A Maligned Empowering.

With all the recent fuss about the upcoming election, a fair amount of discussion has focused on that familiar refrain which seeks to focus upon women. Some of the discussion asserts that, like men, they're entitled to a set of cultural guidelines and [dare I say it] rights that are on par with those that have been afforded men since that one guy discovered he could make fire.

Making fire is a fine thing, especially when one's daily tasks include protecting the fairer sex from the persistent cold. Plus fire is a really helpful thing to provide so that the little lady can go about cooking. For the man.

A few days ago I was perusing the mainstream news - I do this online because we refuse to receive television broadcasts here in our home unless we're wearing our tinfoil hats, which have recently gone missing. And I make it a point to peruse mainstream news sources, because I want to know what the media are promoting in our best interests. I also scan through some of the lesser-respected sources when I want to know what's really going on, but because I've a keen interest in what we're supposed to think is important, I read the big name stuff too.

A lot of what's been in the news lately has been, understandibly, political in nature. We've got candidates and representatives of candidates asserting all kinds of different ways in which they're supportive of women and making promises based on their own opinions on what's best for women. I read these references to "women" as though they're something well outside the standard human.
Women are repeatedly mentioned in a tone that seems to imply "men junior children in need of guidance and direction."

Apparently the only thing these powerful men can agree upon is that the women among us are completely reliant on our sage insights to save them from... whatever the modern day equivalent to 'persistent cold' might be. One thing that's particularly bothersome, to me anyway, is that for the most part, these men are competing to see who among them will win the greatest level of legitimacy in the womens advocacy realm as viewed by society. Never mind that society - on a global scale - is under the control and influence of men.

Lest you think I'm sexist, I assure you (as would any man thusly accused) that I am not. Pshwhew! Now that we've got that out of the way, let's continue.

A few days ago I was looking at Yahoo! News. As I scanned across headlines fraught with sensationalist titles, I found a link to an article announcing that Honda, the carmaker, had introduced a model intended specifically for women. The article features a picture of the car, in pink, alongside a very happy young lady carrying flowers and obviously pleased to be wearing a cute skirt - short enough to demonstrate independence and a touch of sass while long enough to be respectable - and a broad smile. They label this car "She's," with a cute little heart in place of the apostrophe. If you don't want a pink one, you can get a brown one, in a lovely hue designed to match your eyeshadow.

Sound absurd? Click it:

http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/honda-fit-she-world-only-car-aimed-exclusively-205422886.html

For a car to be similarly marketed to someone like me, the color scheme would have to be something along the lines of "prestained with grease + four day old salt and pepper stubble and doesn't smell very good." I'd never buy a car like that. Gross.

Later, I was scouring my news feed on FaceBook, which is always a reliable source of unbiased information presented by my completely sensible and well informed friends network and I came across a link to a recent broadcast of the Ellen show. If we had TV in our house, I'm pretty sure I'd watch Ellen. Every day. She's brilliant and hilarious and has a terrific stage presence, and she delivers her message in a way that's memorable and funny without demeaning the topic nor those whose perspective differs from her own.

Ellen was talking about a fabulous new product: a pen, designed specifically for women. And while I'd love to share some of the hilarious points she made in her opening monlogue as well as the commercial she produced to promote this amazing new pen, I really do think that she's better at delivering her message by video than I will ever be by transcription.

If you could do with a laugh, please do have a gander: http://www.upworthy.com/boom-roasted-heres-why-you-dont-ask-a-feminist-to-hawk-your-sexist-product?g=2&ref=nf

Even the URL is funny. Ellen rocks.

This stuff sorta hits close to home for me. D, that awesome woman who fell into my trap and agreed to join me in jumping over the broom some 2+ years ago, works in an industry that's always trying to find new ways to market its wares. They have whole teams of people whose job it is to just find new ways to make people like you and me buy a newer version of the thing we already have even though we're only marginally making use of it anyway. These things are capable of more than we'll ever understand, and even so we can hardly wait for the new one to hit the market so that we can somehow rationalize dumping the old one and replacing it with the new. There's an ironic component to her being employed by such an industry. Very much so.

Not only that, but I was raised by a single Mom who never once bought into any kind of rhetoric that promoted any kind of gender superiority. She was pretty good about getting that understanding into my own little noggin.

Anyway, a couple years several months while ago, D was in a meeting where some of these smart people (men, by the way) were pitching their new idea on how to market laptop computers. Their idea: to create and offer a laptop for women.

In a room full of men, the sole woman - D - was the only one to offer a response.

What? Women? You're going to offer this to women?

Um, er...

This is absurd! What women? Professional women with college degrees? College student women? CEO CFO women? Women with children and part time jobs? Young women? Women in the military? Is it just for housewives? Is it going to be pink or have flowers on it, or what? What features can a laptop offer women that aren't already available in existing products and can't also be integrated into upcoming products?

Dell offered a laptop for women years ago. If you don't remember it, that's because it was an enormous failure and was pulled from the market after something like two hours.

Her point, which I really can't effectively convey, was that - perhaps like a ballpoint pen, or even an automobile - a laptop is a pretty adaptable thing and isn't bound by the gender of its user. It can already do a zillion things most of us will never bother to learn, and whether it's slate grey or gloss white doesn't necessarily speak to the aesthetic taste (or lack of same) of its human counterpart.

It's like growing an oak tree. For women.

I don't think that pens or cars or laptops really care what gender any of us got stuck with. I don't know why it still matters to us. What I do know is that in our own household, a standard issue consumer level laptop lasts me [the man] about four years and I replace it because I want the new thing; and that D [the woman] manages to fill her hard drive and overload her state-of-the-art super fancy extra cool laptops in a matter of months. So if we were shopping for a laptop for women, we'd need one with four gazillion terrabytes and sixty bazillion RAM things that can totally handle having four hundred programs running at the same time plus skype and that live meeting thing. Mine just needs word processing and web browsing. And a calculator.

The irony, I guess, is that these products were intended to promote the empowerment of women on some level. Someone thought that each of these things would foster strength for the fairer sex. The part that bugs me is that these industries, and society as a whole, continues to present insulting and demeaning products (and rhetoric) while asserting that this very presentation is exactly the opposite. It's like that really rotten insult: "Oh - you're a feminist? Isn't that cute?" But now that sentiment has gone mainstream in a way that it never was before, and it's become distorted to the point that the perpetrators don't even recognize that what they're doing is insulting.

I guess, given that we use the same pens in our house and that because she's only too eager to drive around in the nearly sixty year old cars we keep handy and that she uses a laptop more thoroughly than anyone else I've ever heard of, that we're not likely among the target market for these smart men who are inventing things like pens for the honeys or cars for the cuties.

And we're pretty happy to not fit the demographic.

Cameron