Skip to main content

Paying for a pink razor

How much would you pay for a pink razor?



Not as much as before, fortunately, with Tesco's recent announcement that it is reducing the cost of its women's disposable razors to match men's ones.  However, you're probably still paying over the odds if you favour shampoo, deodorant or body wash aimed at women.

In fact, once you open your eyes, it appears that the number of products that women pay more for is simply staggering.  If you can bear to read it, the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs put together a 76-page report detailing just how much more a female customer is likely to pay over the course of her lifetime.

Perhaps, like me, your initial reaction is, "Why don't you just buy the men's version then?"  But of course, the issue runs much deeper than that.  Paula Cocozza, in The Guardian, comments that spending 50p less for men's shaving gel just "make[s] you smell like a cheap man".  Cheap or not, the all-pervading fear these products are playing on is the idea that you might be mistaken for the wrong gender.  If you don't smell right, wear the right thing, or have the right bottles in your bathroom, you somehow become less womanly.  Or manly.

It runs deep.  I have to confess that all my razors (of the non-disposable sort) have been purple, curvy, and probably more expensive than the chunky blue kind.  It would feel a little odd to go out and buy a designated men's razor.  From a biological point of view, it's obviously quite useful to be able to tell which sex a person is without actually having to peer down their trousers, so the innate preference for identifiers of your own gender is not, as such, a problem.

The problem is that this preference is being gouged deeper and deeper by forces seemingly outside our control.  As the New York City study points out: " Individual consumers ... must make purchasing choices based only on what is available in the marketplace."  Anyone who has raced round shops trying desperately to find just a plain red T-shirt will vouch for that. 

Like many parents, I have snorted disbelievingly at the toy shops selling girl and boy versions of everything from trampolines to push-along carts, but until now I hadn't considered that it might be cynically setting us up to make gendered purchase decisions for the rest of our lives.  A little girl who has everything pink and sparkly from babyhood is surely less able to resist the messages that tell her she must pay extra for the beauty-enhancing women's cosmetics when she grows up.  And a little boy who rather likes pink will quickly squash it down in favour of the comic book heroes and macho packaging that he's told he should prefer. 

An article from The Atlantic claims that gender stereotypes in marketing are as strong as they've ever been, merely "repackage[d] ... to make them more palatable".  If it's not OK to think of a woman as only a housewife, let's make her a princess instead.  If a man isn't just about working with his muscles any more, he'll still be flattered if we pretend he's a super hero.  We can only buy what we're being sold.  And what we're being sold is a whole idea of who we are, and of what being a woman or a man in today's world means.

So how much are you paying for a pink razor? 

More, it seems, than you might think.

Image attribution: By David Monniaux (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.0 fr (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/fr/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Trent Valley: the march of the pylons

In the 1980s, the River Trent supplied the cooling water for fifteen coal-fired power stations, each one gobbling up coal from the local mines and quenching its heat with gallons of river water. The area was known as Megawatt Valley . As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the mines closed, the coal trains stopped running, and the iconic cooling towers, one by one, fell to the ground. The high-voltage electricity lines which connected the stations to the grid are still there, however, and they dominated the walk I did today. The stately silhouettes of pylons stalked across the landscape, carrying fizzing power lines which sliced up the sky. At one point, I was within view of two of the remaining sets of cooling towers. Diving further back into history, I parked by Swarkestone Lock on the Trent & Mersey Canal, walked past St James' Church, and arrived at Swarkestone Bridge, a 14th-century causeway which still, remarkably, carries traffic today. It was famously the southernmos...

The Churnet Way: a wonderful walk

The loop from Oakamoor to Froghall and back was one of the most enjoyable walks I've done in a long time. It had a bit of everything: woods, ponds, rivers and railways; steep climbs and sweeping views; an unusual church, an ex-industrial wharf, and, as a final bonus, car parks with toilets. Of course, the sunny weather helped too. I parked in Oakamoor and set off along a quiet lane called Stoney Dale. This is the route of the Churnet Way, which deviates away from the river for a couple of miles. After a while I turned right and climbed up through the woods on a gravelly path, then dropped down to the B5417. a spring in Oakamoor   Crossing the road, I entered Hawksmoor Nature Reserve. It has some fine gateposts commemorating John Richard Beech Masefield, "a great naturalist". I found a photo of the opening of the gateway in 1933; unsurprisingly, the trees have grown a lot since then! A track took me down through the woods to East Wall Farm. Lovely view! Nice duck pond as ...

Theo Alexander

The due date was fast approaching, and, having had Toby five weeks early, this pregnancy was feeling like it had dragged on far too long.  On Sunday morning, two days before D-Day, we went to church, wearily confirming to eager enquiries that yes, we were still here, no baby in tow yet.  And then, at 3:30 am on the morning of Monday 10th February, my waters broke and things began to get moving.  Fast. Yes, I know I had to apologise to you ladies who have gone through long-drawn-out labours last time , and I'm afraid I have to do it again.  The change in the midwife's attitude when we got to the hospital was almost comical; she breezed in and put the monitors on and said, "I'll just leave those for a few minutes, then".  Back she came for a proper examination, had a quick feel, and: "OK, we'll get you to the delivery room RIGHT NOW," followed by a mad dash down the corridor in a wheelchair!  Our new little boy was born at 5:16 am. You...