You know what’s fun? Where fun equals needless and bizarre? Particular products, apparently picked at random, being marketed as just for the dudes. I mean, we are all probably familiar with companies making special pinkified versions of their products for the girlies, like tools! and tape! and… earplugs! (Lots of gendered goodness through that Sociological Images link, thanks to @Chromiee on Twitter for it.) But let’s delve into the differences in how gender is here enforced for men and women.
For instance, tissues. I’m not certain that tissues need to be gender specific, but apparently Kimberly-Clark, manufacturers of Kleenex, are.
Last year, I was casually walking down an aisle at my local supermarket when a tissue box caught my eye. ‘Ooh,’ I thought. ‘Giant tissues. I would like some of those.’ I took a closer look at the box. Lo and behold, the box said ‘MAN-SIZE tissues’ in big manly letters. Not for me then. Pardon me for asking, but do the rest of us not sometimes get a lot of snot and not want to bother with tiny little tissues only good for three blows? Or is it only manly men who blow out large manly chunks of dead cells from their noses who merit MAN-SIZE tissues? Do the tissues come extra tough for an extra masculine blow? Not only that, but the two box patterns one could choose from were cricket equipment and an old-style map of the world. So, what, playing sport and exploring are for men then? Just… why?
So, because I was a bit amused and because I am a Scary Feminist™, I took down the number Kimberly-Clark provided on the box for feedback. I called them up, feeling a bit silly, and told the woman on the customer service line about misogyny and compartmentalising and cricket and marketing and assumptions and I want giant tissues, too! I must have gone on for a while, because:
‘So, what exactly is your complaint?’
‘Uh. The packaging and the man-size messaging is full of misogynistic messages. If you changed those things, it’d be really good and it’d invite women to buy your product.’
‘Okay. Thanks for calling. I’ll pass that along to the marketing team. Thank you very much.’
The tissue boxes are still in my supermarket, if you were wondering.
The point is: when it comes to gendering non-gendery products, womanhood (and femininity! because they are the same thing!) is so often coded as bad. And it’s not just women who get hurt by this sort of thing; there is never any room for non-binaries in this world of rigid binary gendering. This is just another way to keep anyone who doesn’t conform to binary gender out in the cold.
The girlie versions of these products are coded pink and sparkly and such by way of setting girls and women up as a subgroup. We need special things set aside for us, because the things for regular people (read: men) just won’t do. It’s that idea of the default human again, which we see in medicine and sport (it’s always pointed out when it’s a women’s cricket team, because “cricket team” itself is always male) and all sorts of areas in society. We are a special subgroup for marketers to exploit.
Dudely versions of these products don’t cater to men as a special subgroup. The dudeification of products – that is, where it’s a case of specifically targeting products at men and boys rather than just assuming only men would by this stuff – relies on the disparagement of women. No girls here, we have manly products, you don’t want to be associated with that girly girl crap! Sometimes it’s merely in the unnecessary exclusion of women. That’s the case with Nutrigrain cereal being marketed as Iron Man food, which will help boys grow up big and strong (because that’s what you always want as a man, and never as a woman, right?). Then there are companies that like to make it explicit. For instance, you can go check out the charming Yorkie chocolate bar featured over at Shakesville the other day (with the slogan ‘it’s not for girls!’). Then you have the violent and full-on hateful; Cara blogged on rape-promoting pencil sharpeners back in 2007. Women can be used just as one pleases, from exclusion to counterpoint to objects on which it’s just fine to spill one’s hate.
It’s about setting women on the outside: women are to be a subset of humanity, to be catered for specially or to be the standard of that which the real people ought not to want to be. And, as ever, those who don’t fit the sex/gender binary don’t exist. Excuse me while I go dig out my old handkerchiefs.