By ELEANOR THINKPIECE
As a straight, cisgender white person, I know my opinion doesn’t count for much these days. But someone has to say it; the current movement to cleanse our workplaces of toxic black mold has gone way too far.
It may sound crazy to millennial women, but we didn’t used to call this sort of thing ‘toxic mold’. We called it ‘that stuff in the breakroom’. We reserved the word ‘toxic’ for things that were actually toxic, like the industrial runoff in our water, or the weekly mercury injections that were just part of workplace life back then.
Think about that: all of a sudden a little mold proliferation in your lung tissue doesn’t seem like such a big deal, now does it?
Listen- nobody is saying it’s pleasant to spend years of your life breathing in spores that give you headaches and eventually cancer. But it’s a fact of life; something women have sadly had to deal with since time immemorial. Calling it ‘toxic’ just creates a false equivalency.
Are mold spores the same thing as being force-fed gallons of crude bitumen out of a firehose? No? Then, sorry, you don’t get to use the word ‘toxic’ in this situation. Grow up.
But today’s puritanical Jacobins and commie McCarthyists aren’t satisfied. Even Margaret Atwood, Margaret fricking Atwood, whose books led the charge against asbestos in the ‘70s, is now considered an enemy of progress, just because she had the temerity to write a series thinkpieces defending mouldy drywall.
Look, just because dozens of unconnected young women have accused the mold of causing nausea, vomiting, and respiratory bleeding, doesn’t mean the black mold is guilty. There’s such a thing as due process.
But of course I’d be on Atwood’s side. I’m just another cis, white, overprivileged mold apologist with a mysterious cough that won’t go away, no matter how many times I don’t change my shower curtain.
