-food pipe dream. There was blowback, there was a correction, it was fine – no harm, no foul.
But the instant, widespread fascination with Sweet Peach, before its true goal was clarified, was telling – as part of a long history of men attempting to “fix” women’s natural odours. (In the 1950s, women were famously told they should douche with Lysol.) It’s dehumanising, to pretend as though men’s squeamishness is a women’s problem, to construe women as merely an extension or a reflection of men, to divorce the vagina so completely from the person (a disconnect echoed in America’s puritanical reproductive health policies, which treat a person’s vagina, uterus, and ovaries differently from the rest of their organs).
The debacle reminded me of a joke by my friend, the comedian Hari Kondabolu: “The other day I went to the supermarket to get some more cocoa butter, when I noticed that the cocoa butter had been moved to the ethnic needs section of my supermarket. And at first, I was happy. I’m like, ‘Ethnic needs! End of police brutality, more access to healthcare, more educational opportunities – finally!’ No, no. Just hair relaxers and cocoa butter, apparently.”
People with vaginas have plenty of needs, but none of them have to do with whether or not men think their genitals smell enough like 99-cent lip gloss. If you’re a twentysomething dude with a few million dollars looking to cash in on women’s needs, I have a few suggestions that might actually be helpful:
• A customisable probiotic that helps women control their own yeast infections (up top, Sweet Peach!).
• A spicy-scented candle that convinces cops to believe rape victims and treat them with compassion.
• A special yoghurt that expands into a sentient blob and provides free childcare for working mothers.
• A soothing herbal tea blend that helps women advance in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
• A line of stuffed penguins that performs safe, legal abortions.
• A clear nail polish for male entrepreneurs that stops them from saying things like “hack into her microbiome and make her vagina smell like roses and taste like diet cola” in interviews, or in private with friends, or inside their own heads, or literally anywhere in the known universe except for on stage at the Creepy Tech Bro Satire Contest.
