Tuesday, February 6, 2018

We Ask for Equal Pay, Not for ‘Lady Doritos’

Companies are always innovating food products, coming up with new flavors and textures to improve our eating experiences. Some of these are welcome (Kit Kat Quesadillas!) some are stupidly novel (Firework Oreos with Pop Rocks!) and some are just plain stupid. This is where Lady Doritos enters the equation.

You probably heard the news by now. In an interview with Freakonomics, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi discussed differences in consumer snack habits and claimed women “don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth.” Based on this gendered discrepancies, the company is working on a chip with a “low-crunch” factor and ones that are less likely to stick to your fingers.

There are so many things wrong with this logic, I’m not sure where to begin. But let’s start here. Gendered marketing has always been integral to consumerism. So many times women’s vitamins are labeled as helping skin and hair, whereas ones for men help bulk up muscle, even though they contain almost identical elements. It’s why Bic made those dumb pastel pens JUST FOR WOMEN.

Half the population just wants equal pay, but instead we get stuck with products which reinforce the cultural norms of womanhood. Which, by the way, suck.  Social expectations dictate we be quiet, polite, and please everyone often at the expense of ourselves, even at snack time.

We shouldn’t feel guilty for crunching louder than a jet engine and smearing our greasy fingers with Dorito dust. This is coming from a woman who once found sour cream and onion chip crumbs in her bra and proceeded to eat them with zero shame. In fact, one group in Texas is following my lead by staging a mass “Woman Eating Chips In Public” event at the State Capitol. Fight the power one bag of Cool Ranch at time!

Also there’s a name for chips that don’t crunch—it’s called STALE…which is something nobody wants. Though maybe they’d be a godsend for people with misophonia or sensory issues, but then advertise them as such. Nah, let’s just market them to the ladies.

If these abominations ever make it to supermarket shelves, let’s hope they cost 23 cents less than chips for men (That’s a wage gap joke! Sigh). But at least we got a female Colonel Sanders now. Yay, feminism.



from Food News – Chowhound http://ift.tt/2BJtxJJ
via IFTTT

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