Selling Stuff to Men

In a nearby communal shower room, there is a corner unit where each person who uses the shower has an individual shelf. On these shelves, gender segregation rules.

Some shelves are filled with products like these:

1) "Gingerbread" by Pink Cow: "A Very Warm Bath & Shower Gel. 1. A scent filled to the brim with bear hugs, and sweet memories. 2. Be dreamsome ... paint a unicorn in pink and lime. 3. Say hurrah for 'NO PARABENS'. (Recycle me and I may come back as a blanket)" Text on the back reads "Massage over skin whilst in the bath or shower and let the cheeky bubbles kiss your skin with softness."

2) "Body Wash" by Sanctuary Spa, Covent Garden: "Gently cleanse, invigorate and soften your skin with moisturising sesame oil, smoothing essential oils and fragrant spices"

3) "nourish Shower Therapy" by Radox: "be nice to your skin, with shea butter & ginger shower cream"

Other shelves sport bottles more like this:

1) Alpecin "Caffeine Shampoo" Hair Energizer: "Stimulates hair roots during washing. With patented skin activator - Reduces hair loss."

2) "Ice Dive Shower Gel" by Adidas: "Developed with athletes". Text on the back reads "adidas Ice Dive PRO ENERGY shower gel for men: Unique energising fragrance, enriched with marine salts, pH respect/Dermo-tested formula."

3) Dove "Men+care Body and Face Wash": FRESH AWAKE energising scent (micro moisture)

4) Dove "Men+care Body and Face Wash": CLEAN COMFORT mild formula - micro moisture technology.

There are some pretty obvious differences between the first set of products and the second set. The first set focuses on sensation: scent, kiss, softness, gently, smoothing, fragrant; the second set seems to be more about action: stimulates, activator, athletes, energising, technology. The most verbose of the first set is committed to whimsy: bear hugs, sweet memories, dreamsome, unicorn; the most verbose of the second set is dedicated to improvement: developed, energising, enriched. The first is "filled to the brim" whilst the second is "enriched". The first is quirky; the second scientific. The first espouses gentleness; the second espouses aggression.

I think we all know how products are marketed towards 'men' and 'women'. These bathroom products are fairly typical examples. What is interesting in this case is the response they provoked in me. I am used to products being marketed as "normal" and "girl version" - (see car gadgets, work tools, kids' toys*). It's easy to interpret, in many cases, that "normal" is, well, normal, and "girl version" is kinda ridiculous. The girl version of any "normal" product will often be pink or purple in colour, appeal to whimsy, lightheartedness, romance, flowers or the like. Now, there's nothing wrong with pink, purple, whimsy, lightheartedness, romance or flowers. The problem is how those differences are made to look like that - like differences - by their positioning against the "normal" version of these products. Because the "normal" version lacks these distinctions, the things that are added to make something "girl version" are additions to normal, and thus are produced as excessive, which can also be read as frivolous, trivial, decorative, etc. (See how all these words are code for "feminine"?) The point is that the normal version is basic, and the girl version is excessive. So far, so Gender Binary 101.

What's interesting about these bathroom products is how excessive the men's version looks to me. There is something laughable about those appeals to what seems to be extreme masculinity. Scientific formulas! Athletic prowess! Magic hair regrowth! And yet the appeals to what seems to be extreme femininity are no less laughable ("paint a unicorn in pink and lime" ... ?!). But I am acclimatised to extreme femininity in bathroom products. When it comes to body cleaning products, it is the "girl version" which is normal, and the men's version which is produced as excessive. Note that 3 out of 4 men's products explicitly state that they are for men, while none of the women's products mention gender. Body cleaning products are implicitly coded as feminine from the get-go, meaning that products that want to appeal to a different target market need to explicitly identify that market. Thus we get square gun-metal grey bottles and clean straight lines like this as opposed to curved shapes, flowing lines and soft images like this.

Bathroom products are not the only area where the girl-version is the norm from which boy-version deviates (see also recipe books, pregnancy books and home cleaning products). However, cooking, child-rearing and housework are things that are constructed, however wrongheadedly, as 'women's business', and so the normalising of femininity in products associated with these topics is understandable (if annoying and ridiculous). One would think of bodily hygiene, on the other hand, as being non-gendered - we all need to keep clean. But no, it has to be produced as girly, because women care about being clean (and soft and scented, of course) whereas men only wash because they absolutely have to. I'm not saying that this is true, of course - only that for some reason, advertising companies seem to think that these are the narratives they must promote in order to sell stuff to 'men' and 'women'. (What does one buy if one isn't a man or a woman ... ?) We should all be insulted by this, no matter what gender we are.

* I am aware that by providing only 'normal' and 'girl' links here, I am ignoring the 'boy' versions of the same pages. However, in all of these examples, it is remarkable how closely the 'boy' versions resemble the 'normal' versions, which is precisely my point. See my search for boys' toys, girls' toys and children's toys. In terms of the range of colours and items the non-gendered search is similar to the boys' search (although it's interesting that the 'boys' toys' search also turns up what looks like soft porn aimed at both men and women, as well as products aimed at adult men, whilst the other two searches return only 'children's' items). On the 'girls' toys' search, the range of products is smaller (mostly dolls, dolls' accessories and miniature household products like ironing boards and ovens) and there is not a single item that doesn't include the colour pink. My point is that the boys' version, whilst different from the non-gendered version, is not as different from that version as the girls' version is.

My Customer-Service Fantasy

In a short while I'm going to put some clothes on and walk into town to visit the Apple store. My poor little laptop just can't take the heat any more, and I need to investigate the possibilities of buying a new one. I can't really afford another Mac, but I can't go back to a PC now, can I?!

Anyway. I have a little fantasy about how this is going to go.

I'll take my little list of details about the specifications of my machine (because I'm utterly clueless about what any of it really means and so couldn't reel off its properties off the top of my head, like many of my friends can). I'll breeze into the big, cool, clean space of the Apple store and I'll start playing with one of the test-machines they have out for just that purpose. At some point I'll be approached by a cute Apple-geek - impossibly thin, wearing maybe a checked shirt and chinos, with a casual hipster haircut and glorious shoes. They'll ask me if I need any help, and I'll say "yeah, actually I do" and I'll explain my situation. They'll nod intelligently while I fluently recite my list of specifications, and tell them what I need a computer to do, and what options I've been considering and why. They'll smile at me - maybe they'll think I'm cute, too, and they'll be endeared to me by my obvious amateurish understanding of computers and what they do.

They'll be the perfect assistant. They will be knowledgeable and interesting, and they won't actually try to sell me anything, but they will understand what I need and they'll be just dying to spend half an hour talking me through the options and showing me features of cool Apple stuff. They'll be overtly passionate about the products but they won't up-sell - they'll know when a specification is high enough for my needs, and they'll say "you don't need that, this is fine for you". When I say "I'm not going to buy anything today, I'm going to wait for the summer when the new operating system is released", they'll tell me the exact date when that's going to happen, and they'll tell me if it's worth waiting. Hopefully they'll tell me that that they'll throw it in for free if I buy a new computer today!

They'll be on my side. They'll be interested in my needs and desires, and they will love the products so much that they'll want to talk to me about them. I'll emerge half an hour later, my head brimming with knowledge and intelligent opinions about the pros and cons of various options. Perhaps I'll have asked the cute Apple-geek out for coffee. It could happen!

It won't go like this, of course. More likely, I'll wander in, stand around awkwardly waiting for someone to approach me, and then eventually I'll be faced by some sullen teenager who just wants me to leave so they can return to standing around clock-watching until their shift is over. I'll leave 3 minutes later with precisely no more knowledge than I had when I went in, and no coffee date either.

But hey, a consumer can dream.