When Marie Claire asked Mia Kim from Popgadget to design a “ShePhone” — a women’s version of an iPhone — she didn’t go the typical route and slap a pink coat of paint on a product and charge more for it. But that’s not to say she* and Marie Claire didn’t girlie it up:
That’s right, folks: apparently being a woman is so stressful that we must have Xanax and booze at the ready at all times, and be prepared to fuck (with others or ourselves) at a moment’s notice, and then pee on our phone to take a pregnancy test if those condoms stored near a hot battery didn’t hold up.
Honestly, the only thing on here that I’d like to see put on a real phone is the breathalyzer, and I find the corkscrew kind of amusing in a Swiss-Army-knife kind of way. But this just reinforces the message that women are fluffy, don’t care about quality electronics, and are poor delicate dears who can’t cope with life. And given Marie Claire’s demographics, I’d say that this was reinforcing the message that single women are this way, in particular.
And, yes, I get that it’s a joke. It’s just not funny. Whoohoo, stereotypes!
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*Kim defends the ShePhone, which she says she didn’t have final control over, at Wired:
I’m being dubbed the “designer” of this concept phone, but other than a few of the interface features, I can’t say I had anything to do with the finished product. But after the initial surprise- you know what, I’m not bothered. I’m happy to see that anything about technology is in a traditional women’s magazine. It’s still a lot less salacious than anything that would be in T3 Magazine.
It’s funny, because I started Popgadget to combat the whole image of women only using gadgets so we could stick them in our cleavage, but the sexist marketing imagery is so pervasive that people still think “women+tech = sex toy”.
But there’s a lot of interest- negative and positive- so just you wait- we’ll have it on the market by next X-mas. We’re looking for male models who can wear deep décolletage for our ad campaign.
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Via Susi Weaser at DollyMix.