Emerson College, a liberal arts college in Boston, will begin stocking men’s restrooms with menstrual products beginning July 1. This decision follows a year-long petition started by student group Emerson Flows, which advocates for “menstrual equality” on Emerson’s campus.
The petition was put into action with the approval from Emerson’s Vice President and Dean for Campus Life Jim Hoppe, who allocated a budget of $7,000 each year for menstrual products to be placed in all bathrooms across campus, including men’s and gender-inclusive restrooms.
The college began stocking women’s restrooms with tampons and pads in 2016. At the time, the initiative ensured roughly 30 women’s restrooms across the campus provided menstrual products. However, since then, Emerson Flows has been lobbying for more restrooms to be stocked with them.
“While I understand that the majority of the ‘menstruators’ at this school are cis[gender] women, we should still treat men who also menstruate with the same level of respect,” Emerson Flows president Emily Lang told the campus newspaper. “You get period products just like everyone else, and you get the same amount, because you’re just as valid."
Contrary to Lang’s claims, men don’t menstruate, as they don’t have the anatomical parts to do so. Therefore, this initiative is likely due to colleges’ increased desire to virtue signal and make the college appear progressive and inclusive, even though it is still predominantly comprised of white students from wealthy backgrounds.
Also, it is incredibly demeaning to call an entire group of people by a physical feature. Referring to women as “menstruators” is as offensive as referring to Asian people as “squint eyes.” There is much more to being a woman than simply a liquid coming out of your body once a month.
Putting menstrual products such as pads and tampons in the men’s bathroom is about as useless as putting urinals or shaving products in the women’s restrooms. In fact, if the college feels it is necessary to stock the men’s bathrooms with some kind of product, why not use that $7,000 budget to stock the men’s bathrooms across campus with shaving materials? It would certainly be more useful than stocking them with menstrual products.
The college making menstrual products accessible is not a problem; it only becomes an issue when they start using the thousands of dollars that we students pay in tuition to put them in places where they are clearly not needed.
Despite receiving millions of dollars in federal funding from the Department of Education, Emerson College has also raised the tuition to help fund this cause. The college announced that annual tuition would be increased from $52,228 to $54,379. It is frustrating to see our tuition and tax dollars going towards unnecessary initiatives, especially after factoring in that there are much better and dire uses for that money.
Of course, this move is just virtue signaling. However, if it has any practical effect at all, it would be to appease the incredibly small percentage of women who identify as transgender and use men’s bathrooms, a demographic that is too small to justify an initiative of this magnitude.
And even if one of the very few women who identify as male happens to need a tampon, she could just quickly run into the women’s bathroom and take one from the vanity, which shouldn’t take more than a few seconds. No one would complain that a woman is entering a bathroom that corresponds with her biological sex. This approach would be much more reasonable than spending thousands of dollars just to avoid creating an incredibly small inconvenience to an incredibly small number of people.
Emerson has been facing a lot of backlash over this initiative. Dozens of prominent national publications have been reporting on this story, such as Fox News. Emerson is under considerable public scrutiny, and as it has done in the past, it has been trying to suppress criticism on social media by hiding critical comments. For those reasons, it appears that this case has become a national issue.
It’s not rare to see colleges all around the country misusing their funds, but those stories are usually limited to being covered by local and campus publications. Hoppe perhaps thought that this initiative would be one of those cases. But the reason that this particular case has become a national issue is because there is an ideological component to it.
If Emerson had decided to stock men’s restrooms with menstrual products a decade ago, before gender ideology became the dominant view on college campuses, even though it would still be a poor use of its budget, this case would probably not have attracted nearly as much public attention. But because Emerson is doing this with the sole intention of validating gender ideology, it became an important issue in the culture war.
Practically speaking, I am now wondering what the men of Emerson College are going to do with those tampons. If you’re one of them, be careful where you put that thing.
