At one university I attended, the male varsity teams were the “Golden Bears,” while the female teams were the “Pandas.”
On another note, I found out recently that Rudyard Kipling’s “If” has been rewritten for girls. First verse:
Umm … with the exception of the final line of the original “If,” it seems to me that the original contains sentiments that are suitable for both girls and boys. “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same …” is just as valid for girls as it is for boys.
“If” is not a product like a pink razor, but holy hannah! Was this change, applied to a poem that every young person can aspire to, really necessary?
I’d be scared to be thrown on the floor by a group of 8 at airport security after setting off all alarms at once … but then again - it evidently is made for naval travel, so …
As a HUGE fan of the original, this nauseates me. There is so much to be recommended in the original for people of any gender. I would have hung this up in my son’s nursery if Kipling weren’t such a racist.
Some of the product gendering seems kind of stupid but I wouldn’t call most of it pointless. The point is that the vast majority of people fit into the classification of men (or boys) and women (or girls), and many people in those categories, and others, want products associated with this two groups. It’s simply good marketing and done because it works.
Sometimes it’s as simple as me buying a product gendered for men so I can claim it’s just for me and don’t have to share it with my wife. She does the same because she always uses more of everything we would share, and thus is the one who usually finishes it off, and then she will leave the keep the empty container to indicate she needs to get another one. That despite all rational people knowing that you have to throw out the container and its absence indicates you need another one.
Luckily I don’t drink milk and don’t have to go looking for a male gendered milk because there’s always a milk carton in the fridge but Schrodenger’s cat could be inside of it for all I know.
True, Dude Wipes probably don’t have the issue of being more expensive while giving you less product. I’ve never really paid attention to the price since I never had any intention of buying them. I was just pointing out the silliness of having a product like that being so hyper gendered. After all, everybody poops.
Okay, I have to share this quote from The Boys in the Band. Recently remade on Netflix; stage play premiered in 1968, movie with same cast 1970. Nine men at a birthday party: eight are gay, the ninth insists he’s not. Anyway, early on, the host (Jim Parsons in the remake) holds up one of those (horrible) old aerosol cans.
“And here’s a little something called Control. Notice: nowhere on the label does it say ‘hair spray’, just simply ‘Control’. And the words ‘For Men’ are written about thirty-seven times all over the goddamned can.”
“It’s called Butch Assurance.”
“Well, it’s still hair spray – no matter if they call it Balls!”
When I was a teenager, my father gave me a copy of the poem, written in calligraphy on birch bark, given to him in turn by his childhood friend in boy scouts. He offered me some reward for memorizing it–which I did, impatiently and without absorbing it, much to his dismay.
For weird turn-of-the-twentieth-century advice, I’m fonder of Kahlil Gibran.
“Has been” = “almost a hundred years ago”. According to LHoD’s link, the girls’ version was published in 1931. And clearly didn’t have staying power, since you, and probably most people in this thread, haven’t heard of it.
I saw the girls’ version quoted once, it would have been in some book about the Irish Army or about Irish soldiers in the British Army in or around World War II, and was quoted in a section about Army nurses.
In the late 1990s, there were ads for Hemorid, a hemorrhoid cream “specially formulated for today’s woman.” (They put it in a pink box.) An elderly man who had about 5 teeth asked me about this, and before he bought it, said, “Them things ain’t gonna look at the box!”
A couple years before that, I worked with a woman whose 3-year-old daughter declared that all objects were boy objects, or girl objects, depending on the color. She had a meltdown when they were out in public and she saw a man wearing a shirt that to her was a “girl color.”
(And don’t get me started on all that pink %^&* that we have to look at every October, which also happened to be the month I got my own breast cancer diagnosis.)
