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In which she is sick of being pink
Mar. 21st, 2011 07:09 pmI speak not of sunburn, although that's slowly fading from scarlet to something that might almost accurately be called pink. No, I speak of course of advertising for women and its necessary precursor: sexing products to determine whether men or women should be allowed to buy it.
I went shopping today for a new umbrella, my current one being broken, and my real current one being stuck in my out-of-bounds office. I wandered through Farmers until I stumbled across some umbrellas next to the handbags. They were those tiny fold-up ones that aren't that big even unfolded, and they fall apart since making things collapsible makes them flimsy. But that's all there was so I took one of the non-pink ones to the cash register and said, "I suppose you keep all your umbrellas in the one spot?"
"You could look in the men's section," she said.
Sure enough, in the men's section are the nice big umbrellas, the ones which actually shelter you from actual rain, and which don't break as easily, and which for all these extra features are about 2/3rds the price of the crappy women's umbrellas.
Of course. Of course the men get the good umbrellas.
This evening I got home and discovered that 1-day is selling packages for "Chicks", "Blokes" and "Random". "Random" is illustrated with an image of Georgina Beyer. Since all the cool kids were writing them emails, I also wrote to them and told them my umbrella story (and said don't even get me started on shoes) and suggested as an alternative to sexing their products they could divide them into interest categories like "Sports" and "Entertainment" and "Tools" so people can get things that interest them regardless of whether they (the people, not the things) are male, female, or genderqueer.
I also reminded them that Georgina Beyer is in fact female, not "random". I probably could have emphasised this more but I got the feeling that other people already had, so I thought I'd jump in to answer the inevitable "Wah, but how else can we possibly categorise our merchandise???" lamentations.
On reflection, I think I'll write to Farmers too. [ETA: I did.]
I went shopping today for a new umbrella, my current one being broken, and my real current one being stuck in my out-of-bounds office. I wandered through Farmers until I stumbled across some umbrellas next to the handbags. They were those tiny fold-up ones that aren't that big even unfolded, and they fall apart since making things collapsible makes them flimsy. But that's all there was so I took one of the non-pink ones to the cash register and said, "I suppose you keep all your umbrellas in the one spot?"
"You could look in the men's section," she said.
Sure enough, in the men's section are the nice big umbrellas, the ones which actually shelter you from actual rain, and which don't break as easily, and which for all these extra features are about 2/3rds the price of the crappy women's umbrellas.
Of course. Of course the men get the good umbrellas.
This evening I got home and discovered that 1-day is selling packages for "Chicks", "Blokes" and "Random". "Random" is illustrated with an image of Georgina Beyer. Since all the cool kids were writing them emails, I also wrote to them and told them my umbrella story (and said don't even get me started on shoes) and suggested as an alternative to sexing their products they could divide them into interest categories like "Sports" and "Entertainment" and "Tools" so people can get things that interest them regardless of whether they (the people, not the things) are male, female, or genderqueer.
I also reminded them that Georgina Beyer is in fact female, not "random". I probably could have emphasised this more but I got the feeling that other people already had, so I thought I'd jump in to answer the inevitable "Wah, but how else can we possibly categorise our merchandise???" lamentations.
On reflection, I think I'll write to Farmers too. [ETA: I did.]
