I became a feminist because I wanted to be free: to go for long walks and look up the stars, to wear whatever I wanted, to be able to look after myself and not have to rely on others.
I've lived my life in a time and place where I've been able to have those freedoms, but I feel as if they're gradually being eaten away. I'm being defined by who I am, rather than what I choose to be.
Goods are becoming ever more specialized. Everything from baby diapers to multivitamins is now dispensed in gender- and age-appropriate models. Yes, it makes sense to have his and hers jeans. But gender appropriate soft-drinks? Does the average guy's masculinity really need to be bolstered by buying Coke Zero instead of Diet Coke?
The profitability of his and hers products is partly due to price discrimination. The local hair salon charges women more than men because women are prepared to pay $50 or $60 to get their hair cut. Men asked to pay that price would just walk across the road to the barber shop that charges $15 for a short back-and-sides.
I have to wonder, too, if creating products for girls is just a way of selling more stuff to boys. Imaging buying something for a 10 year old boy that came in the 1960s-ish Lego packaging shown on the left? No way, you'd reach for the remote-controlled monster truck instead. But having a separate "friends" line for girls allows Lego to tailor its other products to suit boys' tastes.
Finally, gender differentiation can be a way of selling more stuff in general, and higher sales equals higher profits (with an increasing returns to scale production technology). With one-size-fits-all multivitamins, a family need only buy a single jar. With age- and gender-differentiated ones, a family needs vitamins for Mom, vitamins for Dad, and at least one type of children's vitamins.
So I understand why most things come in "his" and hers". Maybe girly vitamins are better for me anyways. But if we are stuck in a gender differentiated world, where everything is divided into "boys" and "girls", there are some things I would like to see.
First, gender differentiated kitchen counters. A standard height kitchen counter height is 36 inches, but people come in all sorts of different heights. The counter height that works for someone who is barely five feet will be too short for her six foot four sous-chef. O.k., probably it's costly to make kitchen counters different heights, and it would compromise the resale value of one's home. Yet how can men be expected to share equally in kitchen duties if every work surface is designed to generate excruciating back pain?
Second, gender differentiated power tools. I have small hands. My palm sander doesn't fit into my palm – it's more like a two-handed sander. I'd love to get a new drill, but most have such a large grip that I can barely hold them. It's not just a gender issue – men's hands come in all sorts of different sizes, too. How can women be expected to share equally in home repair duties when every power tool is the wrong size for their hands?
Finally, I'd like to see more cars built with features that appeal to women. I've heard – but I don't know if this is true – that as soon as a particular model of car is perceived as being "girly," men won't buy it. Since men still constitute the majority of car buyers, sales collapse. I've heard this offered as an explanation of the lack of cars like the Smart car – two person vehicles that use hardly any gas, and are easy to drive and park on city streets. Smart cars are just too cute, and cute=girly, and girly is the automotive kiss of death. But what is the cost of this pursuit of masculinity?
Today is international women's day. I'm going to celebrate by going for a long walk – even if tonight it will too cloudy to see the stars.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
AB is mostly coal and gas. Very little hydro.
http://www.energy.gov.ab.ca/Electricity/682.asp
@Scott
“Lastly, and I may be completely off base here, but have you ever met a woman who named their car? Or treated it with some kind of physical/personal identity? I haven’t. But almost every young guy I know does, especially those who ‘take her to the shop’ or ‘wash her’ or have picked up a new x y z for ‘her’. Cars and their accessories are the big toys for boys, and I don’t see any problem with it being so.”
On an episode of the British show Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson stated that only women named their cars. He asked women in the audience if they had and most sheepishly raised their hands. Maybe gender-specific traits are very culture-specific?
genauer
Yes – fitting standard sized appliances underneath is an issue. But if you have cupboards on the side (as I do) without appliances that is not an issue. And you could make them higher if you wish.
Scott: “In my view, an existing product, but repackaged and remarketed to a different demographic/segment often breathes new life into the product itself, and arguably promotes its future development (if necessary). I can think of no greater instance of this than the very nature of blogging itself!”
Good point. There are many examples of this phenomenon, e.g. Kleenex repurposed from gas mask filters, Lysol from disinfectant to feminine hygiene product and back again, thalidomide from cure for morning sickness (really. not. a. good. idea) to drug with use in cancer treatment, viagra from heart control medication to ED.
Yet not all differentiation and marketing expands our effective choice set. Our identities (see, e.g. Akerlof and Kranton Economics of Identity) are strongly tied to our gender. Consuming something that is not gender appropriate feels wrong – and sends out the wrong signal, as someone pointed out earlier. People spend more for gender/age appropriate goods because consuming the wrong good gives us psychic pain. It’s all about, as Peter pointed out earlier, convincing people that “our relatively more expensive toy is Made Just For Young Men”
This is the brilliance of marketers. We don’t pay lots of money because it makes us feel good. We pay lots of money to avoid feeling bad, being shamed by owning gender-inappropriate stuff, or not owning gender appropriate stuff.
The Onion has a lovely article on “Pantene introduces new behavioral conditioner”. “”As you can see here, Pantene’s psychomanipulative agents go straight to the parts of the frontal lobe where they’re needed most,” said Dyer, pointing to a computer-enhanced graphic of a model dramatically tossing her silky blonde hair in slow-motion. “Desirable behaviors such as beauty-product consumption and fashion-worship are rewarded with positive stimuli, including feelings of approval and increased social acceptance. And Pantene’s patented nutrients and moisturizers keep working all day long, seeking out and punishing the slightest departures from social norms with painful, burning sensations to the scalp.””
By the way, if the MX6 has a name it’s a deep dark secret. I’ve named cars in the past, but just don’t have that degree of affection for the Matrix. It’s a functional car, not a loveable one.
On gender limiting automotive choice sets: I really hope Nick will enter into this discussion, but here’s my best attempt to substitute for him. Look up hairdressers car in the Urban Dictionary, or google MX5 hairdressers car. Perfectly good cars don’t get bought because they’re insufficiently heterosexual. That seems crazy to me.
I suspect one reason why people on this blog are having issues with this thread relates to my earlier autistic economists post – anyone who scores high on the asperger’s scale will tend to see through framing effects, and if you see through framing effects, none of this stuff matters. You’ll happily put your little boy in a pink snowsuit if the pink snowsuit is the warmest one available.
Random thoughts:
Sample of two. I have tried, and failed miserably, in getting my daughters keen on fixing cars. I bought them each a (used) car. I can barely get them to check the oil, despite these being old high-mileage cars where you really do need to check the oil. The tools I bought them sit unused in the trunk. This depresses me, and scares me too. One of them drove for nearly a month vaguely wondering why the red idiot light was on. (Seized alternator pulley, so it was running on battery power only; thank God she didn’t try to drive it up the 401 and just did a few trips around town, and that I happened to visit and notice it.) But maybe boys are as bad too, nowadays. I drove 100kms to diagnose a “funny noise”, looked under the car, saw the exhaust hanging down, wired it up with a coathanger to get the car home. None of them (3 girls 2 boys) had thought to look under the car. They abandoned the car, went swimming, and phoned Dad. Maybe my attempts to help them have backfired miserably, and simply made them dependent on me.
I have only personally known one girl, 40 years ago as an undergraduate, who was keen on fixing cars. I have met a small number on the internet car forums where I sometimes hang out. But those forums are nearly all guys. Except for a couple of women who really know their stuff, most women posting on the tech sections are asking for help, not giving it. There is one garage on Bathhurst in Toronto that is an all-women shop. I can’t ever remember seeing any other women working as auto mechanics.
The “girly car” thing is a big deal. Google “MX5 hairdresser (or chick)” to see. Here is the FAQ on that subject on one Miata site. The fact that they have an FAQ speaks volumes. It is a truth universally acknowledged by petrolheads that the MX5 is one of the very best driver’s cars out there (here’s a nearly stock one on the ‘ring). But is it a chick car? I would love an MX5, but my legs don’t quite fit. And then, well, it’s a convertible, and, well, convertibles aren’t really serious, are they, and what I mean is, is it really me? So I drive an old MX6. Sure, the MX6 is a very cute car too. But it’s an 18 years old car, (and manual transmission). So it can’t be a girly car. It says “this car is driven by a man who is capable of fixing cars”. Signalling is very important. Especially for men, because women choose men, and so make men, in the very long run. (A higher percentage of women than men have children.)
Our clothes, cars, drinks, haircuts, are all signals of who we are.
Why do some women wear “boyfriend jeans”, marketed as such? I can’t see men wearing “girlfriend jeans”. There are few spaces left for men nowadays. We value the few we have left, even if they are only symbolic spaces.
I want to do a “gender switch” experiment. Suppose there were a car, marketed mainly to women. In the owner’s manual it gave instructions on how to check the oil etc. But at the end of those instructions it said “Or, give it to your man, it’s his job”. How would you interpret that? Offensive to women (they are too incompetent)? Or offensive to me (it’s a man’s job)? Now read this, and see what the reaction is when we switch genders.
I wish I could start writing stuff on “masculinist economics”, but I’m not really up to the job.
Nick:
I wish you would write some masculinist economics too – you understand feminist theory better than I do, and have things to say on the subject.
But on your substantive points. “There are few spaces left for men nowadays. We value the few we have left, even if they are only symbolic spaces.”
Yes, in countries like Canada, there are fewer spaces for men than there were in the days when women’s participation in life was limited to kinder kurche küche (kids kitchen church). But just as you wouldn’t want the women in your life restacking your dishwasher in a vaguely superior and disapproving way, I want to be free to walk into the Harvard University library, or even just down the street – something that women weren’t free to do in the past, and still aren’t free to do in some countries in the world. So can we agree that some of the decline in the masculinity of public space and the femininity of private space is a good thing?
I think there’s also a difference between male space and male products. A male space is something like Brothers Brick which is a blog maintained and devoted to Lego enthusiasts. Almost all of the pictures/creations are by men, but they aren’t necessarily “macho” images, e.g. there’s a Lego building split in half by an earthquake, a Justin Bieber concert, even (the one I liked best) a little diorama showing a dad tieing up his children, taking over their lego, and building stuff with it. They also aren’t made with “macho” lego – e.g. there’s a Flash Gordon rocketship made with “Friends” i.e. feminine Lego. Yes, it’s a mostly male space, but it’s not an exclusively male space, and within it men are allowed to be free, to channel their creativity.
Male products are totally different – product differentiation is about getting parents to spend more money, because Mark has to have boy Lego and Emily has to have girl lego. They’re limiting, not expanding.
You know, perhaps we should have a Gail Collins/David Brooks type debate about this. What do you think?
Frances: I only read your comment after writing mine!
I used to name my cars. Mostly girl’s names. “By the way, if the MX6 has a name it’s a deep dark secret.” A clue: the original owner of this name was a bicycle belonging (I think) to Lemmy (now of Motorhead).
Thanks for this post, Frances.
My two cents, @ Scott P Bacon in particular, is that gender differentiation of products doesn’t just add choices to the marketplace. It also (in my perception at least, I have absolutely no data on this) pushes out the choice of buying gender neutral products. What do I get for the sibling or friend who is transitioning genders or who does not fit on the gender binary? What about a toy for a friend’s daughter that doesn’t push her into “feminine” gender roles?
Sailors name their boats, very often with a feminine name. So do military pilots.. Not civilian airliners, named boringly by dolts in the C-suite. Except once when David Letterman chartered a 747 for some stunt and named it the “Connie Chung”.
@Frances: “This is the brilliance of marketers. We don’t pay lots of money because it makes us feel good. We pay lots of money to avoid feeling bad,”. Marketers have discovered the mechanism by which armies function. Nobody wants to be a hero, knowing the usual costs. But even less do soldiers want to look cowardly in the eyes of their squad mates.
Paul Fussel in his “Wartime: understanding and behavior in the Second World War”
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Wartime%3A+Understanding+and+Behavior+in+the+Second+World+War.
showed how, while publicly disparaging Italians for their supposed cowardice and lack of fighting spirit, everybody admired them for having reached the perfectly sensible conclusion that dying for Mussolini was profoundly stupid and anyone with a brain should get the “/$% out of there…
@frances
at first I wanted to take the hint, that this is turning into a wikipedia, and just shut up :- )
but,
With regard to Jezebel & Coke:
it is not the corporations, it is the customers, who force this gender specific marketing.
KO (a.k.a. Coca Cola, for those who do not know the ticker symbols by heart 🙂
surely didnt like to introduce the Coke Zero. I have some details on that.
@Jacques
fuel costs are just about 2- 3 cents / kWh. Another 2-3 cents are power plant installation. The rest is distribution (roughly 5 cent, well, here in Germany) and tax (12 cent) and
subsidies for renewable (5 cent)
Fuel costs are nearly negligble against installation /distribution, and fitting houses without any coal or gas makes perfect sense.
I will not have anything but electro and some wood burning fire place in my future home.
Hydro is a nice thing to have in Canada or Norway, but not in other places feasible to be really significant. Even if we would plaster all the Alps with concrete monsters.
Boys & Cars
not me ! I do not even have a car! Makes no economic & convenience sense in my place. Everything, but not a parking space, is in walking distance (population density > 10 000 / square km).
I even got my bicycle fixed, because I was not in the mood, and labor is pretty cheap here around.
@Nick
do the cost calculation here ! How often does a good car break down ? And how much can you still fix for yourself ?
@Frances
I am pretty sure that this recent Language paper is just statistical bollocks. How to ask this guy politely to present his data in detail and what he did with them ?
@ R E Cameron
This Clarkson had a wonderful parody on youtube (“Berlin – Warsaw, in one tank”), which was countered by some polish folks with “Berlin – London, daily delivery”). Both were pulled from youtube. Does anybody know how to get such precious lost art, somewhere ? I can pay !
“Determinant – yes, hydro plays a crucial rule in peak power generation, also has exciting potential when used together with wind or solar, but it’s not powering this computer.”
You’re on my ground now. 😉 I took a course on this in my last year. Beck has the capacity of half a nuclear plant, 2500 MW, and is dispatched as a base unit. The nukes are dispatched as base units because they can’t be scaled. So yes, you’re getting some of Beck’s capacity right now.
The balance of Ontario’s hydro capacity comes from the Ottawa River, a few St. Lawrence dams and some of the northern installations like Longlac. Most are “base” units because of the cost and there is some peak capacity there. There are also very small installations along the Trent-Severn canal system that are mostly base units, again due to cost and the fact that they can’t control their water levels because that is the purview of the Trent-Severn Waterway which runs for navigation.
The residual hydro capacity is used for peak as is the oil/gas unit at Kingston.
In extremis we can purchase power from New York and Michigan and to a lesser extent Quebec.
OPG is for practical purposes a nuclear/hydro outfit.
Nick: “”By the way, if the MX6 has a name it’s a deep dark secret.””
That’s not a name, that’s just an excuse for a Hawkwind reference.
Some gender neutral toy stuff:
http://www.ft-fanarchiv.de/
@Jaques
a little antidot to Italians:
Fukuyama “Trust”, “The virtual corporation and Army organization”, Basslord in Military Review Journal: “Cohesion, Personnel Stability and the German Model”
http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p124201coll1/id/541/rec/11
and from the leader of a small Czech party, who wants to leave the EU altogether:
http://money-go-round.eu/
Please note, that nearly half the money is allocated for “cohesion”
@Frances
I think I have bitched enough about the Language paper. But there is something, what we still dont understand really, culture, nation, does not cut it, really. See the fault lines in Huntington “clash of civilizations” 1993, Greece is NOT part of “western”,
Croatia is.
One book I still see as important is Simone de Beauvoir “All men are mortal”
Nick says, in his London centric view, lets just have a loose free trade union somewhere around Europe.
But the center, which I locate between Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Prag, Vienna, wants more.
That does not mean that all others have to join it, or stay adjoined. There is such a thing as a divorce, and the Czechs are the go-to guys for doing it peacefully.
@Determinant
I thought a little while about your canadian federal way of doing things.
As Trudeau said: Nobody hates Canada.
2000 year old European bitching: Because you never had the chance to give people a good reason for it : – )
Seriously: you Canadians never killed each other in significant numbers, right ?
Europe is DEFINED by never being unified internally, despite so many very bloody attempts.
And that means, that rules and regulations have to be harder.
genauer – A critique of the language paper using Canadian savings data is on my to-do list.
“Seriously: you Canadians never killed each other in significant numbers, right ?” Do Aboriginals count? Actually Aboriginal/European relations were different in Canada as compared to the US, because the fur trade could use Aboriginal labour, whereas agriculture required that Aboriginal people be run off the land.
One thing that I find a bit strange about Europe is that the fact that, over there, I’m an Aboriginal person.
Frances,
first a solution for the 36 inch problem, when I was just 18 month old:
http://www.slideshare.net/genauer/stollen-11956034
use the drawers! or some stepping piece, when you get more weight : – )
When there is a will, there is a way !
The picture actually tells a more complicated story.
Age 1.5, I was able to use the drawers to get to the sweets. My parents blocked that with nails, movable from the side drawer. I figured that also, and they had to use a key lock for the side panels. That was too much for a 2.5 year old, becoming a lock picker : – )
Side stories: gender neutral kitchen duty, half a century ago. Child labor !
Second, an analysis of other, canadian data, does not cut it. The calculations of Mr. M. Keith Chen are simply wrong. I am pretty sure of this. I have some eye for such things.
It is not primarily about, what kind of analysis is legitimate. This is a very daring thing to say, without having access to the detailed data, but I want to see it.
How is this organized nowadays ?
There was the Seven Years War when France and the UK fought each other for control of North America. It was a forgone conclusion since the British Colonies which became the US were ten times as large as New France (Quebec). Sorry Jacques, but the numbers for New France were bleak. First Acadia fell, then Quebec City, Montreal, and then the Treaty of Paris in 1763 ceded New France to England. France lost the war and was given the choice of keeping New France or Guadeloupe, which was a sugar source. They chose the sugar.
Then there was the American Revolution which was a much a civil war in North America as a rebellion against the UK.
The last big war was the War of 1812 which we are commemorating this year, that was the last time there was open and prolonged international conflict in North America north of the Rio Grande.
The American Civil War was a huge killing match but that never got further north than Pennsylvania other than a few trivial actions.
The Fenian Raids then followed that but they did more for Canada then they did for the Irish Fenians.
The UK Government frowned on open rebellion and hostility between colonies, just as the US Government frowned on hostility between states. Such actions are called treason and treason against the Crown was political suicide in Canada in the 19th Century. It is one of our odd things, but we have always been “Loyal” and “Not Americans”, loyalty to the Crown was the 19th Century expression of this.
Both Canada and the US have spent the last 200 years learning to talk it out, with the only notable failure being the American Civil War.
Canada’s Aboriginal policy was a kinder form of neglect than the US policy, we didn’t have mass deportations to the West. Other than that it has been similar. Though the RCMP was formed with the express purpose of preventing “Indian Wars” of the kind that happened in the US and by and large it was successful in this.
@Nick:
Your MX6 is named “Silver Machine”? 😉
Ah, the glories of Google.
@determinant
do you have numbers for dead and/vs living people at those times ?
Did they ever show you , e.g. a typical Russian / Polish / German “age pyramid” in comparison ? This may help a little bit to understand why things here are a lot more difficult.
@genauer
Your question was North American wars, of which the last one was the American Civil War.
WWI and WWII are different questions, those were wars in which we sent troops overseas to Europe.
I don’t see how a thread on Power Tools for Girls has turned into one on the World Wars and their impact on current European politics.
By the way, your comments that some nations like Iceland or Greece are not “Western” are not moderate and sound more like shrill exaggeration. I don’t want to argue over hyperbole.
This whole effect (going back to the original topic, not that I am opposed to drift…) has been amply blogospherically argued, including here.
But I think Nick (inadvertantly?) touched on the issue when he said that he feels that there are very few truly masculine spaces left. The idea that there needs to be a thing that men can generally do that women can’t is ingrained deep in our social subconscious, and is driven by what one may call “womb envy”, which isn’t literal envy of having a womb, but fear of being reproductively superfluous. A good feminist bloggy take is here. The discussion in the comments is fun (in which yours truly bloviated to some extent so obviously it’s awesome).
This “subtractive masculinity”—manliness is whatever is left over that women do not do—is what advertisers are responding to whether they realize it consciously or not.
Mandos – I don’t think this has to be either/or. We can have masculine spaces without dividing the world into exclusively masculine and exclusively feminine domains, and as I argued earlier with my comment on Brothers Brick, masculine space doesn’t necessitate masculine stuff.
One theory about masculine resistance to having any girls in the clubhouse is Claudia Goldin’s “pollution” theory of discrimination. Something, e.g. driving a forklift truck, looks really manly and strong, until one sees a woman doing it, and then instantly one realizes “one doesn’t have to be manly and strong to drive a forklift.” When women enter an occupation (or space more generally) it signals that that occupation doesn’t require as much strength/manliness as we all thought. Hence women “pollute” occupational status – which is why men fight strongly against their admission.
Goldin’s theory never got a lot of traction, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
On Masculine and feminine domains – I spent some time in places where these are much more heavily demarcated (India and Iran). In both, a number of women I knew said that it was their preference that it was that way. They had the home absolutely (including kids and finances) – the men could only run around in the street. They thought that relaxing the barrier would mean less real freedom and power. I could see the point – as the home became less of a female domain in C18 and C19 England, women first tended to lose out.
The picture changes in very class-stratified societies where it is a luxury to some women to be able to be at home, and where the work and life outside the home still treat women particularly badly and the work is not very interesting.
@R. E. Cameron – Interesting point, I tend to treat anything on Top Gear as an authority in all things automotive, so perhaps your right about “gender-specific traits” being “very culture-specific”.
@Peter T – You point out an observation I have also come across, but not so far east. In rural Italy, Amalfi coast to be exact, many of the family run businesses (shops, auto repair, restaurants, etc) I encountered run on a sharp female/male divide whereby the finances and other domestic affairs were managed by the women (wives), while the men (husbands) ran the shops/businesses and interacted with the local economies at large. Does this not represent a more efficient state of affairs, perhaps even a socially optimal one? Given, of course, that women in these environments truly believe that “relaxing the barrier would mean less real freedom and power.”
@Frances Woolley – “I don’t think this has to be either/or.” Really? Touching on your point w.r.t. Brothers Brick, can you not also see their work as a creative development rather than a sharp division/battle of the sexes? Doesn’t creating specific products which can later be combined with other specific products create the possibility of original innovation? I think Lego is an excellent example of just how this may occur: one may use pieces from a female and a male marketed set to create a completely new design or product (regardless of the authors gender).
Or, more abstractly, a paint set sold for young girls, and a paint set sold for young boys; presumably combining the two would offer more breath of colour, more possibilities of detail, but would not each separately also leave something desirable?
For me they certainly would, and so in some cases, it should be that products are sold specifically for males and females. Your point earlier on smaller hand drills and other similar products I think reinforces my claim.
Lastly, returning again to your potent Lego idea, you wrote that by marketing to specific genders leads to a “limiting, not expanding” outcome. Could you please expand on that idea, as I am unsure I understood it fully.
@ Frances Woolley: “I wondered how many readers I’d lose by coming out.”
I suppose, you may have lost a reader, but I would say I’d not have come across this blog had I not read that your research interests included “feminist economics”. I certainly didn’t have a clear idea of what that meant at that point as I was a naive sophomore registered at Carleton as a visiting student.
Anyways, I’d say I’m a feminist too, and of the opposite sex. Although, I don’t really know why I had to disclose that. But, I feel it makes a stronger assertion when a man asks for equality of women, when an able person makes the case for people with disabilities, and so on.
I wonder what the response would have been, had your fellow bloggers posted this article.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-21/volkswagen-mans-up-with-bug-leaving-women-behind-in-sales.html