Men's Memes: Women, marketing and consumerism

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Women, marketing and consumerism

According to a new book, Inside Her Pretty Little Head, women ultimately control the levers of modern business.

But will this recognition stop women acting like an 'oppressed minority'? Will it stop them saying that 'men rule the world'?

Women's modus operandi is rule through stealth. Rule by appearing not to rule, by appearing weak and powerless. For example, notice the title of this book. It deliberately references a phrase that is designed to patronise women. So whilst the thrust of the book's message is: women are a powerful force in the marketplace, this message has to be packaged within a title that makes women look like the victims of male chauvanism.

Oh well, let businesses try to become ever more effective in selling women crap they don't need. I'm quite happy for men to escape from the hypnosis of consumerism.

However, I suspect even though this book claims to be based on scientific evidence of how women think differently to men, it still won't be effective as the authors might not have such a great grasp on what the research truly shows. For example, in the blurb about it that I've read online it trots out the usual cliche about women feeling alienated by ads which show beautiful and slim women. But while this is a cliche in marketing surveys, I remember recently seeing research which showed that ads which showed fat women made ordinary women feel WORSE about their bodies! Why? Because it pushed the issue of being over-weight into their faces and made them more self-conscious. Yet when questioned by a typical market research survey or focus group, I can imagine that many women just automatically parrot the idea that they dislike seeing slim and pretty women in ads. They will have heard this point made many times before, and in such market research people tend to automatically repeat what they have heard before, or what they think they are expected to say.

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Turn of the tide: feminists begin to regret

Cosmopolitan (The women's magazine that urges women to use men for sex) Editor Lorraine Candy has a change of mind and now urges women not to have "Soul-less sex":

"We didn't feel ashamed about one-night stands...this, we thought, is what feminism is about."

70s feminist Fay Weldon now says:

"It is the fault of me and my like, who... got it wrong.

So were we wrong, we feminists, setting women free? The results have been devastating – greater than we ever imagined.

We steamed ahead, changing the world with too little caution, and I hope the future will forgive us.

The pendulum has swung too far over. But it may yet swing back again. Societies, thank God, tend to be self-righting."

"Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the dignity that came from being the provider. Forget it. At best as a man you're decorative, look after the kids and earn a bit sometimes; at worst you're a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down. Twenty-eight per cent of us now live in single person households - a lonely and unnatural state - and most of the 28 per cent consist of young men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest, in the normal nurturing way, that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender's status and self-esteem - call it masculinism, brotherism, machoism, what you want - and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done."

60's feminist Doris Lessing now says:

"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

An excerpt from an interview with Joan Rivers:

"She's not with the feminists when it comes to matters of the heart. For her, they're to blame for the current parlous state of our relationships, as depicted in these television Shows (Such as Sex in the city) and films. "I saw this coming. You cannot be equal to a man, you cannot make a man feel 'I don't need you' or 'I'll take my sex when I want it'. All these shows are so sad."

Camille Paglia :

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials.

But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper.

Male conspiracy cannot explain ALL female failures.

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant.

. . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."