As I was reading this post on Female Impersonators, I felt the need to express my feelings on this general issue.
Businesses exist for a single purpose above all others-- to create profit. How do you create profit? Selling a good or service that people want. If no market exists for a product, anyone producing said product has 3 choices. 1. Keep producing said product and take a loss. This may work if your product is seasonal, or experiencing a temporary decline. 2. Shut down your business, either temporarily or permanently. a temporary production stoppage is an excellent way of ridding yourself of surplus supply. 3. Produce a product that people will buy.
Take the gender-specific Easter egg example. Plastic easter eggs are all about the same, so in order for a company to try and make the most profit, they need to make their eggs stand out to potential customers. This particular company printed purses and lipstick on their eggs in order to attempt to reach a specific consumer. That consumer has a choice as to which product they buy. If they like the print on the egg, the company gets a sale. If they do not, the company has less profit.
Obviously, there is a market for these eggs. The company is not indoctrinating society, society is mandating the market for the product.
This printing is necessary for the profit margin. America is built on capitalism.
Also, despite the fact that the minority may be growing, the people who do not fit traditional gender norms are such a small minority that there is no real profit to be made by targeting them with products.
A commenter on Amelia's post named Micheal made an excellent point, "It's substantially more cost-effective to market to two groups-- Masculine and Feminine-- than it would be to market to the whole spectrum of sexual orientations and identities. I personally hypothesize that, even if we did have a society that fully recognized and supported the whole spectrum of gender and sexual identities, people would feel marginalized, simply because it's simpler and more cost-effective to quantify gender and sex."
From an economic point of view, the gender-oriented products make perfect sense, profit is not made by catering to every small minority, but to the largest possible market.
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6 comments:
You're just shooting down a straw argument. Duh, companies make gendered products because there's demand for it. The demand is what feminists oppose. Bringing attention to this stuff is supposed to make people think about the problems of gender roles and change their buying habits, which would cause companies to change what they sell if it happened on a big enough scale.
If you want to make a worthwhile argument, try arguing whether or not dividing everyone into masculine and feminine and coding masculine as "likes trucks" and feminine as "likes lipstick" is a good idea. Or try to prove that everyone with two X chromosomes inherently likes lipstick.
Yes, judgesnineteen. You hit the nail on the head with that comment, especially when you said "The demand is what feminists oppose."
I really need to start working on my response to this. After I do my reading for film.
I Don't think most people have a real problem with the traditional M/F gender roles. Maybe I should have made that point more clear.
"I Don't think most people have a real problem with the traditional M/F gender roles."
That's what I would like to change. But there are different ways of "having a problem with" traditional gender roles, so let me explain. I fit into the gender role that is applied to females. Well, mostly. I don't wear makeup, I don't do anything special to my hair, I don't enjoy shopping just for the fun of it, I want to be a college professor, I think math and physics are fascinating. If we adhered as strictly as possible to trad. gender roles, people would try to change me on those things. Fortunately we've made some progress already, so, although I'm likely to have a harder time becoming a full professor than men, and although my mom will probably always wish I'd wear a little makeup, and although I underestimated my ability in math and didn't keep studying it, I'm ok. Some people fit their role even less than I do, and they have more problems. Some people feel that their gender is actually not the one traditionally tied to their sex, and they have the most problems.
But even if I was the most feminine girl around, I would still have a problem with gender roles in another way. I have a problem knowing that they oppress other people. I would like everyone to see how they oppress other people, and then decide that we need to relax our gender roles more than we have so far. Because really, I don't think gender roles serve any purpose or have any redeeming value besides propping up a society that devalues the feminine and oppresses women and LGBTQ people. It's not that I want everyone to act the same or to be androgynous - I just want everyone to act the way they want to act regardless of what plumbing they have, without being hated for it.
Oh, almost forgot another way I have problems with gender roles. They endanger me, because the masculine gender role has a lot to do with being aggressive and in charge of women. I think it makes men more likely to rape (keeping in mind, of course, that most men are not rapists), and studies have shown that men who believe in rigid gender roles are more likely to beat their wives and girlfriends than men who don't.
I think I'll try to write a post on some of this, because I get the feeling you're being introduced to these ideas in bits and pieces, which is making it harder for us to understand each other.
Hooray, I got quoted!
Regarding the post, there is still a large field of classes that all business majors must have some experience in to graduate; business ethics.
"Extremely Offensive Speech Alert"
I'm sure there is a demand for shirts that say "I hate n*ggers (but I really, really hate black folks)". I know there is, because I have seen a person wearing one. Someone produced this shirt, and made a profit off of it; off of promoting hate.
Now I'm not saying that gender specific marketing is profiting off of promoting hate, but it is profiting off of pressuring people to be things they don't want to be and do things they don't want to do. And that is at its core, unethical.
As for your comment, almost every single friend I have dislikes gender roles, and im pretty sure every girl in your college does to. Because the traditional gender role is that young women learn to become home makers, meet a man with a good job, pops out his babies, and then raises any daughters that show up. That is the traditional gender role, and the general acceptance of marketing gender specific easter eggs is an echo of that sentiment.
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